[High Fidelity]

[TimmiT]

Josh, on 09 June 2015 - 12:20 PM, said:

Imagine if in 2009, Rare had announced a direct sequel to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. This makes about as much sense as that would have. Sonic Boom left SUCH a bad first impression, and unless this new game is a borderline-masterpiece, it won't make people forget. Even if it's just okay, it'll bring more attention to the downfall of the brand and keep it on the forefront of people's minds.

Except the biggest problem Nuts & Bolts had was that it wasn't a Banjo-Kazooie game, aside from that it was actually a pretty good game that had a decent reception.

[Conzuh]

GeneHF, on 09 June 2015 - 11:55 AM, said:

We live in a timeline where a Sonic 3 remaster will likely never happen, but Sonic Boom 2 is allowed to exist. I don't even know anymore.

This certainly isn't the prime universe anymore, and we aren't the main characters

[Josh]

TimmiT, on 09 June 2015 - 12:30 PM, said:

Josh, on 09 June 2015 - 12:20 PM, said:

Imagine if in 2009, Rare had announced a direct sequel to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. This makes about as much sense as that would have. Sonic Boom left SUCH a bad first impression, and unless this new game is a borderline-masterpiece, it won't make people forget. Even if it's just okay, it'll bring more attention to the downfall of the brand and keep it on the forefront of people's minds.

Except the biggest problem Nuts & Bolts had was that it wasn't a Banjo-Kazooie game, aside from that it was actually a pretty good game that had a decent reception.

Oh yeah, I really enjoyed Nuts & Bolts. It got pretty good reviews, but an awful commercial reception, and nowadays is usually seen as the downfall of Rare. People who've never played it proclaim to hate it.

I was speaking more in terms of the damage this does to the brand than to the quality of the game. It's like how Sonic '06 is still regularly invoked on mainstream blogs when a new Sonic game is announced. I think the reaction would have been much better if they'd waited until the announcement of whatever Sonic Team's hopefully been busy with for years. Because yeah, this is obviously meant to springboard (and ping-pong) off the success of the cartoon.

[360]

So I suppose I'll post my serious thoughts on this as opposed to my initial kneejerk reaction to just post the Twitter reactions. This is worrying and nightmarish news for most of us here. It not only demonstrates that the Sonic Boom initiative is on-going and therefore may continue to persist for the foreseeable future; it casts an extremely worrying layer of doubt on whether Sonic Team is actually working on anything. We're all assuming they have a long in-development game for the anniversary next year in the pipeline but this assumption isn't actually based on anything concrete. We're just presuming that's what they're working on based on Generations being released for the last anniversary and vague quotations from Iizuka indicating that console Sonic games are set to continue.

What's worrying me now is his statement might not be referring to Sonic Team developed games; he could easily just be referring to console games in the Sonic Boom universe. Effectively this announcement confirms Sega's momentum with Sonic is still revolving around Sonic Boom because somewhat understandably the television show was moderately successful. As Aerosol said although this announcement is pretty much horrific news for everyone here it is understandable to a certain extent. Sonic Generations had all the soul and love Sonic Team had to give and still only sold ~1.5 million units on two consoles with ridiculously massive install bases. To put that in to perspective Alien: Isolation sold well above ~2 million units and Sega considered that an under performance relative to their expectations and essentially a failure in terms of commercial performance.

The expectation is that Sonic as their strongest selling franchise should be selling millions and whilst Sonic Boom's disastrous market performance should have killed the Sonic Boom universe there and then Sega evidently still see the potential in the series shifting units because their earlier strategy of pleasing the hardcore failed (Sonic 4, Generations) and the television show's success might be introducing an element of blind false hope. Regardless this is just not good news for Sonic fans. Sonic has devolved in to a series of sub-par catastrophically awful games targeted at very young children whilst the spirit and ethos of the Classic series that was briefly reignited with Colours and Generations now seems long gone.

This might be a premature overreaction to a certain extent because this could logically just be a cash-in to quickly capitalise on the success of the television show and Sonic Team might still be working on an amazing hardcore mainline game for the anniversary next year that could restore our faith once again as their previous games did; but the primary worrying factor here is what if Sonic Boom truly is the new direction of the series now and Sonic Team has been permanently reassigned to mobile and this is pretty much it for the Sonic franchise? I suppose with the anniversary rapidly approaching and news beginning to leak out we'll find out what core Sonic Team are working on soon (if anything) but this news is the opposite of a good sign.

Providing Sonic Team's working on something potentially amazing and cool I don't mind this news. If however this means it's Sonic Boom now for the foreseeable future I think I'm done with this franchise; at least in terms of hope and expectation for the modern games; not this place and the Sonic scene in general.

[Blue Blood]

I'm sure a lot of people are just asking "why is this game a thing"? The one reason I can muster up is that they're taking another punt now that the TV show is out and was met positively.

Combined, RoL and SC were the worst selling Sonic games ever. Between them shifted a crappy 4.9k.

RoL is the worst received Sonic game ever, and SC only manages to beat out 06 and Genesis.

This game exists purely because popular cartoon tie-ins have historically generated sales. It's sad. But beyond that, I can pretty much just ignore its existence.

[Blivsey]

It's things like this that make it really hard to be a Sonic fan these days. In both senses.

[Icewarrior]

Not jumping in the hate bandwagon, I really don't mind this game, I actually like what I saw.
I thought the demo for SC was nice but 40€/$ is way overpriced for a game like this so I'll wait for a price drop!

Here we've got new gameplay elements that looks really interesting and 5 playable characters plus graphics are pretty.
As far as I'm concerned, that's all I want from a portable Sonic game, just hoping it's going to end up in a more polished and interesting product than its predecessors.

[Jason]

Y'know how they say any publicity is good publicity?

This post has been edited by Jason: 09 June 2015 - 01:03 PM

[Josh]

360, on 09 June 2015 - 12:40 PM, said:

Sonic Generations had all the soul and love Sonic Team had to give and still only sold ~1.5 million units on two consoles with ridiculously massive install bases. To put that in to perspective Alien: Isolation sold well above ~2 million units and Sega considered that an under performance relative to their expectations and essentially a failure in terms of commercial performance.

Damn, that's sad. Especially remembering all the marketing that went into it. But it's not all that surprising when you consider how much better Unleashed sold on the Wii.

Sonic Team was caught in a tough spot - they put all their focus on making a game that could only run on PS3/360, and could never be ported well to the Wii. The Wii itself was on its last legs, so even if they had released it there, would it have mattered? The Wii U was still a year away, and who knows how well it'd do?

It's also a shame about the framerate on consoles. I think the game would have done better if they could have gotten it to 60fps. The PC version blew everything else out of the water, but alas, that's not the center of the market for Sonic games.

Anyone know if Generations has at least had a long tail as the previous gen has died down? I still see it for $20 every time I go to Wal-Mart.

[Aerosol]

It's not...bad publicity right?

[TimmiT]

Preview with a lot more info: http://www.usgamer.n...hog-and-friends

Sounds like they kinda get what was wrong with the first game, but also not really and instead of improving it they're just making what they think people didn't like optional. Especially the way they describe what they think people want from Sonic just sounds wrong:

Quote

Omar addresses player reaction to Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal. "With our previous game, it was a kind of a shock to the fanbase how we designed it. There was more focus on exploration and less focus on speed. We've toned down on the exploration and put a bit more speed into Fire and Ice. In the previous game we dropped you into this enormous labyrinth, a Castlevania-style level design. Sonic fans were like, "What is this? I just want to run through and hit bounce pads and spring boards and speed boosts and ping-pong around." So we've dialed down the length and the size of the levels and cut a linear path through the middle. The exploration now happens above and below it. So now you can have that classic experience of running through the level at high speed if you want, but now you can also explore too."

Which just sounds like what Dimps thought fans wanted with Sonic 4, and we know how that went...

There's also this:

Quote

"It can be tricky sometimes. You're developing a game that is for an intended audience, but we have a legacy group of people that played the Genesis and Megadrive games. Then you have the audience that played the Dreamcast and GameCube era games. Then you have the modern, younger audience. Each of these three groups is looking for something slightly different. Our challenge is how do you make a game that appeals to everybody. That everyone can play and say, "I like this." That's the challenge we're working with."

The problem with Shattered Crystal isn't that it doesn't appeal to everyone, it also isn't that it focuses too much on exploration. Really the two biggest problems were lack of variety and having to work against the game's design to backtrack, if you can backtrack at all. I'd go into more detail but I think I went into enough already.

[Jason]

Aerosol, on 09 June 2015 - 01:13 PM, said:

It's not...bad publicity right?

One mouse-over later...

This post has been edited by Jason: 09 June 2015 - 01:23 PM

[High Fidelity]

Blivsey, on 09 June 2015 - 12:58 PM, said:

It's things like this that make it really hard to be a Sonic fan these days. In both senses.

Exactly how I'm feeling at the moment.


''Sonic fans were like, "What is this? I just want to run through and hit bounce pads and spring boards and speed boosts and ping-pong around."

[Xeal]

Quote

"What is this? I just want to run through and hit bounce pads and spring boards and speed boosts and ping-pong around."

Yes. This is exactly what the fans have been asking for. Automation. The same thing we've been bitching about for years for them to stop.

This post has been edited by Xeal: 09 June 2015 - 01:46 PM