Any (new) play mechanics or variations on current ones that you'd like to see tried, 2D or 3D?

My question to you is-- what does Sonic have that games like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, Dustforce or VVVVVV don't? Because I understand you'd like to see precision and timing become more relevant as skills for a player to develop so as to feel more like these uh. What are they called? They're like spatial rhythm games to me. Chaining actions correctly allows you to chain more actions, demanding a lot of concentration from the player as well as spatial intelligence -- and nothing but the correct chain of actions will do, as the margin of error is spatially manifested as the very imminent danger all around you. I suppose the boost game do feature this to some extent, but more than anything, I see you'd like to see challenges around these abilities so that the player's skill is tested more often and more specifically. But is there something Sonic can do that these games can't, for you to bring this type of gameplay to Sonic?

Because from my point of view, I think I'd find it fun if bouncing off badniks (and possibly other objects) reset the elemental shields' abilities. But I definitely wouldn't like challenges based around that. You'll notice all these games work around bite-sized rooms or levels, but do yu think that goes well with other abilities? Genuine questions here. I think we have opposite view on the games, r what we like about them, so this interests me.

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As for what I'd personally like to see: I'd simply like more interactions with a stage's normal geometry, so as not to rely too much on set gimmicks that demand you to learn a new move or a new input. What Sonic Mania did in Flying Battery with the electric shield is brilliant, but -- for instance, and I've said it before -- I'd love for the fire shield to burn any and all wooden bridges, not just the ones with the thorns.

I'd also love to see checkpoints do more. I've always wanted signposts to activate traps, kinda like what happens on Lava Reef Act 1 if I'm not mistaken, but actually activated by the signpost. Or a checkpoint that necessarily takes you to a different route if you die and come back to it. Like this:

Spoiler: I hope it's at least a little comprehensible

Or really, timed stages with fork results. Can't believe they haven't done this yet: if you finish the stage on time, you go to a certain stage next. If you fail to finish the stage under the designated time limit, you go to some other stage, with story implications or whatever. Doesn't even need to be a time requirement. You can do that with the player's ring count too. Time would be more interesting though.

I guess in general I'm very interested in adding depth to Sonic's fail states. I'd like some new games to recognize how important they've always been to Sonic, although dealing with death and game overs and fail states isn't really well regarded in some game design circles nowadays.

 

Shadow the Hedgehog was a mess of a game but I think that the way levels split off into others was kinda charming. Playing Westopolis a bunch to 100% the game sucks and the levels don't link into each other in any cohesive way, though. I always imagined a game whose levels have multiple exits, like in Wagyan Land, taking you to different parts of the map to see more and more levels you couldn't see otherwise. I know people would hate this for 100%ing but I generally play these games very whimsically flowing from one path to another and this would be an extension of that.

 

Boost Formula
WITH multiplayer

 

First, it makes perfect sense. The aesthetics, the lore, the characters and the universe are all great reasons to want Sonic under whichever light you like best. It's not just a coat of paint, it's what compels us to play in the first place.

I worded my question really poorly though, because I didn't mean to imply you want Sonic to be like these game. I assumed you don't, but wanted to know what is it about Sonic that you feel would not only make it stand out in a group, but to make it fundamentally different. I understand a little better now.

 

I’ve wanted enemies to have armor decay or a limb system for a while, example you hit an egg robo with a homing attack and clip it’s arm off, changing how it then tries to attack you. Think of the New doom games but for sonic. I think combining that with frontiers combat might be a cool way to make the fighting more engaging, especially for the super sonic fights.

 

The problem with Shadow was that it was trying to have its cake and eat it. It was trying to be a story-based game, but none of the story pieces connect. It was trying to let players choose Shadow's path, except the last story makes them all non-canon. It was trying to answer the questions of SA2 and Heroes, but forced players to rifle through ten wrong answers to get there.

By contrast, a Sonic game where you can visit different levels depending on how you play is totally fine, so long as you don't have to restart from the fucking beginning each time.

Though, I do wonder if having multiple goal spots might dilute the simplicity of the "just get to the end" style. It'd be fine for one playthrough, but depending on how you handle it, players may get frustrated trying to get to a more difficult exit their second time around. And frankly, this would also mean that any given playthrough would probably be really short, something level-based Sonic games for the last 15 years really have not needed.

 

Have you played the Sonic VR fangame? That applies the Sonic gameplay to short, single-room challenges requiring precise control. It's probably the closest Sonic thing I've seen to something like Celeste, VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy:

https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_VR

Full game TAS:



But that's a TAS; this video of the first section is probably a better demonstration of what it's like to play through it:

 

In my opinion, the one essential guiding principle is organic gameplay. It might seem like a weird comparison, but I think Halo is a good analogy for Sonic. Halo is at its best when the game leans towards letting you use simple core mechanics to interact with the game world. I did like Halo 5, but I always interpreted the Spartan abilities as similar to Boost, drifting, etc. It just overcomplicates and messies an elegant and well designed simple gameplay experience. Halo 1-3 understood that the game should be simple to pick up but give you complex environments with which you can organically interact.

If Sonic must introduce new abilities, it must give each ons drawbacks. Halo 5 did understand this, which is why sprinting stops shield recovery. Sonic 2 also understood this by making the spindash not ideal to start revving. Sonic 3's insta shield is arguably too powerful but the game did make the wise move of making the elemental shields replace it. Frontiers did not understand it by giving you various contact abilities that are very powerful and having virtually no drawbacks at all. If you must add abilities then they must have drawbacks, otherwise the player just becomes absurdly powerful and the game experience is brainless.

Sonic is similarly at its best when the core movement is relatively simple but the level design accommodates the gameplay experience. People talk a lot about rolling and it is very elegant but only because the level design accommodates it. So in future games I think Sonic should lean in making sophisticated levels that showcase Sonic's movement in unique ways. Sonic CD gets clowned on a lot because of its weird level design that knocks you back and forth, yet it did understand this basic design principle that Sonic levels should centre around movement. Even if it did so in foolhardy ways (Wacky Workbench). One of the reasons why I consider Sonic CD as one of the greatest Sonic games is that despite its incredible flaws in execution, it designs unique levels in ways which respected the pillar of Sonic's movement.

Thinking back to Halo, it evolved best when it increased the weapon and vehicle arsenal. Sonic 3 and Mania (to a lesser extent) similarly understood that additional characters with sophisticated level design is a good direction for the series. Although the gimmicks and level objects have never really advanced much and I think what @Palas says in this regard is very valuable.

 

I did not expect someone else to have the same idea! Get rid of those health bars! They're not needed, when taking down enemies takes less than 3 button inputs! As Sonic, you're constantly reading the environment, anyway. So, double down on that instead of UI elements (or whatever the heck they're called). This would make exploring the world in general much more interesting. A minimalistic HUD like in the classics would be highly appreciated.

 

Halo is indeed a good comparison exactly because in general it doesn't have to explain much, and you're constantly aligning what you want to do, what you have to do and what you know how to do. The Spartan abilities look a lot like adaptations for Halo to a more modern design sensibility regarding shooters, allowing you more agency regardless (or in spite of) the level, requiring more input in return. So there's always something you could be doing. This is very much like the Boost, which I can no longer see as a movement skill but rather as a power skill that denies interaction with the terrain. So I agree completely: focusing on organic gameplay is the key to Sonic.

(Since we're at it) the boost would probably be more interesting if it went all-out in this philosophy: if it destroyed not only enemies, stage furniture and items, but basically anything that's not plain terrain -- movement-related gimmicks and objects, springs, anything -- it'd circle back to being a context-sensitive ability. After all, indiscriminately boosting would deny you the ability to use the objects that allow you to keep boosting and, fundamentally, slow you down. This looks like a good alternative to using bottomless pits/crushing hazards as skill checks more liberally.

 

It's an absolute sin that we don't have a 2D Sonic game with an OutRun styled game progression, official or otherwise. This is one of the things I really appreciate about Shadow.

Another no-brainer. SA2B's multiplayer was legendary and back in the day, my brother and I really wished Unleashed had a similar race mode.

Personally I'd just really like it if they put actual momentum in whatever 3D Sonic is coming up next. Mods for Unleashed and Frontiers have proven that there's no technical reason for it to not be so, they just won't do it for whatever boneheaded reason.

 

I play a looooooooooooot of Fortnite and a frequent thought of mine is that the game is pretty close to being a Sonic game. Last season they had this hammer that let you bounce off the ground and I was thinking about how they could implement that into a Sonic game before realizing "Oh shit that's just Amy's hammer bounce." I was overthinking it going over which wisps would make a good Wispon that functioned like that.

Connecting this back to Sonic mechanics, I actually think the Avatar's gameplay would've benefitted from being more like Fortnite. Their Grapple Glove item, which is a device that allows you to swing off of items, structures, and sometimes terrain in a similar but more rigid way compared to their Spider-Man web shooters, Instead of going off of designated grapple points, I actually think it would've been even easier to design their levels in a more open ended way with the grappling hook as a "do it wherever you want" thing, maybe with certain objectives necessitating full exploration like having the player clear certain areas of enemies or just generally doing the things it'd be harder for Sonic or any other character to do. (There's a looot you could swing off of in Chemical Plant and Death Egg...)

Fortnite's version of a slide also lets the player coast downhill, which I think gives it some amount of Sonic feel (and there's even some scenarios like having Ice applied while sliding that makes it an even more pronounced similarity where you can sometimes even go uphill all off your previous speed)

And the wispons are pretty much cheating factoring into a reinvention of this style, because all you'd really have to do is give them a clearer source of ammo and possibly just make it so you can have more than one on you at a time.

I think if they brought back the Avatar in an open zone setting this is pretty much how I think it'd go and I think a lot of people would actually have a lot of fun with it, even though it's not a "traditional" Sonic feel. It plays into utilizing different mechanics the game has to do things as efficiently and quickly as possible. And I'm not even saying they have to go full on Fortnite, but the basic mechanics still seem like a really good fit.

 

First, I want to say that, while I liked Frontiers and I enjoyed many of the changes it did to the boost formula, it's still far from being my ideal Sonic game... in my opinion it has many issues and a lot of its mechanics can still be improved or replaced with better ones. So, when I say "open zone", I don't mean another game like Frontiers, I mean another game with sandbox gameplay but not necessarily similar to the Frontiers we know.

What I would like to see is to implement 2D gameplay concepts to the open zone. I don't mean actual 2D gameplay, I mean ideas taken from the 2D games. For example, I wish the open zone was less focused on exploration, and more on adventure: make some events happen in real time, and have the player need to hurry and go at a certain point of the world to do something in order to progress in the story. Basically, more A to B missions in the open zone.

Spoiler: Comparison with Mario games

An example of this is Bowser's Fury. At some point, Bowser arrives, so you need to hurry and reach the big bell, or one of the shines, or simply run away: in this precise moment, exploration and levels become less important, you just need to move fast through the map, taking advantage of gimmicks and terrain in order to arrive earlier to your destination, whatever it is... the obstacles now have a bigger purpose: a single goomba maybe can't hurt you that much, but if you are running away from Fury Bowser, and you find a little hiding spot, that lonely goomba can make a difference... it might hit you while you are trying to hide in a corner, with limited freedom of movement, or simply might slow you down, making you lose a chance to reach a place before having to hide for Bowser's next attack.

It's the same with Mario Sunshine and the Shadow Mario missions... the sandbox that was open and calm just a few moments ago, now it became a point A point B level, because you are moving in a straight line toward your goal, Shadow Mario. The sandbox naturally turns itself into level design for a point A point B platformer.

The most minimal and focused example of this is the race against Koopa the Quick.

During that type of missions, explorations, side quests, npcs etc. don't count anymore, only taking advantage of the environment to reach the goal as fast as you can counts, and I believe that Sonic fits this concept really well.

The open zone needs to alternate moments of freedom with moments of tension where you need to chase a goal in a linear way. Frontiers had at least one moment like that, but it was extremely automated. I'm talking of the first encounter with Wyvern, that transformed the first desert area of Ares Island into a linear level. It would be interesting to have moments like that one, but still keeping the freedom of taking the road you want. Anyway, there must be something to put pressure to the player, be it a timer or whatever.

The moments of freedom and calm serve the purpose of learning the layout of the world, so that when you have to rush through it, you already have an idea of where to go. Missions with goals can happen on a well known territory or in an unexplored area; you can also apply temporary changes to the map only during a mission, like, open a cave that's usually closed, or make Eggman drop some structures on the map that serve as temporary enemy forts, that are normally not present on the world outside of that specific mission (changes to the world caused by the missions might or might not be permanent). Failing a mission does not necessarily mean losing a life and getting a gameover... depending on the type of mission it could lead to a different branch of the story (possibly a different ending too), have different negative consequences (maybe the boss of the open zone gets an additional weapon if you fail a mission), or you can just restart it by returning at the initial point and triggering it again; there can be optional missions that happen randomly at a certain point, give you bonuses if you complete them, but you can also decide to ignore them and continue the exploration at your own pace*.

My point is, I'd like to see stuff like signposts and animal capsules (as goals to reach, not as collectables to find) in the open zone too! At some point you get a mission, and it's split into 2 or 3 acts with a signpost or a capsule at the end of each. At each signpost, the story should continue a little bit, with a cutscene or something. The final act of a mission has a boss arena like in the 2D games. When the mission is complete, the game returns being an exploration-based collectathon, until the next mission is triggered.
The level design of the open zone should accomodate this type of gameplay, by having all sorts of mobility-based gimmicks and interesting terrain shapes + enemy placement.

*To a smaller extent, the night of the shooting stars in Frontiers is already a similar concept... you leave exploration behind, and start chasing those stars in a linear way, without caring too much of where you are going, because the time is running out.

 

I agree with u about momentum and I’d also like a 2 player boost game. That said, I’m out of the loop with Unleashed modding. I’ve played Generations mods that allowed Sonic to carry momentum when he jumps but could u fill me in on the Unleashed mods that add momentum.

I love your ideas for how the avatar could play in the open zone. If they were to bring that gameplay style back, I’d prefer if they dropped the character customization and instead made Whisper or Bunnie Rabot a playable character with the Avatar’s abilities. For story reasons, I think it would be better to have an actual character instead of everyone having different avatars.

I haven’t played fortnite so I’m curious, how would you feel about a competitive online Sonic game similar to fortnite. I recall a concept like this was in the early survey that also had the concept for Sonic Frontiers

 

Sorry to disappoint, had a smooth brain moment and said Unleashed instead of Generations. Was thinking about this in particular...

 

Avatar customization is non negotiable >: (

"Fortnite but Sonic" would be a dream come true.