That... That was it? Uh... huh. So it's one of those kinds of games. Where it's only fun if you take the detour.
Something tells me the level's not done. Seems a little bit too short. You know, like how the Sonic Heroes demo on Gamecube had Team Dark's part as a really short version of Bullet Station?
We thought the same thing about Sonic Colors levels. Something tells me that the Lost World levels are just pathetically short. The Frozen Factory - Casino Night level doesn't look very enjoyable either.
The levels shown look about the length of a Sonic Colors Act 1/ Act 2. Considering the fact that there may be up to 6 or so acts per world, (and considering the a little less than 2 year development time), all 6 acts may be this long.
I can see it being like Colors with it being a huge level. But ends at one part and have another act and have it continue where you last left off. But I don't know if they would put that much effort for all these diverse themes.
To be fair a Sonic stage being around 3-4 minutes long is pretty standard. It's the amount of things going on in those 3-4 minutes are what's important. Now I dunno about you guys, but all I saw in that video was "How about that Casino Night Zone, remember that? We do!" With barely any platforming at all and dodging those lasers that seem to be annoying as hell. It feels so short because it was just starting to feel like the level was warming up by the end, but nothing ever came of it. This game is blue balling us, I swear. Every time a stage starts to get interesting and I start to think "Yeah okay this is pretty cool", the level abruptly ends and it totally kills it for me. I will never understand why they felt the need to essentially take 3 whole Zones and chop them up into 6 different mini Zones. You're literally not adding any more playtime to the game by doing this, and it only serves to kill the flow of the game. If you HAVE to do this, at least have the decency to go Sonic 3&K on it with level transitions on the fly. But even then, a stage having 6 Acts just feels stupid and unnecessary.
I think that Sonic Colors is a poor example of a good Sonic game, so I'm not very happy about what I am seeing.
Christ, let's not even think about Heroes' level lengths. It was so obvious they copy and pasted whole sections of levels to lengthen them and the whole game suffered from it (among other stupid design and gameplay choices.) All I'm staying is that there's very little to this level to make it look interesting, especially when you compare it to some of Colors' featured levels. Of course, my standard in Colors is Aquarium Planet and Sweet Mountain.
I want to add that the levels in this game have been said and (partly) shown to have plenty of alternate paths, with gold cannons, animal capsules, Red Rings and stuff. Plus, the parkour moves and planet-like level design allow even more variety for getting through levels tan what's immediately apparent. The supposed "main path" Aaron showed seems overly basic indeed, but there is definitely more to it: he only got 2 out of 5 Red Rings and we can see a few hallways he didn't take. On the other hand, the level doesn't seem to have Wisps, and that pinball table is extremely lame (I wonder how many of them there are in total?). If I were playing that level, I would've gone out of the way more often to see what surprises it is hiding, if any.
I would echo the sentiment that some of this stuff seems unfinished/unconsistent with design. If the focus is on exploration, why is there a Mario timer? What happens when this timer finishes? It does give quite plenty of time to go around the stage and they're a bit short anyways; but having something like that doesn't exactly encourage exploration AFAIK. It's like the middle point of those SMG missions with the timer to complete an objective and the regular game. There's a scoring system in this game and it's apparently important in this casino stage, but no score is even shown while playing normally. It seems a bit silly if the focus was doing score-attacking instead to not show your current score at all. If the focus wasn't score-attacking, then it could be speed-running. But it isn't either because of the weird timer (and they got rid of decimals on seconds for whatever reason). Not to mention the level design doesn't seem to encourage that at all. It might seem a bit too nitpicky, but Colors made it quite clear that you needed to gather up score to get some good ranks and use most of the wisps for that. Generations tried to make it clear that it was designed for speed (Checkpoints marking delta times, getting rid of scores, etc.), it just happened to give way too generous ranks. Lost World got rid of ranks altogether? Yet the 3DS version of it has ranks! :v: EDIT: Actually the score seems to be shown in the bottom of the screen sometimes, very rarely. Maybe I'm just missing the point and this stuff is on the gamepad. EDIT2: Apparently some of the HUD appears when standing still.
I'm sorry but I can't really take that Unleashed's Arid Sands averages around 5 minutes on new playthroughs, while Jungle Joyride about 7 minutes and neither of those levels ever copy-pasted stuff nor felt drawn out.
Yeah but they also fell into the Unleashed general problems of sloppy controls, level layouts that don't give time to react / don't inform the player of what's coming up well, overuse of specific mechanics (/fuck/ those interceptor chase sequences, and they're everywhere so screw your 'it didn't copy-paste' claim). (I said I wasn't going to shut up about this, and I meant it. Why is Generations easier? Because in almost all cases it is much, much easier to predict what is coming up ahead.) Besides, time-attacking one 7-minute level is way shitter than time-attacking six or seven 1.5-minute levels.
What does any of that have to do with level length. And ok, let's remove the interceptor chases, that still leaves a 5 to 6 minutes long level, nevermind that even in Project Unleashed where the chases are MUCH shorter and takes advantage of Generations' much improved controls the level is still really lengthy.
If the 15 to 30 second interceptor chases were enough to ruin those levels for you, then perhaps the issue is more your attention span than the mechanic. I always enjoyed them, even though they were used too many times. What we're seeing here, on the other hand, is far less well-crafted. The level just doesn't look like effort has been put into it. Each new level they show is making me more and more nervous :/
I don't have quite the vitriol for the Unleashed levels, but I definitely see what he's talking about. I especially notice it with the Unleashed mod, where I'm so very used to the Generations levels now. The Unleashed stages are much longer, but they're also a lot more boring. They're more about spectacle than skill... not saying there's no skill to 'em, there is. But it's WAY too spread out. I mean, Unleashed Rooftop Run is longer, sure, but in Generations' the level feels more complete and stacked and far more interesting. It FEELS longer because you're doing more. Unleashed has far too many extended sequences where you're basically just holding the boost button and watching the scenery. That's okay occasionally, but sometimes it just drags on and on. As an example, by far my least-favorite level in Generations is City Escape, purely because of the truck chase at the end. In SA2, that truck chased you for 30 seconds, and there were ramps in front of you that you could try to gain speed off of. In Generations, you're just holding down the boost button for over a minute, and there's nothing more to it. It's AWESOME to see a few times, but gets very boring on repeated playthroughs. That's what I feel like a lot of Unleashed's levels are. They'd be better off if they were abridged, or if some of their geometry was stacked into multiple path options. It's still fun and good and I love the art design, but you can definitely tell the level design is a lot less refined.
As much as we've always joked about Straight Line Zone I don't believe they've ever done a zone which is objectively Straight Line Zone prior to this.
While you guys were looking at time lenght of the stage, I was looking at another time, I.e the game's timer in the HUD. It counts down from 600 (10 min) for what it seems. But here is the thing... It counts down. We've never had such a feature in a Sonic game (maybe in a time attacks or whatever, but not in the main campain). The reason why we never had such a timer in a Sonic game is because, well, it is an feature of his rival's games, Mario. We all know that this is a partnership and that Nintendo is helping in the game and that Mario Galaxy is probably one of the game's inspiration. But why change this? It's not necessarily a cleaner design and for what is worth growing up playing more Sonic than Mario I've always found the timers in Mario games a bit confusing for some reason, I dunno, I guess because of the 10 minutes rule that was easier to track by an adding up counter than a countdown. But yet, why change this? So I have this feeling that the Mario Galaxy and the counter aren't the only two inspirations that this game is taking from the Mario series. Which could be pretty much be the reason why these stages all feel so short. See, Mario games have this tendency of having up to 10 stages per zone (or "world"), each one with its own gimmick and sometimes with whole new themes instead of being a remixed version of the last stage. But there is one thing that keep these games from being short as shit and that is the replay value, having multiple objectives per stage and whole new paths that can lead you to a bunch of new things. One of the most annoying things, at least for me, in Sonic games was that, 'till it's release time we'd already seen pretty much the whole game already. So I have two theories to why those stages feel so short: 1st: They're cutting out significant chunks of the stage in order to make the other half (the part they don't show in these gameplay videos) a complete surprise. And considering how those stages are created it wouldn't be very hard to just to open the level editor, select a few objects and turn them invisible and just place the level capsule at the end of the shown section. The end of the stage at Frozen Factory/Desert Ruins Act 2 and Windy Hill doesn't really look like "ends of the stage" they always feel like there is more out there, specially the Frozen Factory since the end of the stage is pretty much the same as the parts that teleport you to the next segments of the stage, only difference is with the animal capsule on top of the hole that cash in your chips. So, they could either be hiding parts of the stage or having the ending of each act looking incomplete like that to give the feel that the next stage starts where this one ends. Either way it is possible and this is supported by the fact of how much the game changed from the E3 demo to the ComicCon, meaning that either they're hiding something or it is THAT easy to create whole sections in almost no time. 2nd: They're going in the Mario way and creating lots of short acts that feel different instead of creating 2~3 big ones. This theory is also supported by the first artwork we've seen for the game, that one with the planet that looks pretty much like... You know, a Mario game map. So, yeah. Either way, I'm ok with both, but mostly the first one since I don't want such a boring casino level that doesn't make me feel like a pinball ball bouncing everywhere. But again, it's too early to draw conclusions about this game and the only thing that is kind of making me unhappy is the lack of loops, slopes and stuff like that, but whatever. Everything else is pure joy. :3
I took some cool footage when I was at Comic Con: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDpmq5jf8HU&feature=c4-overview&list=UUwu256S0vVdfJ8OWEAgpocw
