"Multiple" new Sonic games planned for 2021

They've not been building hype or taking a slow burn approach. They've simply chosen not to announce the next game because there's nothing ready to be announced.

If the next game is due for release June 2021, or Christmas 2021, what would be gained from revealing it now?

 

Just saying it exists and showing us what it is, even if minimal.

When a game gets revealed, it doesn't have to have a steady stream of info all the way to release. Again, that's just how Sega's always handled their Sonic game news, not how most game news is distributed.

They could easily just let us know what's up and then dip for a few months until they've got a bigger megaton to drop. I'd much rather take that over the radio silence and occasional "oh we have future plans but who knows when so staaayyy tuuuneeed". lol

 

How about having something to actually fucking talk about , we haven't had anything relevant to discuss since Team Sonic Racing and even then the discussion quickly reached "yep, this game sure exists" 2 weeks after the game released.
If I see another post talking about how 3D Sonic was always bad and Evening Star need to make Sonic Mania 2, I'm going to loose my damn mind.
Just give us SOMETHING, Sega. Anything will do, even a 30 second teaser without a name for the game. I'll happily take it at this point, that's how desperate I've gotten

 

The first Sonic Forces teaser trailer was 15.5 months before its release. Then everyone complained about the long stretches with no new info. When it was released, the game was clearly underbaked.

Revealing games too early is a bad idea. Releasing them too early is an even worse idea. Aaron Webber said that they're giving Sonic games the time they need going forward.

 

i would prefer to take shorter time between reveal and release tbh, something SEGA always done but only broke it recent-ish with games such as Forces and Team Sonic Racing which had 1+ year gap between announcement and release....an approach i didn't like for those games and made them more disappointing somehow -i actually do like TSR very much personally but you get what i mean- and somehow with the longest timeframe to release, they still had lackluster marketing with even fewer info than usual.

Boom also had a long one, also Sonic 2006, and sonic 4, it almost feel like the longest they take from announcement to release, the shitter the game turns out

The way i see it, after all this time since March, it feels like they didn't actually have anything ready to release soon anyway, so they don't feel the rush to announce them, and take more time to develop them, without feeling the stress of "we announced this game now, lets finish it as soon as we can", also it can line up nicely with 30th anniversary next year.

But.... they should have been more transparent, something as basic as "we will announce shit in 5 months" should suffice, while i personally can wait, they should know the fanbase at large can't, especially since they were promised to get news like.....6 months ago.

 

Sonic Mania also was announced way before the game was out, by like over a year. It was the best Sonic game in over a decade, and the hype was immense.

I think the problem with Forces or TSR taking so long to come out wasn't the length of waiting from announcement to release, but that the games weren't exciting lol. Both of those releases were kind of limp, and that def had more to do with the games not really looking all that promising in the first place.

 

People would then complain about an "announcement of an announcement". Nobody even said that any of the SXSW announcements would be a new game.

We've known for a long time that the next major Sonic game is in development and that 2021 will be the next big year for the series. That's enough until Sega has something worthwhile to show. Unveiling a game that's 15 months away won't be them any favours, nor will showing off early unfinished gameplay footage. They need to put their best foot forward, then follow it up with a strong and steady marketing campaign.

 

By the way you're addressing this, it's apparent that anyone could complain about anything.

I think it's valid that people are getting tired of waiting. Keeping the fanbase in the dark has done them no favors.

 

Mania is the sole exception and even then it was supposed to come earlier, and while i agree that games like forces weren't that exciting, the reception would still be different if people didn't wait too long for them, they would still don't like them but they will move on faster

 

The idea is to get people excited about an upcoming game and maintain that excitement until release date. Announce something too early and that initial excitement is lost and you have to build it up all over again. Put out an underwhelming reveal trailer and the first impression is squandered.

 

So we don't want them to announce games too early...but we also want them to take their time and make the games right...and we also want to be kept in the loop 24/7? You guys do see the problem with that logic, right?

That said, there's no reason they couldn't have just turned the announcement into a stream. So many functions/announcements were cancelled because of COVID, and I'd bet most or all of them could've been done online instead. But the companies involved just...didn't.

 

I do, we've just been so starved for Sonic news as of late just having an idea would be nice. But part of the impatience comes from the fact that the last mainline Sonic game came out in 2018, assuming they started work on the next one shortly after you'd think they'd of made ok progress by now at least.

 

I have a hunch the reason why we haven't gotten any real news is because of Sonic Team must have been left scrambling what to do after Forces reception. Combine that to tons of management shifts due to the higher ups at Sega that must have occurred during this whole time. I may be in the minority but given how much Forces burned my trust with sonic team I'm glad we're most likely not getting anything major from sonic team this year. They need to think hard and deep about this franchises direction after Forces.

 

The mention of early reveals just gave me flashbacks to that actually-interesting-looking Sonic 06 trailer and then the early demo with the real-time day/night cycle, and the slow realization that the game wasn't going to be what we wanted with every trailer afterwards, followed by the game actually coming out and being godawful...absolutely soul-crushing.

Tbh, I have a hard time getting antsy about the lack of Sonic news, a band I really like took a decade to release new music, and Metroid hasn't had a Prime 3-good game since 2009ish, so I think I'm pretty well-inoculated to this kind of waiting

 

So IMO, what makes the wait so frustrating is just how bad a taste Forces left in my mouth. If Forces had been a decent game, this wait wouldn't even bother me because it's clear we have good stuff on the way.

After 06 we only had to wait 2 years until Unleashed came out, after Boom we got Mania announced just 2 years later. It's been 3 years, we know its highly unlikely we'll get a Mania 2 anytime soon and Forces is just sitting there as the newest game in the franchise and it's leaving us in this limbo of waiting for information to see if Sonic will be redeemed or fall deeper into mediocrity.

Good comics, a decent movie, and Mania DLC/shorts don't mean much of anything when your main headline franchise is still so far in the pits. I'm also sure SEGA knows this which is why they're being careful with the reveal but the opposite thing of what Pengi mentioned could happen and we can end up waiting just so long for something to be announced that it will be a letdown given all the anticipation we built up. That's literally what happened with Forces, even in prerelease, after we had to wait 3 years after Lost World (which got mixed reception).

It took so long for this to be the first information in forever that it's lackluster showing made the hate be built on the game from the older fandom from day one. Even with how awesome Mania looked.

I'm sure SEGA knows all this and I just hope it's worth the wait.

 

Honestly I'm just partially antsy because I dodged Forces like the plague so the last 3D Sonic game I played was 7 years ago, and the last good one was nearly 10. lol

 

This is definitely what it comes down to for me. I just want to see anything from the new game so I know the franchise is going to do well going into the future. Nothing about Forces looked that great from the first reveal to the release, I bought it as I thought it was just poor marketing, and was still disappointed by what the game was. I don't know whether the next game is going to be good, or going to be as disappointing as Forces.

I just want *anything* to show they have learned from their mistakes and didn't spend most of the development time designing the graphics engine instead of... you know, working on the game lol

That, and it seemed as if they were going to announce it back in March, which then never happened, but the least they could do is let us know what their plans are going into the future about how they are going to announce it. It felt as if we were promised exciting news, and now we're just waiting indefinitely for news that isn't going to come. People should be lenient because of the pandemic, but at the same time I think it's fair people are getting antsy because it feels like they haven't even tried after their plans were cancelled, and instead have just given up with doing *anything*.

 

Some parts of the fandom assumed that the next new game would be revealed at SXSW 2020, but no official channels even hinted that this would be the case. The same assumptions were made about the SXSW 2019 event, which had no new game announcements.

For context, here's the 2019 panel description:

And here's the 2020 panel description: