Sonic Dream Team (New 3D Game from Hardlight, coming to Apple Arcade December 5)

That animation is top quality has a lot of the energy that Superstar’s animations were sorely lacking. It might be hinting at rolling being in but who knows. Advance 3 style team moves like we see at a few points would be neat, would make sense for it to have some sort of team mechanic considering its name.

The aggressive defensiveness around this whole thing is a disheartening to me especially when it can be pointed out how games have been dropped from this service never to return in any form, subscription only games that are treated as utterly disposable by the publisher when a contract ends isn’t a great precedent for the future as the industry attempts to push it as the norm over purchasing games individually.

 

The future?

You might be familiar with the numbers: 87% of classic videogames are completely gone from the market and, in fact, no time period in the industry even reaches 20% representation. It's an absolute disaster all around and, if I may be so bold, I'm no more bothered by a game being an Apple exclusive than I am about the state of any other game in existence. Games in general are treated as disposable.

Of course, this particular way to handle things is arguably worse, but going 0-100 because of this strikes me as weird.

 

It might look like "0-100" to you, but that's because Sonic games don't get murdered before release that often (or indeed murdered at all), and when they do people usually do make a stink about it. I wasn't any happier watching Sonic Runners die than I am now.

 

I'd generally read, quote, this has radicalized me into anti-capitalist violence, period, there is simply no point in allowing the perpetrators to live comfortably, unquote, and then a 20-page bitter back-and-forth about it as a 0-100 kind of move. But if you have more fuel in you to consider the problem at large doesn't stop at subscription services or exclusivity, more power to you.

 

You may notice that there's a bit of hyperbole to that comment, and also that the forum you're frequenting is generally specific to Sonic the hedgehog. Shocker, I know, but "uh actually this is a systemic issue" is not exactly going to make a huge difference here. Sonic games don't very often get murdered at all, much less before they've even released.

But hey, maybe I can't help but read "Exclusivity is a good thing, actually" and think that any further attempt you make to shut down discussion comes across just a little bit disingenuous. If this is a good thing in your eyes, then there's a bit of a conflict of interest there, huh?

 

Exclusivity is a good thing, actually. Also Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game franchise, and it's not the only one that exists.

 

What do you mean? Our hatred over that fact is almost unanimous.

 

Exclusivity, in your own words, is part of a larger problem that happens to be killing more than 87% of all video games. Sonic is one franchise being negatively effected by it right now, so we're talking about it. If this were a thread about how games are being murdered across the industry in general, we'd be talking about that. That certainly is not "0-100" any more than going from "exclusivity is part of that larger extremely-destructive problem" to "exclusivity is good". Again, it really just looks like you're saying whatever you think will get the people you're unhappy with to shut up.

I don't think he's talking about this forum specifically, there's been a lot of weird lines of rhetoric surrounding this game on other platforms, manifesting as a sort of toxic positivity. A lot of people not only seem to think that corporations are people and deserve rights, but also a very weird contingent argues that Apple should be thanked for any of us even having the privilege to sample it. I mean, there's also the usual "It's just business", which is as bad an argument now as it was centuries ago, but obviously dedicated forums like ours are going to be the most outwardly critical.

 

I've yet to encounter a large scale toxic positivity. Not saying it doesn't exists, but when I scoped the big social sites and comment minefields, the same disdain exists there as it does here. Although that's mainly towards the exclusivity rather than the subscription model. The Apple central communities aren't too happy about Apple Arcade at the moment, but that's mainly because the service just saw a price hike shortly before they announced a series of games along with Dream Team.

 

Well, yes. I wouldn't use the word "large scale" to describe it, I'm not that much of a misanthrope.

 

Exclusivity is absolutely part of a larger problem that (commercially, legally) kills not only 87% of all video games that exist, but is responsible for some games not coming to existence at all in the first place. Sonic is being impacted by the larger problem, but it was also impacted by it in some capacity when the PS4 was made not to be backwards compatible, for example, or when Sonic Cafe became inaccessible, or when the eShop closed. Subscription services compound on this greatly, part of a larger trend that revokes ownership from the consumer, and isn't even restricted to videogames. A game being gated by both is a deadly combination that turns a game into an event with a beginning and an end even if isn't made with this production and consumption model in mind like, say, a gacha game could be.

There. I find all the above to be true.

That said,

The poster I quoted, and I made sure to remove your quote because I wasn't talking to you, was talking about trends within the industry in general. So if you are talking about Sonic in particular, too bad: I was talking about the industry in general, of which Sonic is a part, and so was the post I quoted. Not everything is about you or how you feel towards this game in particular. Now, being a part of the industry, exclusivity is a good thing for this game in particular for other reasons, a point for which I'll use words I used before on Discord:

Which I'd like to believe generally makes for a better working environment -- also a sweeping problem in the game industry -- and, unlike what we see when a Sonic game is decidedly not exclusive from the start, we'll see workers earning money from their work and not be crunched to astronomical levels while also being able to give the game a consistent aesthetic and a very clear brief from which the ideas we're seeing can thrive. They could still be crunched, mind you, but the conditions for that are clearly minimized (EDIT: to an extent). So "exclusivity is part of that larger extremely-destructive problem" and "exclusivity is good [for the game to be the way it is, and possibly for workers]" aren't actually mutually exclusive sentences.

 

Is Ian Flynn an Apple user?

 

Whether you're talking to me specifically or not, there's not a great reason to imply that someone only suddenly cares about this issue as it relates to Sonic, unless the user you're responded to has a long reputation of stanning for corporate predation that I don't know about, because you're still basing it on what you're personally experiencing people talking about. You did do that to me, even though I talk about this shit all the damn time outside of Sonic.

The issue with this is that absolutely none of that is dependent on exclusivity. SEGA could just as easily give the developers who work for them the time and money they need, and Apple could just as easily not be gatekeeping sons of bitches. The problems we see with Sonic and the industry as a whole are not a natural result of the creative process, they are the result of value judgements made by the people in charge of these companies, and they're not making those decisions based on what will produce the best game, they're making them on what scrubs the most immediate gratification cash for them and theirs. If you're blaming multiplatform releases for the issues the series faces, that's punching down in a way that only serves to defend the powerful. It's not a lack of resources that made this game exclusive or other Sonic games bad, it's a load of businessmen who probably don't even play games saying "here's the greediest thing we think we can get away with, do that".

 

It should be clear enough that I was referring to the fact that the future about which they spelled doom is already here, and has basically always been here in some shape or form, so claiming this trend (games being at the mercy of publishers for preservation or accessibility) is only coming to fruition now counts as 0-100 to me. Upon rereading, I should even say I jumped the gun, because they weren't talking about the problem as a whole but about the subscription model specifically, which is a particularly egregious case of the form this has taken recently and long-standing franchises adopting the model isn't such a natural move. So you're right! But that still

It's true exclusivity isn't intrinsically connected to a better work environment. The Genesis games were ever more famously subject to crunching and a horrible workflow (not to mention games like Panzer Dragoon Saga). You can't really say there's an argument for the powerful here because a game is exclusive, either, though. Because if these problems happen because individual people in power are assholes, but it seems infallible that the people in power will be assholes; and even though SEGA could "just as easily" give time and money to developers -- but they historically haven't, and the problem seems to have gotten worse without a console to call theirs -- then it should be safe to say it's very much a structural problem, natural not to creative process but t the material conditions of the industry. Exclusivity, and in this case for a game ultimately funded by the store with a productioon cycle that is basically its own, does bring down the risk of these problems appearing. We just have to compare it with recent Sonic games that are multiplat and the way they were made to be so, and that had these kinds of problems in part because of that (06 in general, the pop-in in Frontiers, Sonic Origins, possibly even Superstars).

We theoretically could have seen Dream Team, or a game just like it, just appear at any point in time. But we didn't. If the reason for that isn't in the material reality of development over the years, then everything is simply arbitrary, and everyone in Hardlight is just coincidentally very good while everyone in Sonic Team and SEGA is coincidentally very bad. I'd like to believe that's not the case.

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Anyway I'm tired of pretending the pink spheres in Dream Team don't remind me of Doremy Sweet's pink blobs in Touhou, which are dreams (she's a baku):

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Which means nothing. But I had to say it.

 

Then you're settling for less, essentially. You're presenting exclusivity to a box none of us want (and, importantly, where preservation is extremely difficult) as a necessary price for a smooth development cycle -- that's exactly the sort of thing a corporate PR person would say. SEGA is not some small indie company, they put out plenty of games that are both polished and multiplatform, but Sonic struggles across multiple developers and many different types of games. It probably has some amount to do with Sonic Team, but I have very little doubt that it's more that SEGA does not treat all of their franchises equally. If they say "we can finally make good Sonic games by making them on this shitty Apple platform", the correct response is to call them out for being a bunch of lying bitches.

Frontiers, Origins and Superstars might be uglier or buggier due to being multiplatform, but it would be supremely misguided to place that on the platforms. If we can treat development with this much fluidity, you might as well say "they should have curbed their scope and made only made the kind of game that they can be sure will be polished for each platform". I mean, they should probably do that, but you get my point, it essentially goes both ways, and all it would take to disprove it is for Dream Team to be jank and buggy in places (which, I mean, it might).

It's not like Sonic Team is the only developer to ever produce a bad Sonic game, nor is it the case that multiplatform Sonic games have a particularly worse track record than exclusives. The series struggles because different teams at different times are able to work better or worse with the conditions they've been set. Yes, the platforms a given title is designed for is one of those conditions, but so is...y'know, everything. If I said that because Forces had a strained development that automation is a good thing because it makes the game function, and that Sonic games are better when they're glorified cutscenes, I don't think you would find that a very compelling argument.

 

Animation was awesome, game looks good and the direction looks promising. Looking forward to hearing some impressions soon.


...What?

 

..Isn't making a multiplatform game in Unity (for example) basically a matter of clicking the 'Build for Playstation' button and then clicking the 'Build for Xbox' button? Obviously graphics hardware bottlenecks can be an issue like with the Switch, but making 3D assets lower fidelity can also be somewhat automated nowadays. I just don't think multiplat would make that big of a difference as far as budget or labor goes, or at least it shouldn't in this case.

 

They never said anything of the sort, and they wouldn't-- because making Sonic games for an Apple platform simply isn't their only line of work. Preservation in absolute any capacity is not in the minds of any big company, and they'll go out of their way to convince legislators not only they shouldn't care, but also no one should care. It's in the link. How is a game not being exclusive better for preservation if not accounting for activities that are outside the market realm of development? You'll have to count on regular people to dump games and emulate them anyway. At no point have companies ever not displayed the greedy behaviors responsible for poor game quality and poor working conditions, how is noticing the fact that this exclusive game does seem to benefitting from it, how is it settling for less? Game companies aren't democracies, and "voting with your wallet" makes extremely little sense.

I don't get your point because there's a reason why they don't curb their scope and make only the kind of game that they can be sure will be polished, and it's not just incompetence that is born out of thin air. It's the model. It's not that people are simply greedy. The model is greed. After all, I have t ask again: if it's a simple question of doing better as a publiher with an in-house develpment team, why then doesn't it happen?

 

It is absolutely a bigger pain in the ass to preserve a game that's contingent on a paid streaming service. It's not the same just because emulation might be involved, which wouldn't even be relevant in this case.

Also I just don't know why you'd already be so confident in Dream Team's 'Apple exclusive quality' with how bashful they seem to be about showing actual gameplay, and with what they have shown still being kinda plain and fangamey if you ask me.

 

I was referring to Apple (and other subscription services) specifically. The walled garden approach is simply draconian in a way others aren't. It's probably only a matter of time, but I can also only assume that someone will be able to pirate and run Dream Team without Apple Arcade after release anyway. It's a question of degree, not of kind.

Because you don't actually know that's what you're seeing or why? I simply don't trust your judgement. Lots of Sonic games, exclusive or not, have displayed no obvious quality issues while they were being shown to us pre-release. Like, would you have said this about Lost World in 2014? That game doesn't have any super glaring polish issues, but we got a PC port the next year that, if I recall correctly, was basically done already. So what difference did the Wii U exclusivity make? What crazy changes would there have been if it were multiplatform in 2013?

If it's a question of exclusivity, shouldn't they take this supposed boon to efficiency to crunch them even harder? Everyone they wanted to would buy it anyway, right? This kind of rhetoric has no beginning and no end.