Hopefully the success of the franchise in 2022 will get SEGA willing to invest in outsourced lower budget titles again to fill in the gaps between releases. And not just a bunch of mobile games and another kart racer, I'm so tired of those
I don't know what's supposed to have been stopping them from releasing smaller 2D titles more frequently this whole time, really. It was a good model in the 2000s! Even when Shadow, 06 and Secret Rings were bad, you still had Advance and Rush to make up for it. But for some reason, it got pushed into the "lesser versions of main console games" camp and just sort of snowballed into blandness (or outright fucking exhausting games like Lost World 3D) from there. Even as Whitehead and Thomley have done great work, it's always been released alongside main games rather than between them. I've seen anxieties over the four-to-five year wait becoming the norm for Sonic Team's output, but that's only because it's been broken up by some pretty sparse output. Maybe having games better than Sonic Boom and more ambitious than Team Sonic Racing would help, but all they really need to be is just normal Sonic platformers, with some semblance of adding to the series.
My understanding is that the handheld games’ sales were declining, and then Sonic Rush Adventure bombed pretty badly. So Sega mandated that all subsequent handheld Sonic games had to tie into the big console entries, and they gradually died a slow death. (The gap between Lost World and Forces was long, so there was no game to tie into, and then the Switch kind of rendered the 3DS irrelevant pretty quickly.) But yeah, bringing back smaller 2D games to fit in between the big Sonic Team ones would be really nice. There’s certainly a market for them, demonstrated by the success of Mania (and other retro-style platformers like Katana Zero and Celeste).
I think this decade could theoretically look better for it. Three of the games that could have been a Rush or Advance equivalent in the 2010s were taken up by Sonic Boom, and now there's no "lesser system" to make another version of the main console games for. I don't think we're gonna just get nothing between now and 2026.
They’re bound to be working on something, but I definitely think it should be a 2D project I’d love another Mania or Advance or Rush Esq title.
Yeah, @The Joebro64 said what I thought too. And I'd add Sonic 4 to that list of side games as well. E1 performed well, but E2 did not and that dumpster fire off a series ended on a cliffhanger and feeling very incomplete. But Mania? Mania was gold. And it's had a lasting impact on the series. There absolutely should be a side-series of platformers going on, with 2D being an obvious choice. I don't see any reason why we couldn't have a 2020s equivalent to Advance/Rush/Sonic 4(/Mania) being released every other year or so. 2023 is probably going to be convered in large part by the Frontiers updates. I'd welcome something else too though.
I love him, happy for him, wish him all the success in the world but for my inner-nerd I'm not crazy about the end product. I couldn't tell you exactly what it is, emotion is difficult to quantify but on some level yes.
At least they actually promised announcements outside the Frontiers update could be things like Generations remaster or so, but i will take it
There is a limit to how much money can do for a production, and a margin of how much you should allocate to one branch of the series versus another (they can, in fact, put ample cash into both). Frontiers had a number of problems, but stuff like the rushed ending struck me as...well, rushed. Not lacking for funds. I think there must be (or must have been, hopefully) some inefficiency in the development pipeline that caused these issues, not a failure to chuck giant budgets at them. Also, like, you could say this about basically any Sonic product. Should they just stop making anything that isn't directly part of Sonic Team's output? What do we need comics and cartoons for? It's a game series! Honestly, rereleases are the thing I keep coming back to. Obviously most people here have stuffed Colors Ultimate and to a lesser extent Origins in the same box of "barely even a remaster that also introduces some problems" games, but I honestly think less is more for a lot of them. Like, even if Origins were 100% polished and bug-free from release, we got all this tokens and challenge mode stuff that's nice, but really just amounts to the important QOL change of not having a lives system. If they did, say, a Sonic Advance collection, you wouldn't need much more than that. Expand the screen size maybe, but those games are all fundamentally solid, there's usually just nitpicks to be had with the level design and especially the special stages. It'd be a good way to stuff the release gaps while also reintroducing people to some unfairly-forgotten games, and it doesn't exactly seem like an expensive project.
some of ya'll may have missed the new that sega is developing something other than sonic frontiers updates too https://hrmos.co/pages/sega/jobs/217 could just be another olympic title, but there are some saying that sega might not make a video game based on the paris games, cause the rights have been available for a while, and normally sega would have announced it by now... interrestingly games outside of the in-house hedgehog engine (unity, unreal) are also being developed. the current division 2 where sonic team resigns also has now developers from AM1 which focused on arcade games for forever.
As far as sega is concerned, the mobile games and shit like the olympics titles are the new spinoffs. I would like more "Sonic Mania"s between titles but it's clear they disagree.
Finally got Frontiers over the holidays and I’m almost through with Ares Island. I have the Switch version. Couldn’t justify getting a PS5 or XS for 1 game. I mean I’d like to have either system but I’m happy with my Switch right now. Game still looks good and I know theres a lot of complaints about pop in but I’m honestly not that bothered by it. I don’t know once you get into it it’s not as distracting as you’d think. Not to me anyway. My opinion on the game itself so far is it’s really good. People complain the open zones are just fields with rails and puzzles scattered but it’s still a lot of fun zipping around everywhere and discovering new areas even if you’re just unlocking portions of the map and leveling up. The combat is cool. I thought it’d be mostly button mashing but you do need to put effort into it. Each enemy has a unique fight. I know a lot of people want something more like fan games or a giant Genesis/Adventure-style world but it’s not much different. Just the aesthetics are different. Like a “proper” open world Sonic game would still have you doing similar tasks and running back and forth from place to place. There’s gotta be stuff to do. The Cyberspace levels are fun. Again I know people complain about reuse of assets and design but they actually feel like they’re own thing imo. They’re not just reused boost stages. They seem much shorter. Like bite sized obstacle courses made up from previous games. Like the red star rings are easy to find cause they’re never out of the way. My own complaints... The Cyberspace levels only using 4 themes. Is there a story reason for only having Green Hill, Chemical Plant, Sky Sanctuary and the Street one? Does it tie into memories or the Starfall Islands? (No spoilers please just yes or no). Sometimes it’s easy to fall especially in Cyberspace but not a huge problem once you get the hang of them.
Wow, this is a pretty significant combat mod, it adds rewards for combos, restores a scrapped move, and even adds combo rankings. I can’t wait to see what mods look like 4 months from now if this is what we’re getting now mod wise.
Those mods are tempting me to double dip and get a PC version just for them alone, maybe the next great sale on steam
It seems that their stated bottleneck (someone maybe can cite or substantiate this) is that the worlds themselves take a really long time to model / make for a character that moves at high speed. We can also see this in the way they rely heavily on copy-paste objects and platforms instead of just changing the world and level geometry, which would be more ideal since it'd create a more natural landscape. There's a lot of modern procedural generation technology that could help with this. For example, systems that given some high-order constraints on character movement and the shape of the level layout (based on those cut-and-paste objects for example), can actually generate natural-looking levels based on that input. You could also use the same kind of system to prevent undesired movement out-of-bounds and to do automated testing. Using something like that could drastically speed-up development and iteration cycles of the game, and end-up with a higher-quality result. So I'd say that Sega should spend on technical research and development to build tools that make their games across the board easier to iterate on and test.
