Sonic Colo(u)rs: Ten Years Later.

Sonic as a concept was not fundamentally flawed from the start. What Sonic became throughout the 3D titles is fundamentally flawed. An entire game built on speed for the sake of speed is a waste of resources. There is room for spectacle and there is room for gameplay. The gameplay part should be the more important one. Making Sonic go so fast in 3D that the classic games give better reaction time to the player is unnecessary and harms the game overall.

Getting rid of the boost altogether and slowing Sonic down a bit would be a good move. Then put in some physics that don't suck and aren't constantly reliant on scripts to function. Then let Sonic roll in a ball again. Then of course make Sonic not control horribly.

We already know that it's possible to approximate the classic Sonic philosophy in 3D, it's just a matter of refining those ideas.

 

I agree with that, but disagree that the 3D games are fundamentally flawed by default, and that a game like Generations doesn't feature robust gameplay in addition to an impressive spectacle. Sure, Green Hill is speedy for speed's sake. But the timing, practice, and skill necessary to see that spectacle in every other stage is what makes it so endlessly replayable to me.

And that's EXACTLY how I approached the classics, too: The opening level was easy to blast through, because it was impressing upon the player how good it would feel to be THAT GOOD at Sonic. But when you can achieve those same heights in later stages, it feels WAY BETTER because you've earned it. That's why I say boost scratches the same itch for me that the classics do. (And, for that matter, why the Adventure games ALSO scratched that itch. I just find that boost hits it even better.)

Forces was the epitome of everything boost's worst critics always said it was. When you talk about an "entire game built on speed for the sake of speed," that's what comes to mind. But Forces being "boost to win" doesn't mean the earlier games didn't pull it off more successfully, just like Sonic Advance 2's "hold right to win" didn't invalidate the classic formula, just like 06 didn't (or at least, shouldn't have) ruined the Adventure formula.

Of course, if I didn't like one of these "formulas" to begin with, I can see why the worst games in that style being the way they are and having the reception they did might make me go like, "SEE? I was right along!"

Also, I'm definitely not saying a momentum physics-based 3D Sonic game couldn't work. I love SRB2 as much as anyone else, and it's pretty silly that something like that hasn't really been officially ATTEMPTED at this point. But, I also think that emphasizing SPEED was a perfectly natural fit for a 3D perspective, when Sonic's superpower can be so much more spectacular, and the player can see ahead into the Z-axis.

 

Nintendo did take that direction after the Galaxy games though, with 3D Land and its sequel 3D World (Miyamoto even described 3D Land as "a 3D Mario game that plays like a 2D Mario game"). They're not "pixel perfect" adaptations, but they definitely follow the spirit of the controls, level design, and mechanics of the 2D titles much closer than any of the other 3D Mario games that came before (or afterwards with Odyssey). 3D World in particular is being re-released for to Switch next February with a new "Bowser's Fury" campaign mode.

 

3D Land and 3D World do. The rules, controls and design philosophy are the same, but there's a third dimension. This was only made possible by its zoomed out, fixed perspective camera, giving the player a full view of what's in front of, behind, above and below Mario at all times and at an angle that makes it easier to judge depth perception. This style of game wouldn't be possible with a fully controllable over-the-shoulder camera, where even simple Mario actions like making Koopa shells bounce back and forth between walls would become too confusing and hazardous.

To have a 3D Sonic game with the ramps and half-pipes and careful platforming of the Mega Drive games, with no crutches like the homing attack, would require a similar approach.

You're painting in very broad strokes there. There's a large contingent within the fandom that wants a Sonic Adventure 3 (by which they usually mean, a Sonic Adventure 3 but with just the Sonic style levels and Chao Gardens). There's also a large contingent that enjoyed the non-Werehog parts of Unleashed, Colours and Generations but were sorely disappointed that Sonic Forces was a huge step down, and altogether not fun, instead of a further refinement (this was certainly the case in the video game press).

The loudest group is usually the one that hasn't gotten what they wanted recently. The last three 3D Sonic games (Lost World, Rise of Lyric and Forces) were all such big disappointments that currently nobody is feeling particularly catered to.

The fans of the 2D games are also feeling a little nervous, because it took 23 years to get a proper successor to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and Sega finally released one, and it was a big hit and critical darling, yet there's been no sign of a follow-up.

But these segments of the fandom aren't as mutually exclusive as people tend to think, or particularly worth worrying about. Most players aren't hardcore fans, they just want a good game. And most hardcore fans will be happy with that good game, even if it doesn't check every box on their checklist.

 

My response to that would come back to what I said a few pages ago: Sonic 4 didn't happen JUST because hardcore fans demanded it. If it had, then at the very least, it wouldn't have included Sonic's post-Adventure design, because BOY HOWDY did that ever piss the fans off.

Sonic 4 happened because in broad strokes, what fans wanted and what the mainstream wanted happened to be in alignment. A back-to-basics 2D sidescrolling Sonic game (because that was the only form everyone could agree was good) featuring no alternate gameplay styles and featuring only Sonic. On that last point, they even made it a part of their marketing. They did a countdown on the Sonic 4 website where every day, another potential playable character would be crossed off an image, leaving only...



But I did say they aligned in broad strokes. And you can see the discrepancy in the way the mainstream reacted, versus the way the FANS reacted. The game reviewed well and led to a lot of positive word-of-mouth, because on a surface level, it represented exactly what people had been begging for for the better part of a decade. But among fans, Sonic 4 was treated as the coming of the antichrist, for so completely misrepresenting the depth of the classic games. If you weren't around at the time... y'know how poorly certain types talk about Pontac & Graff now? That doesn't even REMOTELY compare to how they talked about DIMPS back then.

But I digress! Like I said, something Adventure-y wouldn't exactly shock me. But I really don't think the audience looking for that, specifically, is really comparable to the audience that was looking for Sonic 4 ten years ago. And I worry that if Sega does announce a Sonic Adventure 3 or an Adventure remake or something, then I think fans too young to remember how they talked about Sonic back then may be underestimating how much derision it might be met with. "Sonic World Adventure" wasn't called "Sonic World Adventure" outside of Japan for a reason, y'know? Sega would have their work cut out for them in convincing the audience that distrusts that name on principle that it was even a good idea.

 

And yet, the very first game of the franchise was well worth it, and it was just Sonic. No friends, no gimmicks, just Sonic through and Through. And amazingly, that design put them over Nintendo! I 100% agree that I'd take a ridiculously short good sonic game over a mediocre one that takes two weeks. I honestly don't care what else we get, be it friends, or gimmicks, or the real super power of teamwork, if it has good focus, I think Sega is sitting on a huge cash cow. They just need to stop milking it dry lol.

Sonic Mania is a good example of this. You can beat it with all emeralds in a couple of hours if you know what you're doing, and it's the highest rated sonic game in 15 years. Sega needs to learn that we'll gladly take a good short experience over a long meh one. Of course, the issue doesn't lie entirely in padding either. Team Sonic Racing is pretty bare bones and straight forward, but that doesn't mean it's a knockout, by any sense of the imagination.

If i could actually make a game, I'd make an adventure style PoC first and foremost. I certainly don't claim to be a game design professional by any means, much less one who understands sonic, but I think I've got a pretty good understanding of what all the adventure games had in common gameplay wise, and what did and didn't click for people. Maybe I should make a video explaining it... :D

 

I don't think this is particularly true.

Fans have been asking for a Sonic Adventure 3 since the GameCube days. Sonic Heroes wasn't that, Shadow the Hedgehog wasn't that, and Sonic 2006 kind of was that, but was also very bad and didn't have a Chao Garden. They've never stopped asking. It's something that's come up frequently in interviews and practically every fan event without fail. But Iizuka just isn't into the idea, wanting to move the series forward rather than back. I think we'll probably see a new Sonic Adventure style game eventually, even in that interview Iizuka gave the caveat that there could be an SA3 if they ever "get the gameplay to evolve and get to a place where Adventure 3 makes sense". But if it was simply a case of Sonic Team responding to the most vocal minorities, we'd have gotten Sonic Adventure 3 years ago.

Sonic 4 was a small project cell phone game that got elevated to a numbered installment console game by management during development. It was a result of corporate hubris and short-sightedness.

The things Sega have taken to heart tend to be sentiments from the larger player base, rather than just hardcore fans. Things like dropping the alternate gameplay characters (treasure hunting, shooting, Werehog), taking a step back from the "serious" and "realistic" tone of Shadow/Sonic 2006, abandoning Lost World's gameplay and the Sonic Boom games.

 

The #1 sentiment I see lately outside of dedicated fan communities, like in comment sections on mainstream gaming news sites, tends to be this: "Sonic Mania was so good! Why haven't they made another one!?" It's pretty rare at this point to even see anyone dunking on 06.

I think the segment at the beginning of this review of the movie sums it up well. The sentiment outside the fandom is still pretty much, "Sonic was awesome in the 90s, and mostly fell off a cliff when 3D hit, but then fans were hired to make Mania and finally showed Sega what they should've been doing all along." All this hand-wringing about tone and direction and whether Colors is good or not is basically just us screaming at ourselves.

 

The solution is obvious: if we want an Adventure 3, then the fans need to make it!

Which'd be an exciting prospect if every 3D Sonic fan game wasn't the same 2 gameplay styles: either boost or just pseudo-boost where they have the hallway level design without the actual Hold Boost to Win element.

 

Thiiiiiis. I'd love to make an adventure 3 fangame (apart from the already existing one), but I just can't program. Imagine if everyone in the world with an idea had the ability to just make it real. We'd get good stuff, some bad stuff, but a whole lotta weird stuff. To parrot myself, we need an adventure era Christian Whitehead. Someone who understands the adventure formula, but also has the experience to make the game (cause sega certainly won't do it themselves)

 

What 3D fan games are you playing? Sonic GT, Sonic Utopia, and Sonic Robo Blast 2 are all have more open level design (especially GT and Utopia), and none of them have the boost.

 

Sonic 4 did go over better with reviewers (and even casual audiences inside/outside the fandom) compared to dedicated fans of the Genesis titles; and it did review better than recently-released Sonic games at the time like Unleashed and Black Knight. But Sonic 4's scores were mostly mediocre across the board, and were substantially worse than other major 2D platforming games released around the time, like 2009's NSMB Wii, 2010's Kirby's Epic Yarn, Super Meat Boy, Limbo, and DKC Returns, and 2011's LittleBigPlanet 2 and Rayman Origins. If anything, some of the sites that gave it good marks earlier later listed the game as one of the year's biggest disappointments.

 

It's not that they don't have boost, it's that they still play like boost games. One of my favorite things to do in Sonic games is challenge myself to play through the game without using a basic ability (that isn't required to beat the game), like tricks in Sonic Rush. The problem here is that you can play these fangames and get used to the style, but if you go play gens or unleashed without boosting at all, you'll quickly realize how these "adventure style" fangames are actually built on the boost formula :/

That's just it I think, The adventure games are just highly evolved 3d classic games (especially adventure 1). I think that 90% of a 3d classic game would end up fundamentally being the same as the ideal adventure game, so I'm not really qualified to decide what makes each of these takes different from each other.

However, I will put a short list of things fangames need to fix to break away from the boost formula fully and become a "true" 3d classic/adventure game-

>Nerf the overall speed by more than half

Sonic moves so incredibly fast on his own now. The speed reward system is long gone... you don't get speed for playing well, you have speed to start with, and it's about not losing it. Personally, it was much more rewarding in the genesis/dreamcast days for me when sonic was significantly slower and it took skill to see his true speed shine. I shouldn't be able to beat sonic utopia in a couple of minutes- I honestly expect a level that huge to take at least 30 minutes to traverse.

>Multiple Characters and playstyles

I feel like this one is obvious, but we should at least be able to explore these worlds in a way that feels right to each of us. Get rid of fishing, get rid of guns and mechs, just make it about athletics and parkour. Give people unique ways to get around, not unique ways to wish they were doing something else.

>Tight, condensed stages

(Sa1 really comes to mind here). I miss the days of having small condensed areas filled with a million and one ways to get to where you wanna go. The best examples of this that I immediately think of are twinkle park, speed highway, red mountain, sky deck, and final egg. The stages were so full of things to do, it really felt like the natural evolution of s3&k to me. Most fangames now, regardless of how many paths there are, are huge open Kansas-style prairies with little to nothing to do. (But it's guud because no boost) :/

> little nuances here and there

I've got a list of other little things lost in the transition to the boost games, such as the lack of cinematic cameras (white jungle was so good for this, I legitimately feel like centrifugal force is pulling me around with shadow) or involved rail grinding (which now has devolved into forced quick stepping at it's best and glorified QTEs at it's worst- I miss when rail grinding was so involved as to literally be the difference between an A or a B rank), but I'm not gonna list everything here.

There's a lot of particular magic anyone has yet to recapture to truly create a 3d classic/adventure style game, but I'm not giving up hope. I don't want sonic adventure 3 to happen. That the worst thing we could get right now. But a different game in the same style I believe might be the saving grace the series needs. But again, I'm not qualified for that.

Now I really want to stop having to write walls of text, and I apologize for the long read

Edit: my phone keeps destroying my grammar

 

I don't entirely agree: in those Classic/Adventure styled fangames, you can have moments when you can slow down of your own will and interact with the environment as a platforming game, rather than just a road to blast through. The level of interaction with the terrain is completely different: in the Boost games, everything is just The Run Zone (and I say this as a person who likes Boost Sonic, mind you), but in those fangames, there is a level of analysis, during which you ask yourself "Okay, what's the optimal route? How do I gain speed here?" and you use the slopes and the level design to either build or maintain speed.

But I agree with the rest of the post! A proper 3D platforming game based on the Classic/Adventure style would be very fun.