Right, but: Forces marked the return to the boost formula. TSR was another racer made by Sumo. Mania led to Origins and Superstars. Sonic Colours Ultimate wasn't a bad idea, either. They've started this "streak of good ideas" way before Sonic Frontiers.
Those are all such surface level comparisons that you gloss over the negative aspects of them. Forces major gimmick was pushing avatars and avatar gameplay. The return to boost was also not a return to the sprawling level designs we received in the previous games. TSR dropped the transformation mechanic everyone loved from the last one in favor some entirely new system that amounted to nothing And left the game without an audience . Origins leading to Mania is such a bizarre comparison to even bring up. They're 5 years apart and the best follow up to a (somewhat) original game is a compilation title? It was the individual games in Origins that lead to Mania too. SEGA was already pushing Classic Sonic as it's own separate brand way before Mania on top of that. Superstars is just a continuation of that. Ultimate is just following the wake of all the recent Remasters coming out. The only focus these titles have in common are poor development decisions that lead to all of these being half baked.
I love frontiers, im not looking for a big shake up yet, im just expressing a willingness to experiment again or try new things, or make more side games like SXSG to fill gaps that are more experimental. Im not complaining at all about more like frontiers and building on it
additionally, Forces is explicitly one of the reasons why Frontiers exists any "better" ideas you might have will be altered, filtered, and limited the instant you attempt to implement them with a group of people - even hundreds! - who all have to be paid and have a deadline. your ideas will have to be filtered through marketing and focus groups, and, yes, play tests from both inside the company and the general public (who don't give a single shit how "accurate" the physics are as long as it plays good). your ideas will be limited and altered by the means of your teammates and by the realities of how technology supports it. group undertakings are inherently about compromise and I don't think anyone with "better" ideas would actually get those borne to fruition in a professional environment. even Mania had its issues and compromises, because again that is the reality of working on a professional team.
Case in point, Richard Williams. He had a really good idea for a movie. The problem is it took 30 years for it to actually be made. Everything had to be visually jacked up, even if it made no sense.
@Antheraea Sure, but you have to admit that it would be super rad if developers were just constantly knocking it out of the park by default. Lol
Man I totally forgot about this. If it weren't for Shadow Gens actually looking good and having some improvements over the last good 3D Sonic, I'd say Sonic Team still ain't got a clue what they're doing. Small things like having more natural ramps and unique character abilities being much better integrated into level design without feeling like a "lock and key" moment sounds a lot like evolution to me! They should go back to linear titles, just saying...
They won't be going back to linear for a while and I don't think they should. People have responded well to this new progression system despite it's flaws. I'm not even the biggest fan of it myself but the obvious move is to keep refining it imo. I wonder how they'll do with it on the next game though. A frontiers type game needs a lot more stages than the average Sonic game to work, and ST would only achieve those numbers in the first game by reusing maps from the older ones. They'll run out of viable bases for maps soon though so I wonder what the plan is.
Cyber Space levels are created from Sonic's memories. I thought that is the explanation for the familiar level designs. I'd say they'd come up with new ones, simple as that. If they can come up with a gazillion ideas for the Open Zone challenges, they can also make new and original levels.
From a game design perspective, I think you've got it backwards. Whilst yes, the native explanation for all of the recycled content in Cyberspace is that it's created from projections of Sonic's memories, that is almost certainly secondary to the developmental reasons. Cyberspace is about 30 levels, and that's on top of all of the new content/systems created for open zones, the combat and the boss battles. Cyberspace alone is about the same size as Forces, and the only thing Forces has over it is a shoddy character creator. Sonic Team reused assets from Forces and Generations, plus many existing layouts from other games, to reduce their workload in Frontiers. And that was the handwaved by the narrative of the game.
And then they pushed out three waves of DLC, just like that. I suspect it's harder to design Open Zones, rather than Cyber Space levels.
You're talking about the stage geometry itself and not the themes, right? Do we know for certain that production time is the reason they did that? Kishimoto always talked about it like they were doing a fun reference that only some fans would get, and while it's possible that that's only a half-truth (or something he convinced himself of), I think I also remember hearing that the cyber levels were finished way before everything else (I assume before they implemented the fucking control sliders, yes I'm still talking about this). On top of all this, "no more reused levels" was one of the criticisms he said Final Horizon was a response to, and we know how different those stages were. Perhaps I'll be eating my words if we get a trailer for Sonic Fury or whatever (we need three "Sonic F-word" games in a row!) and the first action stage we see is based off of White Jungle, but I feel like it might not be as dire as you're making it sound.
I think it's all a little too convenient to just be a reference. It cuts down on design workload which can go some miles even in the early stages. All open world games take some kind of shortcut on content in this way, so I don't even consider it a desperate thing to do. Just economical. Even if the cyberspace levels were finished first that still meant they had something done early to free up hands for other things they had to work on. The heavy revisions the overworld and combat required were probably easier to focus on with those levels in their back pocket. If I recall, the game was supposed to ship a lot earlier than it did too. And I didn't mean to make it sound dire. It's a problem some of the open world greats struggle with. Keeping some kind of quality standard for the content that holds across the entire map with the least amount of compromise. I just wonder what the answer to that problem will be next time.
The DLC was greenlit by SEGA after the fact, because of the positive critical and commercial reception, and in particular because of Kishimoto interacting with fans which have him a lot of inspiration. But just look at how much DLC stuff is made using existing assets. All of the new cyberspace levels and Ouranos Island layout were built with asset spam on top of existing geometry. In fact, even Open Zones are largely comprised of asset spam on top of otherwise mundane maps. It's the same as Episode Shadow in Forces. The main geometry is basically used as a backdrop for them to place objects and platforms on to create levels. It's much easier to that way, but the end results feel cheap and half-arsed (even if that's not the reality, that's the impression it gives). A gun already stopped her existence.
Well, yeah. The asset spam aspect is something I didn't like either. Again, I blame Cyber Space for it and really hope they leave that concept behind. I wouldn't mind a smaller scale sequel to Sonic Frontiers if that would mean we can have more original content. My first playthrough of it took me about 60 hours!
It's hard to feel confident in any judgement on either the open zones or cyberspace when we know what a mess Frontiers's development was, I guess. Are the islands made of asset spam on top of otherwise-unrelated terrain? Yeah, but we also know they were originally really barren, only for bridging the gaps between combat, cutscenes and cyberspace. Are the Final Horizon's levels made of taped-together cardboard boxes? Yes, but they're also meant to be tests for future Sonic level mechanics, and I do feel that their broader, longer design is meant to be a statement of what the later games will bring. If something like "having the cyber levels in their back pocket made the rest of the game easier to finish" or "they had to reuse designs because thinking up new ones would take too long" is true, then exactly what is a sequel made with the hindsight of combat, world design, action stages and progression of Sonic Frontiers ver. 1.41 supposed to look like? I can't imagine them making the "make a bunch of big empty fields OH SHIT WE NEEDED TO MAKE THIS FUN?" thing happening again, and that feels like a pretty big factor. Then again, they had until ver. 1.41 to make the fucking sliders work.
