Sonic Forces Thread

I'm flashing back to the mid-2000s. People on GameFAQs were constantly posting their ideas of how to fix 3D Sonic, and every time they specified "call it Sonic Adventure 3," as if a name would magically make things better. No, calling Forces Generations 2 would not make people like it more. Being a better game is how you make people like it more.

 

Eh, I wouldn't say that. I didn't like the character that much either, but when I think "ways Infinite could be improved", making him a buffalo or giving him an edgy "ghost" costume and metal claws isn't exactly what comes to my mind.

I'm curious as to what is it that makes people say this. Is it just the speed cap? I actually found Classic Sonic easier to control in Forces, as Generations gave him an unwieldy jump, an awkward OP spindash, and a glitchy roll that causes him to uncurl half the time. It made his gameplay a complete chore to me, and turned the tornado section in Crisis City into a nightmare.

 

I'm totally with you on this. Classic Sonic in Forces was unnecessary, but physic wise, it was a big step up compared to Generations.
Even his levels (as few as they were) were much more enjoyable imo. Less focus on dynamic camera movement and scripted events, and more focus on solid and layered level design.

I even find myself replaying some Classic Sonic levels in Forces every once in a while (y'know, when I'm not feeling like playing Mania or literally any other 2d sonic game ). With Generations, I 100% the game back in 2014 and I'm positive I never touched a Classic Sonic level since then.

 

Every single aspect of Forces is half-baked. I'd really like to know the development timeline. I don't believe they started right after Lost World, so much as they focused on Hedgehog Engine 2, and then built the game in under 2 years after the budget started running out.

 

Classic Sonic's inclusion was really weird tbh. He only has like 6 levels out of 42 and he has no relevance to the plot. Hell he never even interacts with Infinite.

Idk why this game wasn't just all Sonic/Avatar team up levels. Those levels feel like the only decently thought out ones in the entire game.

 

Something nobody seems to mention about Classic Sonic but drove me a bit insane: you can't consistently pull out a specifically charged spindash because how long you hold jump determines how charged you get. So you can't just eg. tap it once to do the least charged spin.

Sonic Generations by comparison had an optional one-button spindash split off onto the "boost" button, so Forces felt very much like a regression in that sense.

I think I could have lived with the time they spent on Classic Sonic going towards better level design for everyone else.

 

I had assumed it was the same reason the Valtron or whatever was changed to the Phantom Ruby: Sonic Team wanted to associate Forces with Mania in a pitiful attempt to piggyback off the goodwill surrounding that game.

 

These posts are all so frustrating to me because they don't reflect anything that's actually in the game, or they misinterpet things that they simply personally dislike as things that are poor on a technical level. There's nothing "dumbed down" or "regressive" about Forces. On that technical level, it's a little better than Generations, and works well as a sequel to Generations, because that's exactly what the developers set out to do. That's the truth. This isn't about liking the game or not. It doesn't matter how many years pass: this was true back in November 2017, and it will remain true in November 2117.

Modern Sonic isn't "broken". It's a solid idea with largely solid execution, game after game after game. The constant claims of "inconsistency" simply are untrue; disregarding Secret Rings and Black Knight, which were always intended to be a separate thing, the games we've gotten out of Sonic Team since Unleashed share the same core and are all built off of each other, while still being different enough that they're properly different games. There's not really anything to fix, as all of these games are good at what they aim to achieve. All this drama, all the endless complaints, it's nothing more than people supposedly not wanting what Sonic Team wants, and that's very frustrating because people simply don't know what they want on a daily basis.

The only real issues in Forces are things like Null Space not being the full level it was clearly meant to be, or Classic Sonic having so few levels. But things like this are so overwhelmingly common in video games. Sonic itself is built on the idea of scrapped levels; people pretty much worship Sonic 2 for this trait. The reaction to Infinite has never made sense to me... you're not supposed to like this character at all. He's supposed to be "a Shadow-like character if they were genuinely evil", and Infinite does a really good job of that.

Likewise, there are very few bad Sonic games, completely contrary to the popular belief that most Sonic games are bad somehow. As of right now, I only know of two: The 2006 game, and Rise of Lyric. Only one of those, the 2006 game, was actually made by Sega themselves, and we also know what actually happened: the game was sabotaged by its own team, and we somehow got Secret Rings out of it. Not only that, but the 2006 game is surprisingly salvagable considering everything that happened, and amazingly people have actually recognized this; that's why someone decided to make Legacy of Solaris.

None of the drama is exclusive to Forces, or to Sonic, or even to video games. This happens a lot across many different mediums. So much of whether people like or dislike a work is all too often based on something completely outside of the work in question, or some tangential detail about the work that suddenly has everyone going mad over it (positively or negatively). People come up with all these silly theories and hyperanalyze every little detail in an attempt to create this grand narrative about why a work is the way it is. At the same time, people can't seem to understand very simple connections, or even consider the possibility that their grand narrative doesn't even have a solid foundation to stand on. Maybe just... don't bother with the grand narratives at all...?

Lots of aspects of game development are generally misunderstood. Development time is a big one. Most people believe that development for a sequel to a game starts immediately after the previous game, but in many cases this isn't true and what a developer means when they say "development has started" is rarely clear. Do they mean initial brainstorming? Do they mean trying to pitch a sequel to their higher-ups? Do they mean trying to get an engine together? Then you have the actual timeframes; a lot of types of games don't take as many raw hours as people think they do. The typical old video game was developed within six months to a year, the development teams were fairly small, and these games were often being made without all the fancy tools and multi-purpose game engines we have today. Most people consider that to be completely insane, but it's how the absolute majority of old games were made and it's really not that insane if you take the time to think about it. No, I'm not saying this is how we should make games, though many indie devs will tell you just that, and some will even denounce Unity and the like. Maybe I should too! Maybe that's the right thing to do.

There are so many obvious tells of this kind of bad thinking. More frustrating than anything else is that people insist on thinking in direct opposites and absolutes, especially when it makes no sense. For example, every single time I attempt to talk about a game everyone hates like Forces, people act as if I'm making it out to be some untouchable masterpiece. It's not! Very few games are, and people want to "debate" about what those masterpieces are all the time, so it's often a lost cause to even try to find these games. All I'm saying is two things. One is that Forces, and quite a lot of other Sonic titles, are significantly better than people give them credit for. Two is that people are exceptionally bad at actually judging a game's quality, and they always have been.

I'm sure someone's gonna tell me I should write a blog or do videos or whatever, because they always do. I don't care for blogs, but I would like to do videos. Problem is, I don't really have the equipment. Sorry.

 

Everything I heard about Forces was great, then it turned to a "meh" thing later one sprinkled with a little "lulz, they can make their deviantart characters now" stuff. None of that really bothered me either way though. In fact, I think people flip flop and fall on one side because it's the social bandwagon thing to do.

But that's just it. Maybe I'm not seeing a clear picture, but what's "good" and what's "bad" are subjective constructs, and a person's opinion on things shouldn't bog anyone's enjoyment (or displeasure) on a game. I'm all for the "You do you" mentality.

That said, Sonic '06 is one of the best Sonic games of all time come at me.

 

An American bison is a cool and unexpected choice, however, like, the thing about bison is that they're big hulking animals. Shouldn't he be more like Vector or Big in stature? So weird.

Also I wish they just reused GG Sonic Blast's Green Hill Zone Music if they could not bother with Nakamura's.

 

You know? This is a big post. A lot of people, when they see big posts, they think it's all rambling. Please don't that. There's no rambling here. This is all really important.

I think you mostly get it. There are standards for good or bad design, but they typically aren't what people think, which means they aren't really what people are talking about. Worse, personal opinions tend to get held up as standards for design because "many people agree on them". That's just not how this works. There's a science to this, and unfortunately there aren't very many people interested in the science. Strange I'm saying this on a forum for a community that seems to be dedicated to breaking a particular game series down to a science, but here we are.

Just now I happened to come across a very particular post. This post really sums everything I've been talking about Sonic-related:

What if I told you not a single damned thing in this entire post makes any sense? What if I told you that this is the narrative that the entire Sonic community is supposed to have gotten behind for over a decade now? You wouldn't listen to me, because that's what happens when you let mindless hate simmer in pot for a decade and a half, if not somehow longer. Every single year makes it worse and worse and worse, and I'm honestly starting to wonder if there even is a breaking point. So often I'm told "the Sonic community is not a hivemind", and yet so much of the internet is littered with posts just like this, outright stating that we need to reject this developer and demean this game like we're about to declare some kind of war. I'm glad that some people recognize the theatrics behind this and dismiss it as the nonsense that it is.

This entire post, and the majority of the narrative it embodies, is based on a very specific understanding of what this series is "supposed" to be and a very specific understanding of what each game in the series supposedly is. These understandings are completely at odds with what each game in this series actually is. It's funny because the majority of the games mentioned in that list have very little to do with each other and have wildly different levels of quality, yet they're all painted with the same broad stroke of "bad". That doesn't make sense. Something is wrong with this narrative. Let's just go over this list:

-Sonic 06? Yeah, it's a bad game. We also know why. It's pretty depressing. On the other hand, we got two games out of it: one that's a total mess but actually salvagable, and one that's actually pretty good.
-Riders? Fucking RIDERS. Why do people actually hate Riders again? There has never been a real explanation for this, ever. The game was very clearly made to challenge F-Zero GX (no not Kirby-fucking-Airride), and they did a really damned good job of it in every single department. That game is phenomenal on a technical level and it should never be hated to the degree it is. That is a game you can call a Sonic masterpiece, it is that good. The response to that game is so far removed from reality in such ways that it's the reason I got so concerned about how people view this series, long before anything else people like to bash was coming out. Seriously, this game is GOTY material and was slept on HARD.
-Unleashed? The Werehog is really not a bad concept for Sonic, and it works well as a "reverse" to the "obverse" that is the Hedgehog. Any concerns about the Werehog are, at best, small gripes, or complaining about Eggmanland (which is just as much of an "issue" for the day level!). Unleashed is overall a pretty good game and a solid framework to build later games on... so that's what Sonic Team did.
-Sonic 1 GBA is a simple mistake that isn't in the least bit interesting. It's unfortunate, but there's probably some really shitty story behind it, because it doesn't make sense after things like Sonic Mega Collection and all the work Dimps was doing on the GBA.
-Sonic Chronicles is just a silly little spinoff based on some idea that someone had floating around. It's a decent game for what it is, and it kinda works as a sequel of sorts to Sonic Battle, but it does have some obvious quality control issues e.g. the music. I always thought it was interesting that Chronicles was actually fairly well-received compared to other Sonic games, considering it has clear technical issues that other Sonic games don't.
-Black Knight? Actually a better concept for the Sonic series than the Werehog, simply because the entire point was to give Sonic himself Werehog-esque abilities. Playing Black Knight is incredibly satisfying for this reason, and it's another game that's significantly better than people make it out to be. The only thing I could possibly think of to change would be to have a different main character besides Sonic, but we all know people would have hated that even more.

Last but not least, Rise of Lyric itself, the topic of the post. Rise of Lyric is shithouse. Period. That was entirely BRB's fault, not the show's creators, not Sonic Team's, not Sega's. Shattered Crystal and Fire & Ice? Those are actually good games. They do the whole "slower-paced Sonic" thing much much much better than the pre-Boom concept for Rise of Lyric ever would.

Ah, yes, the pre-Boom concept. Sonic Origins.

That thread becomes kinda funny when the story about Rise of Lyric shows up later in it. A lot of people suddenly felt real bad about Big Red Button after that and just used it as more ammo against Sega, even though the concept was a complete mess and noone would have liked the end result in a million billion years. I appreciate those Retro members who recognized it for the absolute madness it is. You can even see some people struggle to refuse admitting it in the original Stadium thread. They know the truth. They know they'd hate that game forever. Things like this are exactly why I don't trust fanbases to do the right thing.

This isn't about "accepting mediocrity" or whatever other drivel people have come up with over the years. This is about appreciating good games for actually being good games, and about realizing that people treat this series far too harshly for the high overall level of quality we've gotten out of the entire series since the start. Sonic doesn't need to "go back to basics". He needs his fans to understand what those basics actually are and why they're important. Many fanbases across many mediums don't understand their "beloved" series very well, so often acting as if they don't actually engage with that series.

Let me restate that there are fundamental issues with the entire Sonic series and its obsession with speed that I've never been able to get over. I have never considered myself a "Sonic fan" for that reason, and also because fanbases are just fucking crazy no matter what series we're talking about. Even though I dislike Sonic as a series fundamentally, I don't hate the games, because there's just no reason to. I respect the sheer amount of love and care that clearly goes into these games time and time again. I have no reason to not be interested in the next Sonic Team title. I also greatly respect Mania, as that game makes it clear that there are people out there who want to at least somewhat take on the longstanding issues with this series at its core. However, Mania is not a "pillar" of anything, and I don't think it should be. There is a better way. We need to do something more fundamental.

 

You can't tell people to, uh, not have opinions, k'now?
It's a shame you're being so stubborn about this, because I also think a lot of Sonic games don't get enough credit in the fanbase, so I'm with you on that. But I just can't agree with the way you're doing this. Let people think what they want to think.

 

I don't like other people talking to me as if they know the how and why of what I think. The opinions I have on this series and its games are my own.
Your post comes across as, more than anything, "your opinions are wrong and here's why".

 

"Fanbases are crazy. Here's my intense rant, but it's totally not a rant guys. It's all super important."

Are you sure you're not part of the fanbase, buddy?

 

We're all part of the fanbase, and I love any sides of the coin. It's good to take the "good" with the "bad". No matter how divisive.

That post did set some valid points, even though it's points of their own opinion. Just because I may or may not agree, doesn't make them less valid either. They aren't "frickin' fricks" in any sense.

If people bandwagon, fine-- we all do it to some degree, and it's nothing new. Best to move on, especially since the topic is getting derailed a bit.

 

This reminds me of one of those old NeoGeo shmups that M2 are so obsessed with. Pretty good stuff.

And this looks like The Great Alien Invasion of Traverse Town.

 

This concept art is so cool... it gives me strong Unleashed flashbacks. Sonic Team very clearly wants to do something like a new Sonic Adventure, but they're too terrified to put in the sheer amount of work required. Rightfully so. The last time they tried, the entire project was destroyed by madness.

The problem with framing this as opinion and being done with it is that numerous people claim to share this opinion and also claim that, because this opinion is shared by so many, it must be true. There are so many posts just in this forum where you see people talk about how "objectively bad" their favorite pinata happens to be at the time. Additionally, while there's nothing wrong with liking or disliking a game, there is something wrong with saying things about that game that simply aren't true to support your like or dislike, especially if you also claim that like or dislike is an objective statement on the game's quality. Yes, this really does happen! Go through any thread anywhere on the internet about games like Unleashed, Lost World, Forces, etc, and you'll find this kind of talk frequently. Most importantly, people need to stop talking as if everyone on Sonic Team needs to lose their jobs over this. What an awful thing to demand, people losing their jobs simply because you don't personally like their work. It's cause for concern, and always has been.

For example, I don't say what I say about Riders because I personally like the game, but because I've sat down and compared it to its peers on multiple levels. I'm not saying that I'm infallible, but I am saying that I've put serious thought into this. I actually dislike Riders: I dislike how incredibly difficult it is, just like F-Zero GX. That is a personal opinion. I can dislike a game and still recognize it as good. There are many games out there that are not for me, but that are clearly some level of good by some standard.

I never even bothered with the part where the entire idea of "mediocre" is busted, either...

...What? I never said it wasn't a rant. It's obviously a rant. If you think rants are something to be ignored, that's on you. I rant because I've been putting up with this for years, and I'm tired of it. These games deserve better. I've already said I have major concerns about Sonic as a series, and I've never cared for wanting Sonic Team members penniless like so many do. People repeatedly call me a "contrarian" simply because I'm unwilling to accept their nonsense at face value. That doesn't really sound like someone who's a major part of a community.

 

I dunno. There's always going to be some self-important person who thinks that because their opinion aligns with the consensus, that it's more important or valid. I just choose to ignore those people.
They can go on and clamor about how people should be fired for their perceived incompetence. I ignore that too.

I don't really care if a game is "objectively" good or bad. All that matters to me is whether I can enjoy it or not. There's a whole bunch of unpopular games in this series that I don't mind playing: Riders, R, Drift 2, Shuffle, and even something like Labyrinth. I can take serious issue with some of the design of these games, but when in the right company and the right mood, I'm fine wasting an hour or so on one of these games. Playing something I'm actually not having any fun with is just a futile effort—except for that time I played 06, because that was a bet.

I think it's a really interesting experience to play games even that I don't like, just so I can see interesting details and glimpses of ideas that I find intriguing or interesting. Sonic Shuffle in particular is a game that both has so much I love and so much I hate. It's a fun game to discuss with my fellows who have played it.

 

It's a shame that the concept art has more in common with the background designs than the actual game play sitting in front of it.

We could have had something more in line with the saturday Sonic cartoon, where stakes actually felt high, but the cheese level is through the roof.

I've probably already written this somewhere in this mess of a thread, but they didnt even embrace the cheese correctly and the theme song isn't even on the fucking title screen.

Can we just let this thread die so I don't have to be reminded again how much of a disappointment this game was please?