I’d rather they didn’t make a HE3 unless that’s absolutely necessary to lessen or remove the pop in. Part of what screwed Forced over was 3 years spent blanking HE2. Graphics are facing diminishing returns these days, I don’t think a hypothetical HE3 would be worth the investment at this point in time.
HE2 was initially used in Mario & Sonic at the 2016 Olympics. Forces took forever due to them not being solid on a direction for quite a while I believe, said game was supposed to be more Avatar focused (and there was some prototype build that was VR focused I think, I don’t think they knew what they wanted to do with Forces from the start) But regardless of what they decide to do, the pop in is shit and I otherwise loved Frontiers. That needs to be addressed. Hell it makes some of the memory token challenges more difficult because you can’t tell where the challenge even starts because it’s outside the game’s draw range or whatever you call it.
While SEGA have excellent programmers that are capable of doing good to excellent internal engines,I think they should ultimately just move to Unreal Engine 5 Yakuza have their own Dragon Engine, that make the recent games look great -questionable physics tho-, even then, they are actually moving away from it in favor of UE5, starting with “Like a Dragon:Ishin”, a remake that is built on Unreal Engine 5 for the first time, they may treat it as “experiment in testing the engine and see if it’s fit for the future of the series or not”, but it’s obvious that they will use it again in the future Using “common” engines like UE have their own benefits: 1-not wasting time/resources on making a new engine/maintaining and updating the engine, when you could just use an existing engine right away 2- Using well-known engines actually make it easier to hire new staff to work on your projects, you can hire anyone that have an experience with working on Unreal Engine from anywhere in the world, while you have to actually teach new staff how to use internal engines, which take more time and effort that could have been used to just develop the game proper 3- it’s “easier” to solve engine problems when you got thousands of developers using it, and even technical support from Epic Games, while it’s harder to do it in a custom engine with handful of programmers 4- UE5 is highly customizable for every need, just look at how distinct ASW games look, using UE3 and UE4, also look at how Forspoken is running on UE5, vast environment and very fast character with no pop-in in sight so…yeah, would prefer UE5 rather than HE3 at this point
Oh I’d prefer they went that route too but they’re stubborn and they probably won’t. Plus I feel like the Hedgehog Engine has had so much time and energy poured into it it’s a kinda sunken cost fallacy situation (they developed it over multiple years, made a second iteration, and it’s been used in what, 7 games? Unleashed, Generations, Lost World, Mario & Sonic 2016, Forces, Origins (for some ridiculous reason) and now Frontiers. Have other Sega projects used it? I know they had grand plans to license the engine and no one ever bit) But maybe they’re learning? Colors Ultimate used Godot (even though ironically THAT should been the HE2 game and not Origins) and good to hear Yakuza is moving away from its own proprietary engine.
Sakura Wars (2019) used it. Phantasy Star Online 2 also uses it. i get the sunken cost fallacy, but they used the engine and it’s newest iteration in enough games now for several years, that it’s probably okay for them now to abandon it, it served its purpose very well, even developed some of their biggest games yet using it If Yakuza series are willing to abandon their Dragon Engine, I think SEGA also willing to abandon Hedgehog Engine too
I don't see how having to learn a new engine they have less control over than your in-house one for a nebulously-defined and not-at-all-guaranteed return is supposed to be worth more than just figuring out what the problems are with their current one. Are we really thinking that because this one game has some pop-in issues that's reason to just dump the whole thing?
There's a good chance that it is what's responsible. It was built to handle long and linear Sonic levels, not open spaces. I said this earlier but this limitation can be seen as far back as Unleashed, with major pop-in similar to that in Frontiers featured in large open areas such as the Jungle Joyride water running segment (1:24 onward). It could be something Sonic Team is able to fix somehow but I don't know enough about the internal workings of HE2 to say.
I could definitely see Sonic Team adopting a new engine over overhauling the current one. I'm actually curious what a Sonic game would look like on a third-party engine nowadays (hopefully we're past the times of RenderWare).
A bunch of reviews were added over the week, figured it was worthy enough to do another review aggregate update. Opencritic - 72 "Fair", 97 reviews, 55% of critics recommend Metacritic: PS5 - 73 "Mixed and/or average", 81 reviews Switch - 70 "Mixed and/or average", 12 reviews Xbox Series X - 60 "Mixed and/or average", 10 reviews (Subtracting Sterling's review would put the metascore at 70) PC - 79 "Generally positive", 9 reviews - PS4 - (3 reviews) Xbox One (No reviews) Should more reviews continue to be regularly posted, I may start doing weekly updates for some time.
Sterlings score is ridiculous. The only Sonic games that deserve a 1.5 are 06, Boom Shattered Crystal, and Sonic 1 GBA. This isn’t big rig truckers or some other fundamentally objectively broken game. They kinda just get off on shock value huh? They gave Colors a 4.5 and Sega sent them a giant Sonic Colors blanket in response. Please do something this stupid again. But hey, 7 and 8s out of 10 I’ll chalk it up as a step in the right direction. EDIT: Correction I meant Boom Rise of Lyric. Tbf I never played Shattered Crystal but it’s crime seemed to be that it was meh. I never played RoL either but I watched it… that was enough. Never played Black Knight either but Zoomers seem to love it
Strange choice for them to use Cool Edge Day as the music in the commercial (I guess it's close enough to Christmas though), but I'm digging the Sega scream they're placing at the end of the commercial. Love that Robotnik book too.
Kinda? It seems clear that the engine must become more performant to reach the standard expected by people today. Doing that work is really difficult. I personally feel like the time spent learning a new engine that has a famous level of support would be less than re-engineering the Hedgehog Engine. But then I'm not a game dev. I just want the next game to wow me visually like Unleashed did, and I don't see that happening without either switching to UE5 or re-engineering HE2 into something much better. Edit: Note to self: stop phone posting.
I have to say, having your own exclusive engine has its charme. You boot up the game, and it's already iconic.
PSO2 does not use the Hedgehog Engine. Sega is also developing GaaS games (Crazy Taxi and JSR are rumored), and they are confirmed using UE5. Also there was a interview where Iizuka basically admitted that UE5 would be more efficient, while saying that having an engine team on staff is an advantage because you can make requests...whatever those are.
Oh I mixed them up, Rise of Lyric was the Wii U title that was bad, Shattered Crystal was the meh 3DS title. and yes I’m shocked they stopped using the Hedgehog Engine logo as well, it was cute
PSO2 doesn't use the Hedgehog Engine at all. What they used before NGS was codenamed "Oxy" but the current iteration seems to go by the name "Aqua Library".
