They said it's a possibility. It is a possibility. I don't see how that's a "level of paranoia" by any stretch.
Positing possibilities for no reason isn't much better. Sonic Team has made a LOT of stupid decisions. But the possibility brought up is definitely a different kind of stupid. Sonic Team's mechanics for the most part in the past few games have not been utterly broken. A canned automated spincycle is something that would be broken in the open-world context Sonic Rangers is supposedly in. That would be a possible thing in a linear boost game, where "spincycle sections" would have a bunch of enemies artlessly arranged in a circle. But an open-world game? Really? The world design necessitates free control because it would have to be useful in a wide variety of situations where the player can be surrounded by all sorts of things. I'm not even saying this in a "Sonic Team is competent" sense, but a "this would literally not make any sense whatsoever" sense. Playtesters would excoriate this mechanic in a way I don't think Sonic Team could just blatantly ignore. A more wide-ranging example of this is why I am so interested in learning and seeing more about Rangers to begin with: I've seen a few people in this thread go "but what if it's as automated as Forces" and I think frankly the exact opposite. Rangers literally cannot be as automated as previous Sonic games simply by being open world. It is actually, fundamentally impossible. The entire point of open world is to remove automation and linearity. Rangers is Sonic Team choosing a paradigm for their Sonic game that is actively antithetical to their previous design philosophies. (also the leakers would have mentioned this, because, once again, it is literally impossible for an open world to be as scripted, automated, and linear as Forces) Whether they do it GOOD is another story, but the simple fact that Rangers kinda forces them to not automate so much by dint of what it fundamentally is is the thing that makes me more interested in this game than any 3D Sonic game in the past decade. We've been asking for them to ease up on the linearity and the automation and here we are with a potential game where they just cannot do that.
Aight. All I'll say is that a game can change a lot from the incredibly vertical slice shown to players two years before the game is scheduled to release. We can gloss details from what they shared, but it is by no means set in stone. It is entirely possible for the developers to change things such as how the spincycle functions in this span of time. We don't know these anonymous playtesters familiarity with the series, how much they remembered from their play session, how much they even felt like sharing, what they perceived as non-issues that we may perceive as issues, etc. All we have at this point is speculation, and saying things like "Positing possibilities for no reason isn't much better." is simply pointless. The reason is speculating. We are all speculating at this stage. If you find "no reason" behind that, this thread probably isn't a good place to be until we get concrete details. tl;dr There is simply no good reason to ascribe "paranoia" to such a short and calmly worded post by someone else. You're welcome to push against the idea presented by them, but by no means is what they posted "paranoia" and typing a short essay doesn't dispute that. That's all I was saying.
I It's a leak, there's also a possibility that the spincycle doesn't exist altogether. Also we shouldn't read to deep in to the dialog of leaks anyway, they probably weren't written by weren't posted directly after the play test. And even if in the beta it isn't automated they could still change it, all it would take is someone to critisize how hard it is to turn (the game is said to have boost physics to some degree) and hey presto sega take the easiest solution they can think of.
Adventure 1 has camera control (using the shoulder triggers IIRC) that was useful for stuff like the godawful fan floating section in Sonic's Final Egg. You're right though, it isn't used very often.
I mean, yeah. But the thing at the end of the teaser is probably it. That could happen. But my point is that if Rangers is an open-world game, they can't do this, because then the move would be so awkward and clunky to use that it would be a detriment to the gameplay, and not in a sense that I think ST would just ignore and power through anyway. I feel Rangers represents a bit of an ambitious paradigm shift for 3D Sonic. If they wanted to just keep doing the thing they were doing, they would have remained with a linear level-based structure, even if it wouldn't be boost. Open world is such a dramatic shift, and one that requires a specific kind of gameplay toolset, that I don't see them just lazily returning to what they did before. It's like shock therapy. They're all but forcing themselves to rework Sonic's gameplay, because the boost style just plain would not work in an open world without massive changes so drastic it'd be effectively an entirely new style. I get it: Sonic Team has basically zero good faith remaining. Rangers will almost certainly not be an Odyssey/BotW-tier masterpiece with a 90+ MC score that turns 3D Sonic into a universally-beloved series. But, after 20 years of increased linearity and focus on automation, for them to choose a path where they can't do that feels like this isn't going to be just another Sonic game where they just give us the same inoffensive mediocrity they've given us before. Basically: this game is either going to be a really interesting new direction for 3D Sonic and get it back on track or a massive flaming trainwreck, and after a decade of complete inoffensively pablum I'm ready for 3D Sonic to be a dangerously ambitious out of control train again
Yea I agree with most of what you said we haven't seen any ambition since unleashed and that was nearly 13 years ago, how did we regress in 13 years? On the toic of the spincycle I wonder if it will work with other objects like rings as that could be interesting gimmick wise. Also are the enemies actually going to fight/do something in this game? The spin cycle solves the issue of attacking enemies in 3D but it still will be useless if you can walk past them with little to no resistance.
Just this. This is all I need. The leaks specified an EXP system with a skill tree. Unless you plan to play the entirety of the game as underpowered as possible, I'd like to think this makes defeating enemies a worthwhile distraction, no?
The skill tree is a mystery! What kind of abilities will be in there? What do you want to be in there? How much of the skill tree will be about increasing or enhancing your movement speed? Increasing the radius of the spincycle? I'd guess the Homing Attack, Stomp, a form of Boost will probably be part of the early abilities you unlock. What's there to start? Just run and jump attack, maybe. Will there be a roll button? How does rolling work? Is the spin dash part of the skill tree? It's a shame that none of the leakers ever bother to get into these specifics. There's a skill tree... but what's in it and how the basic movement works is a complete mystery.
Frankly the skill tree is the thing that I'm most muted on, because I can't see Sonic just having that many moves to unlock. In most games with stuff like that the skills/perks are for either combat or roleplaying stuff. Obviously there will be little roleplaying, and Sonic's never been that focused on combat. If it's mostly movement stuff, I'm a bit worried it may be a lot of wisp-esque moves designed to circumvent one obvious obstacle or stuff that is essential enough to make restarts annoying. But I still need to see the actual game, so I'm obviously reserving full judgement until we actually know what's going on. Speaking of, SEGA doesn't appear to be in the upcoming E3 attendees, so I guess we're gonna have to wait a bit longer?
To be fair, it answered like, half of their question. No one can say for sure how the enemies will behave, especially not me, but we (supposedly) already know why they're there, so they're not completely useless. Even if they don't fight, there's a reason to attack them, which as I said, does answer their question to some extent. "What will they do?" I don't know. "Will it be worth it to fight back?" Yes. I've heard from dozens of people that they absolutely are. Where are you getting that from? Yeah, just checked. They'll 100% be at e3. I'm personally holding out hope that we'll get more info then.
Whether they will be usefull isn't my question, it's whether they will be engaging to fight. If they just sit there and do nothing it won't be very fun to have to grind them for exp. I wonder what the enemies will actually be; badniks? Gun robots? Dark gaia minions? Something new? I hope it's something new as it allows them more room to innovate and make something engaging to fight. But how do you make enemies engaging if you only need to run around them once? My thought is that the spin cycle gets more powerfull the smaller the radius so you would be encouraged to drift around enemies as tightly as possible (which could add some skill to it) but as a trade off this also allows enemies to attack.
Sonic enemies are never really engaging to fight, even in the best games; I think Lost World might have actually made the best use of its badniks, and it still wasn't that good.
That's my point how are these enemies going to be different? To be fun the game has to innovate a little and completely change what enemies are in sonic. But is that even possible? How are they going about the combat? There are too many variables here for me to get hyped about this game specifically, but I'm really excited about the apparent new direction.
Well, we actually don't know what this game "has" to do or change to be fun, because we can only assume anything about it based on believing leaks that we can't necessarily trust even if the people making them really played the game. If someone says "the game focuses on combat", that may be because the section or manner in which they played emphasized the combat, but that's not necessarily representative of the rest of the game.
I would think that being open world it needs the skill tree/upgrades to prevent sequence breaking and honestly I think a skill tree for sonic is a no brainier. Perhaps (if it exists) you could upgrade the spindash to SA1 spamdash or maybe unlock the roll from SA2. Also since everyone has there own preference on the way sonic handles, it would be neat if you could tune him like a car. For instance you could change the curve at which his turning tightens in proportion to going fast, his acceleration, top speed ect. I think unlocking moves that can be swapped out at will (like the skill shop in generations) would be better than getting them permanently, as it would get to confusing to quickly. Imagine if you could have an option between boost or spindash. Forward dash or double jump. Wisps or elemental shields. And all of them are independent of each other, it would really allow for some neat move sets.
Skill trees in Sonic titles historically have sucked, we found this out in Unleashed where the Werehog went from awful to merely unbearable by the time you maxxed it all out.
And you have the upgrades for Sonic that are supposed to make him faster, but I'm legit convinced they forgot to implement them because god damn do these upgrades do fuck all lol. Sonic Unleashed's skill tree was pretty harmless tho, I honestly prefer it to most skill trees in triple A games nowadays that are pretty much just "Unlock this basic gameplay functionality that you should've started with". I don't want to have to unlock the spindash, thank you very much.
I'm always one to throw shade at crappy things in Sonic games, but come on. That example doesn't hold up.
