Sonic Adventure: Great Game. Had Hubworlds Sonic Forces: Total Garbage POS. No Hubworlds Sounds like a yes to me. Wouldnt it be cool to actually go through the theme park in colours rather than this flavourless glorified menu that got busted in the Ultimate port? Frontiers looks like it's gonna be one big massive hubworld and im all for it. Also all the games come with level selects to replay levels so its not like you're forced to navigate hubs to do that.
I like that they facilitate some exploration, but their existence feels like an excuse to neglect making actual action stages that facilitate exploration. I'd rather the action stages facilitate exploration to the point that they would make hubs redundant.
Only if they were, in themselves, actual levels in some kind of way. If their only purpose is to be a buffer between levels, what's the point?
With Sonic Frontiers coming, I'm not sure hub areas matter in an open world-ish concept. I would handle it like many (MMO)RPGs and Metroidvanias do: connected areas where either they're (mostly) peaceful or (mostly) hostile to the player, but made under the same rules for everything else. Technically, the peaceful areas would count as hub worlds, but only because they're safe havens, not because instantly all the wackyness of the landscape stops and there's nowhere meaningful to go to inside their boundaries.
How about the games have content that's actually worth engaging with? Hubs inherently involve a lot of downtime, doing nothing and impeding progress. They serve mainly as a breather between the action, but right now, they're not even giving us enough action to need a breather for it. I'd rather more well designed levels- every piece of modelling and designing they have to do for a hub likely takes away time/budget for the actual levels.
If they call for them for some reason, sure. They're only an issue when they just kinda waste time without a purpose. SA1 hubs were a mixed bag because you could discover secrets and experiment with character movesets, but overstayed their welcome because they sometimes were time sink-y and were hard to navigate at times. Unleashed hubs were better but still sometimes had the issue of taking up your time for no reason other than padding.
Depends like I'll be fine with hubs in 3d games I found them quite nice in SA1 and Unleashed for the most part, though I did not like the weird hub system from advance 3 at all and wouldn't want any sorta hub like that in the 2d games.
Definitely a big fan of them - really dislike the level to level structure, I prefer a game that let's me take my own pace and explore. I definitely prefer Adventure's excecution of the concept to later attempts (excluding Unleashed because I only played the Wii version). I felt it made each stage feel more real by contextualising them, helped give the story breathing room and scope, and also just included enough little secrets and bits of fun dialogue to act as a nice distraction. I'm not sure if people would qualify it or not, but I also really liked Sonic Battles world maps too. Obviously a very different game, but I always enjoy Sonic titles that feel like they include his actual world and give me a chance to explore it, over game's that just take me to an abstract map while I jump arbitrarily between green hills, ice caps and... music plants, with no context.
Sonic Rush and some of the Advance series had wonderful world maps. I suppose Colours does too, although the best to me are Sonic Forces and the mission mode of SA2. The worst I experienced was Rush Adventure. Having a map beats a simple menu all day, but the pinnacle is the fully realized adventure fields of SA. Sure would be great to finally get a successor that tops it.
World maps I'm not against - games have been using those effectively for a long time, including pre-Sonic - but I never saw the point of hub worlds.
The issue, I think, is that hub worlds naturally contrast Sonic's gameplay in an ugly way. People often point to Mario 64, or Spyro, or Jak & Daxter as an argument for how hub worlds can be awesome, but the difference there is unlike Sonic, those games are not linear platformers through linear areas with time limits and checkpoints. They have open and expansive levels that encourage exploration, so they have hub worlds that complement that idea. The more linear Mario games have simple map screens, instead, where you're always moving forward. Crash does this too. I don't like the idea of a map screen though, since the stage transitions S3&K introduced are iconic and I think they should be a mainstay. That's ruined with a map screen. However, Mario Odyssey has changed the game. Now, you have an open and expansive environment that has a linear path through it, but also has multiple side paths and hidden areas/objectives as well. And there are often doorways that lead to more traditional, linear platforming challenges. Many fangames, such as SRB2 or Green Hill Paradise, have a design philosophy to their stages that could easily act like one of Odyssey's "kingdoms", but have doorways the player has to find that lead to an "Act". Frontiers almost does this, but instead, Sonic Team is going all-in on the open-world aspect and so the overworld and the linear stages feel like two entirely different games. That approach is the only way I could really justify a hub world otherwise. If the hub world is so different from the actual levels in terms of structure, then the gameplay needs to be something different too. It can't just be Sonic walking around trying to get from point A to point B. I've always thought SA1 would've been better if they stuck with the RPG idea the game started as, and had the hub worlds and the linear stages be two opposing genres, with a "Classic" mode available that simply strips the story and turns the game into a classic, linear Sonic game with all of Sonic's levels combined together. We'll see how well this works out when Frontiers releases, since it comes close to my idea.
They can just make the levels bigger and make good use of 3D space to cater to those wanting exploration. 3K/Mania’s transitions are all the immersion I need, and I like how I can skip them if I don’t care about the story or world at all. (Which is often) “Quest markers” and following the paths to the next event or level is never fun in itself in any game, and the only fun it can be is when it’s basically a puzzle that needs to be worked out as far as where to go and how to get there… …which is not what I want to be doing in a Sonic game.
I don't know, it really depends on what the developers want to accomplish with one particular title, for something like Sonic Frontiers, there's no real need since the open world is essentially one hub world for everything, but in a more traditional Sonic installment, with levels, I do like them when they're well made. I recall a couple of experiences that I had with hub worlds in Sonic, one in Sonic '06 and the other in Sonic Unleashed. Sonic '06 made me despise them, because they were big, had no landmarks, weren't interesting in the slightest, and overall just made me feel lost. Sonic Unleashed was completely different, they were condensed, which made talking to people feel like less of a chore and lead to me actually getting engaged in some of their stories, it gave the world you travel in feel more alive, more real, have more personality. When SEGA decides to do a new traditional Sonic title, which they will at some point regardless of how Sonic Frontiers does, since this is a franchise that changes constantly, I'd like to see hub worlds make a return, but only if they were like Sonic Unleashed's hub worlds.
