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What approach should 3D Sonic take next?

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by The Joebro64, Mar 23, 2020.

  1. SuperSonicRider

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    ?????

    I think Josh was just saying that he personally connected with them less as he grew older, not that it has to be that way.

    Speaking personally, my first Sonic games were Sonic Heroes and Mega Collection Plus. Maybe because of that, the story has never really affected my enjoyment of the games. I will say that I do think the early 2000s-era games have a better sense of continuity, or at least tried to engage with past events more consistently? I think about stuff like how Sonic Adventure has the NPC that mentions Sonic's adventures in Sonic 3 & CD, or how Sonic Heroes makes a few callbacks to Adventure 1 that feel genuine, or how Sonic Battle intertwines some plot threads of Adventure 2 (IIRC), or how Advance 3 picks up loosely after Battle's story...et cetera? Stuff like that is what I think people miss in particular, and it contrasts directly with how, for example, Chaos was used in Sonic Forces (doubly so because of how Tails reacts to Chaos).

    Oh, about the gameplay. Uh, I hope it's good? I guess since the Wisps came up I'll say this about them. I don't really mind them coming back, but it's a shame that no game really used them as creatively as Sonic Colors' DS version. In the 3D games, Wisps pretty much only ever serve one purpose and may be able to interact with one or two types of stock objects. In the DS game, it feels like their implementation is a bit more nuanced. For example, the Burst Wisp (fire) in Tropical Resort can be used to activate these ferris wheel-type objects that shoot you off at a high speed, and in Sweet Mountain, there's these mounds of jello that can be used as springs. If you use the Burst Wisp near these jello mounds, they melt. I digress though! (I've just never gotten to fully ramble about this lol)

    Going back to main gameplay, though I do love both the best of "Adventure" and "Boost" gameplay, something like SA1 Sonic would probably be ideal for me. There is still a lot that can be done with the physics and simple moveset that game has IMO, especially considering that when I think back, SA1's Sonic levels were a bit on the easy side (not necessarily a bad thing :) I just think maybe more types of platforming challenges could be explored with that "formula").
     
  2. Josh

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    Thank you! I feel like qwerty unintentionally misrepresented the point of what I was saying. Which, y'know, it was somewhere within a rambling multi-paragraph essay, so that's probably fair! :P

    I do think the appeal of art is EXTREMELY subjective, and in a series that picks up such a majority of its fandom when they're young, and goes in as many different directions as this one, many fans' preferred "flavor" of the character will at least correlate with whatever "era" we were in when they first became fans.

    I didn't, and still don't, think Colors is "cringe." I thought, and still think, it has one of the most enjoyable stories of any mainline Sonic game, though that's not saying much: It's only a C+ or maybe a B- in a sea of mostly-average stories. But in the face of a substantial, or at least a vocal, movement within the fandom who clearly feel very differently about all this, all I can do is self-examine why I didn't feel that way about it, and the best comparison I've got is to compare my experiences to their's.

    To wit: As a teenager, I cringed through Heroes for being too kiddy, poorly-written, awfully-acted, and for dismissing many elements of what the characters were "supposed" to be. In retrospect, I can see that while my criticisms may have been fair, my vitriol over it was not. Sonic Team was making a game for people less-familiar with the series than I was. They were continuing to target their family-friendly mascot platformer series at, y'know, families, and I wasn't in the target demo anymore. The sort of emotional arguments I see nowadays leveled against the games of the 2010s reminds me very much of how many fans older than me used to talk about ANY of the 3D Sonic games, and how I personally felt about Heroes.

    But just like I had fair criticisms buried within my angst, I think it's entirely fair to criticize the stories of the most recent games. There's absolutely been a problem with Lost World, Forces, and probably even Generations (though that was SUCH an excuse plot and SO out-of-focus there that I'd argue it didn't impact much), where while there's a lot of time SPENT on the story, that story isn't substantial or interesting enough, and the characters aren't compelling enough, for it to feel worthy of all the time it takes up. Comparatively, something like Unleashed wasn't really engaging for me as an adult playing it, but at least it didn't feel like it was just spinning its wheels.

    I'll always argue that Colors' lighthearted tone worked well for it, because it fit the story it was telling. But when Lost World and Forces' writing is the same flavor of lighthearted and breezy, AND ALSO EVERYONE ON SONIC'S HOMEWORLD IS DYING or SONIC IS TORTURED AND TAILS HAS LOST IT AND EGGMAN HAS TAKEN OVER THE WORLD, it's a tonal mis-mash. To put it in 90s fan terms, it'd be like doing SatAM's setting with the writing style and slapstick comedy of AoStH.

    Through these games, it's felt like Sonic is awkwardly trying to split the difference between critics who say "Sonic doesn't need a story" and those fans who play the game at least partly BECAUSE of the story. Either approach CAN work depending on the game, but you can't have it both ways. You can't have a high-stakes, dramatic plot with the tone and characterization of a Saturday morning cartoon, and by continuously trying to go in both directions, Sonic Team ends up satisfying no one.

    Sonic stories, at least in the mainline video games, have always hit me much more like the "Emoji Movie" than "Frozen." I'm personally _okay_ with the stories just being there for the kids, because from my perspective, they've been that way for almost 20 years, and it doesn't affect how much I enjoy playing the games. But it doesn't _have_ to be this way. The movie presented a version of Sonic that anyone can root for, the IDW comics seem to have a TON of older fans, and Tyson Hesse's cartoons are, IMO, basically perfect. Sonic should always be palatable for kids, but that doesn't mean the stories can't be palatable for adults, too. Fans who started with the Adventure games have always seemed to find this stuff more integral to their enjoyment of the series, and given how many of them are coming of age, it's way past time for Sonic to be held to a higher standard.
     
  3. qwertysonic

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    You're right I did intentionally misrepresent you, and I'm sorry.

    I meant to turn what you said into the argument I've seen many times, that Sonic is a game for kids and isn't meant to have a story that adults will like. And that argument is stupid.
     
  4. Pengi

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    The story scenes in recent games have mostly been characters standing around spouting exposition in non-descript locations. The Adventure games had set pieces and events that propelled the story forward. Things happening. Pieces on the board being moved around. Even Sonic & Knuckles did that.
     
  5. You know what they should bring back? Seamless transitions between cutscenes and gameplay. You know, like in S3K, and to a lesser extent, SA1 and Heroes. As long as the cutscenes don't drag on for too long, it could help keep the pace going a bit better. Most Sonic games these days just use the in-game models for cutscenes anyway. Even SEGA's own Yakuza series has seamless transitions between cutscenes and gameplay now; especially the newer games on the Dragon Engine.
     
  6. Frostav

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    Bro...

    I know countless Sonic fans who enjoyed the stories of the two Adventure games and even the storybook ones--I've seen a lot of "it's time to admit that Black Knight kicked ass" tweets across my timeline, for instance. I've said it many times before, but while it's hard to notice on a place like this, there are places of younger Sonic fans for whom things like "momentum physics" and "multi-tiered level design" and "speed as a reward" are utterly irrelevant. You can laugh at them all you want, and hey, I think they're missing the point of Sonic a bit too, but these fans like Sonic for its world and characters and don't...really seem to care about the gameplay minutiae we debate intensely on here. These people tend to be Adventure fans, but they don't particularly want Adventure gameplay back for the reasons people often bring up on here (that it's the closest framework to classic Sonic in 3D we have) but because that was the style of the Sonic games they played as a kid.

    Now, this demo has grown up a bit, and I definitely more of them also want a return to a more strong gameplay paradigm and better physics, but man. I keep saying this but there is a whole 'nother world out there of Sonic fans who can go literally weeks without bringing up gameplay once. They can spend hours debating what ship they like best or drawing fifty million pics of their favorite Sonic character or writing long-ass fanfic longer than most actual novel series, but they absolutely exist, and they are way bigger than I think a lot of people on this forum realize. Like, way bigger.

    If you asked me to think of a typical Sonic fan, I would think of two people: the stereotypical classic boomer like this forum that spends all their time debating physics on Sonic Retro, and this person:

    [​IMG]

    This. This is the typical modern/younger Sonic fan in my eyes (also an excellent artist). You can tell what this person likes about Sonic from her headbanner alone. And it ain't what Sonic Retro likes about Sonic.

    And you know what? You can lament The Youth(TM) for being Sonic fans for ultimately shallow reasons in your eyes, but SEGA kinda did this to themselves when they put a bigger emphasis on story and characters compared to Sonic's contemporary rivals. Shit, it's why I can never really leave the series myself--I simply like that Sonic characters, for as shallow as they all honestly are, are still characters. Sonic takes place in a world that almost feels like it could be a real place in comparison to the surrealistic nonsense of the Mushroom Kingdom.

    Like, the entire reason the SA2 fandub exists is because these characters are actual characters who can be parodied and satirised. None of the characters in the fandubs are terribly out of character, they're just hilarious interpretations of existing characters. No one would do that for a Mario game because 1) mainline Mario games don't have that many cutscenes 2) most Mario characters outside of the RPG's are so charmlessly devoid of any character whatsoever they're effectively cardboard gameplay/narrative-contrivances and the ones who are like Luigi only ever show up in spinoffs

    If this is a problem...it's a problem SEGA created.
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2020
  7. The Joebro64

    The Joebro64

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    Wasn't expecting to summon the "Sonic Story Defense Squad" by saying that. My point was that this discussion is about gameplay, not story. And story should never be prioritized over gameplay.
     
  8. Josh

    Josh

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    Well-said, Frostav! I'm reminded of the time, a little over 10 years ago, when I met someone who claimed to be, quote, "Sonic's biggest fan." I declared that that was impossible, because, in fact, _I_ was Sonic's biggest fan, and so we decided to challenge each other to a trivia contest, where we'd give each other questions until one of us struck out.

    HER OPENING QUESTION: "How tall is Sonic the Hedgehog?"
    MY OPENING QUESTION: "How do you activate level select in Sonic 2?"

    I didn't know her answer, and she didn't know mine. We both struck out immediately. Because while we might have each been huge fans of the series, we were fans of very different things ABOUT the series.

    And while it's often spoken of in generational terms (and fairly so, I think there's a TON of correlation with Adventure boomers wanting the series to go back to what they grew up with, as there was with Genesis boomers wanting the same), it's worth noting that this was never purely a generational issue. After all, a significant portion of the FIRST generation of Sonic fans on the internet were primarily fans of SatAM, and many of them never, or barely, played the games at all. There's always been a contingent that leans more toward gameplay mechanics, and a contingent that leans more toward characters and stories. I think it's fair to say that MOST fans would like to appreciate both, but most of us at least prioritize one or the other.
     
  9. RDNexus

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    I may not be a gamer, and prefer games with a decent-to-good story.
    But to my brother, the resident gamer, gameplay always matters.
    He never finished Unleashed & Lost World. He's simply given up.
    Both games' gameplay sucked for him, so it's only natural it happened.

    So... In my opinion, a good game gotta have good gameplay AND story.
     
  10. Dek Rollins

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    When you make false statements to support some sort of strawman or non-argument that nobody has ever argued against, yeah, people are going to respond accordingly. If you had said "I'd like my thread to remain centered around gameplay discussion rather than story," there would be zero issue.
     
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  11. The Joebro64

    The Joebro64

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    It wasn't a "straw man" argument, I genuinely believe that people don't pick up Sonic games primarily to see the story. They pick it up to play it. So just drop it.
     
  12. Antheraea

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    Fuck it, make everyone mute again. The TSR and Chao in Space cartoons showed that you can do that in modern style and still give everyone loads of personality too (and give the voice actors work with their little grunts and such) ...though the current 3D meshes don't really seem made for funny cartoony facial expressions :/ But seriously, I think the TSR short alone can be shown to people who don't know anything about the characters and they'd "get" what they're about immediately, which is a great metric in keeping the flavor and personality of Sonic as a whole without having to have everyone stand around spouting off shitty exposition.

    I'm also in the "played Heroes as a teenager and hated it" camp, though to me the "SUPER POWER OF TEAMWORK" was just a cherry on top, which was resting on top of the icing of the awful Tails voice acting and weird scripting ("Look at all those Eggman's robots"), which itself covered a shitty sponge cake of utterly buggy gameplay and confusing level layouts. ...on top of having to run all those layouts all over again as each team. Notably, I hated Heroes so much that Mania was the first game I had bought since Heroes, so that'll tell you how much it put me off the series.

    Also, I disagree with the notion that no one picks Sonic titles up for the story. It's still there. You need context for stages these days - look at how people complained about the lack of transition between certain stages in Mania before it was literally patched in because people wanted it - even in 2D games people want context. And that context in modern games is provided via story. No one says that Ratchet & Clank has great stories, but if you just instantly switched from level to level the games definitely would've been panned for it. It is an expectation and has been for the past two decades now at this point, whether you admit it or not :V
     
  13. Dek Rollins

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    Again, your "genuine belief" is wrong. And the strawman is your implication that some people here want the story to be prioritized over gameplay, which nobody has ever said they want. Your arguing against nothing to try and portray anyone's opinions about the stories in Sonic games as meaningless.
     
  14. The Joebro64

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    Still no, but I'm just going to drop it.
     
  15. Darth Taco

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    Maybe it's not the specific reason someone is playing the game, but having a good story and stuff makes it more fun right? Eventually after playing a bunch you start to not pay attention to or skip the cutscenes, but the game will kind of feel a certain way still.

    It's hard to describe in real words, but doesn't all the stuff happening and the reason why, the music and the tone of each level, the stuff characters have said and the way they react to things, contribute to making the game feel more fun or interesting? If that stuff isn't working or even if it's just not there, don't you feel more indifferent?
     
  16. The Joebro64

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    You do have a point, but the best Sonic games (1, 2, CD, and 3K) kept storytelling to an absolute minimum. They were not a focus and they did not impede the flow of the game. I'd prefer next to no story, just tell the story through gameplay itself.
     
  17. Theoneandonlyjoebro64 isn't totally wrong. Regardless of our tastes, the primary form of interaction in the videogame medium is gameplay and for the majority it will and rightly should take priority. When you have you ever seen a videogame release that had poor gameplay but a great story, do well with critics and the wider gaming community? If it ever happens, it's rare. I can't think of it at all to be honest. However it is very very common for games with poor or just minimal stories but great gameplay to still do well critically, commercially, etc. The importance of gameplay and story are not equal, I think that should be recognized even by fans who prefer a greater sense of story or got into the sonic series primarily because of the story and character interaction.

    So obviously if Sonic Team is able to do both well, there'd be no reason to discourage it. I think there's something to be said about focus though, and since the Sonic series has struggled with its gameplay over the past 20 years, I think development focus should be centered around that primarily, rather than listening to random fan complaints. Like, if ST understands anything, they should understand that making 3D Sonic gameplay top notch and consistent is the best thing they can do for the series and everything else is secondary until they do this successfully. I think this is the area where the story-first fans and I will always have conflict. If I was a developer, I would flat out ignore anything that didn't have to do with ensuring excellent gamplay until I knew I had it, and then only after that would I begin addressing everything else.
     
  18. Sid Starkiller

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    That means the game does have story. Telling a story purely through subtext is still telling a story. And just because the best games had little in the way of story doesn't mean Sonic shouldn't ever have a story.
     
  19. LucasMadword

    LucasMadword

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    I would say the only reason Sonic has the storytelling stigma it does, is because no 3D game has really tried and succeeded at fully realizing what it wanted.

    I don't care whether the story is lighthearted or dramatic, I don't care whether there's voice acting or not, I don't even care whether the story is grand or pretty small scale... I just want a story that knows what it is, and is polished as much as can be. Everyone will have their preferences, of course, but well, the only reason the stories have the stigma it does, is because no game has fully realized what they were going for. The closest 3D got to fully realizing what Sonic is, story-wise, is SA1 or SA2, and those weren't perfect.

    In this case, I disagree. Remember, Sonic Team is a triple A developer. I understand that they haven't gotten it right in the past, and we should take what we can get for the latest game lol, but pretending as if they don't have the resources to be able to create good gameplay and good story is just wrong. They just haven't tried, in a long while. Even Sonic Forces, it half-arsed the story, whilst trying to claim it was darker and edgier (they wanted their cake and wanted to eat it too). You can tell when the writers just don't care, the writing is dripping with either ineptitude or apathy, and it's been clear since Colours that they want to instead go for the bare minimum.

    As much as anyone can critique Sonic Unleashed, you can at least look at all of the effort that went into the story and see that they tried. Even Sonic 06, you can tell it was the deadline crunch with the story continually being swapped around at the eleventh hour, rather than pure laziness. I'll take a story that tries over apathy any day.
     
  20. qwertysonic

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    This. Sonic 06 isn’t a good story, But a lot of effort was put into it. And at 3 hours of cutscenes it is a full story.