Constructive criticism for Sonic Team is an idea that peaked a decade ago when RubyEclipse was getting paid to work the forums and it looked like someone was actually listening. You can't even "vote with your wallet" like we did with Colors and Mania. SoJ are just gonna do what they want until they stop getting funding.
When I first played SM64 I did not like the level design. I’ve never finished it and only tried a little of Sunshine. Never played the Galaxy games but I’d like to. Only 3D Mario I’ve finished is Odyssey which of course uses the same format. The best way I can describe it is everything was just pieced together. Like the playgrounds only existed for the sake of holding Stars instead of proper landscapes. I think Odyssey is better at this...and Galaxies gets away with it because they’re planets. In Sonic the open-zones seems like a similar format but a much bigger scale where everything is more cohesive instead of “snapped together”. I know it’s an unpopular opinion. I don’t hate the 3D Marios. I hope my description made sense. I’ve never played BotW but I love GTA (haven’t played 5).
I don't think going online and ranting about how shit every game SoJ makes is necessarily any better. Like, I feel there are much healthier ways for people to get their feelings across that don't involve participating in the uh....online discourse. Conversely and I'm guilty of this too, think we all get a little too caught up in what we as fans want versus what the developers are making. So we judge the game for what it isn't as opposed to for what it is. Like you said, SoJ are just gonna do what they feel like at the end of the day, so I do think its much more emotionally healthier to look at this game for what it is and not what we want to be.
I'd honestly argue constructive criticism is significantly more powerful now that internet commentary is almost impossible to escape or ignore. Sure we could tell him and Kelly what we thought back then, but iirc most of that didn't end up doing much. The recent social media managers have held all kinds of polls and guaged interest in all kinds of things, they've allegedly thrown ideas in Sonic Team's direction and Katie seems absolutely hell bent on maintaining the relevance of the Chao Garden, which so happens to be one of the most requested features in a new Sonic game of all time, but rarely has anyone at SEGA acknowledge how many fans have requested it. I honestly think if they don't take criticism it's either because they don't want to, or because this fanbase is so split into different factions that their approach is just to try and take little bits of everything, either that or they choose one direction and just go for it, because the last thing they did clearly didn't work.
The Quinquennial Festival of Grievances is a timeless tradition where grown men revert to their teenage grousing habits and burn the Sonic tulpa to pray for a good game harvest. It's cathartic and EXTREMELY healthy and good for you, actually
It's true! I neglected it for my first years out of high school, and now I'm attracted to men sometimes. Keep your kids safe!
This game isn't inspired by Mario 64. It's inspired by BOTW which did the same thing but in a more clear and epic fashion. No matter where you were on the map there was always a tower looming over everything that you could conquer and unlock more of the map. No matter where you went there was a oossibily of running into one of the 120 shrines that allowed you to upgrade your health and stanmia. And this is with the clear looming threat of Ganon no matter where you went. This game is taking from BOTW. And as much as I feel better about what I've seen I've yet to see anything that will make me just want to run off and explore snd find unexpected secrets like with BOTW.
To be honest being surrounded by constant unending negativity with no breaks has really put a dent in my hype for this game. It's like people feel the need to analyze every single part of something to understand what makes it tick. But that's not always necessary. It's tiring.
And just like Star Wars, even if the negativity does overwhelm you, all you have to do is wait on a few year lag, and anything people hate will inevitably become the "good ol days" that the evil new content is apparently supposed to return to. Does it turn out to have always been good like The Last Jedi, or are people just crazy, like anyone who likes Sonic Unleashed? The answer is who cares, all opinions are made up. If you think something looks good, don't be afraid to own that opinion, other people will share it and the fact that there is no objective criticism of art means nobody gets to tell you you're wrong. Drag that opinion kicking and screaming into the spotlight, and you'll find someone who gets you, I promise. Honestly, though, even when things were crazy here earlier this week, nothing has been quite as dire as the leadup to Forces. I remember Blue Blood saying at one point that that game had gone from "not for me" to "actively repulsive" to him, or something like that. I think at worst this game is gonna remain a "not for me" for most of the people here. I think just the things we've seen are already better than Forces and maybe even Lost World, and I tolerate the former and genuinely like the latter.
Okay, here's my chip into Sonic Frontiers... Holy molly, this is intriguing, definitely did catch my eye a lot more compared to Forces like one user said here previously. I'm anticipating how it'll go further along the line, it looks really neato so far! Also some suggestions and ideas I think would be cool Adding warm colors to the mix Slight adjustment to map scale (I think ETS2 and ATS are great examples of my ideal map scale and would work seamlessly with how Frontiers is designed) Mini-map on the hud Usage of fog (to make up for popping in models and give sense of an even larger atmosphere) Honestly I think the whole "World Premier Gameplay" title should be replaced for early build previews, since it can deal lots of damage to hope or optimism, giving the possible false impression that it's extremely near completion, I think Frontiers was a victim of that. I believe if the "World Premier Gameplay" was instead titled akin to "Early Sneak Peak", outrage wouldn't be as heavy, as it's been already confirmed that this is just an early build, so it isn't set in stone.
Not sure if people are interested, but Lange posted a (rather lengthy) thread in response to the various discourse over the game. Read at your own peril.
I still think the floating springs and platforms look absolutely terrible. Buuutt... the hands-on impression video actually sets up a few cool pieces that make me more optimistic about the game (cautiously though). The idea of some missions requiring you to race from Point A to B while not giving you a direct path is cool as hell. The boss fight too actually looks fun, the scale alone is sick. And the SyLoop ability is genius and I'm surprised it hasn't been thought of before, especially since its basically a Sonic-fied version of Nights. I think the floating plat Edit: I have no idea what I was getting at with the last unfinished sentence. I like to think it was a metaphor for Sonic Team releasing unfinished games.
aint no way am I gonna read a 60 tweet thread about why modern sonic is fundamentally flawed. Just wanna play game and activate neurons
Just finished reading the thread. Lange, as always, makes some good points about the nature of control and automation in Sonic games which I largely agree with but, as usual, I feel he falls into the trap of assuming himself to be purely vulcan when writing these things, when ultimately no one can be. Whether he realises or not, he has an internal bias towards the the physics based gameplay of the Mega Drive originals which is inevitably going to affect any argument he makes. And that in of itself isn't a problem, we all do it - we're all products of our various biases. Lange even outright says in his thread "My threshold for Sonic is what its creators envisioned and established." and ultimately I personally believe this is a fundamentally counterproductive lens through which to view the franchise. The core original creators of Sonic are long gone and, even when they were still around, they developed Sonic beyond and outside of that gameplay of the Mega Drive games. I think what has followed in the wake of the shift to 3D has been a reinterpretation of the philosophy of the original gameplay in a way that can still have the capacity to evoke the same kind of enjoyment as the classic games. My perspective is that Sonic distilled is about the mastery of mechanics in order to retain speed and achieve high level play in a fast paced play environment. In the classics, this was indeed about the abuse of momentum and terrain to barrel through levels. In Unleashed, Generations and even Forces to an extent, it became about twitch reflexes and level familiarity that made the speed itself more of a beast that needed to be tamed as a means of achieving that high level play, rather than the speed in of itself being the high level play. In Frontiers, this looks like it will come in the form of the combat by the player weighing up their tools in order to evaluate what strategies will put down enemies most quickly, most effectively and most stylishly. Granted, that's only the context of a set goal. Frontiers is really bucking the trend here because its scope seems to be far more than any Sonic game before it. The moment to moment core of all mainline games from the original up to Forces was to get to the end of the level or achieve a specific win state unique to that level (i.e. finding the lost Chao). In Frontiers, goals seem to be more long term, given what we've heard in the hands on preview. As such, mastery can still be achieved, but is less immediate in its contribution towards a goal (i.e. mastery can now be used to navigate terrain in an impressive manner without that feat necessarily taking you closer to or further from your objective). I don't think this is inherently a good or bad thing in comparison to over Sonic games, just how Frontiers will explore the philosophy of Sonic. And to be clear, it's not like things couldn't be better. The classics are put on such a pedestal for a reason and people didn't complain about Forces' aggressive automation for the sake of it. I just don't think a Sonic game should be measured solely on if it can convincingly recreate the physics systems of the original games. I personally believe that's a limiting philosophy that stifles experimentation. After all, if Masahiro Sakurai slavishly stuck to the foundations of the original Kid Icarus, we wouldn't have gotten the best 3DS game of all time.
It just feels antithetical to the modern ideal of fandom and subculture, honestly. I mean, I guess since I think private intellectual property laws are kind of a scam, I might be considered an extremist, but my desires for the series would inevitably lead to it becoming way more fractured and varied. Sonic as a community is so full of people deeply entrenched in the specific aspects of the series they care about a lot, and while there are tensions between them worth cooling, those idiosyncrasies are things of beauty. It's people developing and understanding themselves and their priorities and tastes through the lens of art from others, and sometimes themselves. This thread...just feels like a guy trying to control a narrative about what's best for everyone by substituting his personal vision for the series with some objective, unchanging idea of Sonic and it just comes off as a little disrespectful to people that may have their own ideas. There's a really telling bit where he says something like "would YOU consider someone a REAL Mega Man fan if they only liked CAPTAIN N Mega Man???", and it's like...yeah, man. What else am I supposed to call them? Just because I think that show sucks doesn't mean it's fundamentally an incorrect version of that series, because it's fiction! There is no correct version. There's no way of answering "no" to this leading question that doesn't result in a million questions, where now suddenly Mandalorian fans are not "true Star Wars fans" or you get disqualified from Kingdom Hearts fandom if you don't like Chain of Memories or any other number of weird contradictions. Like, okay. Obviously he has not received the kind of Sonic content he wants for a long, long time, and probably won't for a long time either. That can wear on a person. But that's not really an excuse for the position he's taking here. You can argue that modern and classic Sonic are different. Most people would not put up a huge fight against you. It's something else entirely to argue that the nature of those differences makes one of them innately invalid. Because people aren't all going to agree what the differences are and why they matter, and labeling one version as fundamentally incompatible is invalidating those people and their opinions. He tries to argue a couple different times that he's not doing this, but the thesis, no matter how much he tries to reframe the debate, is still inevitably just standard-issue elitist rhetoric, where even if Frontiers is good, it's still bad.
