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I'm not pledging money up front for a game I was promised decades ago that was never delivered to me.

There's several elements of Sonic Battle that conflict in plot consistency with SA2 and Shadow the Hedgehog, particularly in regard to Shadow yet again. The details mostly elude my head at the moment but among one of them were the messages from Gerald which made him act a lot more sane than the vengeful madman who plotted a colony drop at the end of SA2, but was supposedly written around the same time.

https://www.youtube....h?v=1lrGTazAgrc

Of course, there's also Sonic Championship's "8th Chaos Emerald outta nowhere".

(EDIT: Also, there's how Shadow the Hedgehog's "Last Story" doesn't seem to fit in the continuity of any of the possible plot branches.)

ICEknight, on 22 May 2015 - 01:54 PM, said:

He claimed he rejected a "more goth" Sonic.
Grey's a pretty goth color.

This character is almost like a parody of Tom Kalisnke's "rejected Sonic".

TimmiT, on 22 May 2015 - 10:55 AM, said:

Okay then, does Xenoblade (Wii) to Xenoblade 3D (New 3DS) work as a better example, then? That was a game that was quickly ported to vastly inferior hardware and yet somehow managed to escape with only resolution issues inherent to the hardware it was working with. Similarly, Donkey Kong Country Returns from Wii to 3DS suffered mostly in framerate, but was otherwise really solid. Even the SaSASRT port to 3DS which had a framerate like ass played better than RoL. Or heck, let's go back a bit further to some game ports which turned out REALLY technically impressive considering they were being made for hardware that wasn't meant to support them, like Street Fighter Alpha 3 on GBA (Or Playstation, considering how impressive that was at the time) or Virtua Fighter 2 for Saturn or RE2 for N64 or... yeah, I can name off a lot of these, especially from the 32-bit era. Get what I mean? And even outside of ports, look at most of the Wii U games that can pull hardware Voodoo the likes of which you don't see often outside the old days of the 16-bit console wars. I'm not saying BigRedButton was expected to pull off a CryEngine 3 game on Wii U with 60FPS - far from it - but they definitely had PLENTY OF TIME to make a more polished, refined experience, engine port issues be damned. Again, we're not talking about merely a subpar game or a game with missed potential - we're talking about one of the most critically panned, IP-damaging games the Sonic IP has been tainted with, where bugged code and graphical downgrades were the LEAST among the complaints. Sega may have done a lot wrong here, but developers have managed to put out something better than "the worst game in years" under worse developer pressures before - many of the BEST video games made have similar stories of crazy internal drama.

Here's some of my big questions regarding the supposed difficulty of CryEngine 3:
1) Why was CryEngine 3 marketed as a selling point to begin with? It was like this from before the game was defined as a Sonic game. Was someone at BRB connected with Crytek? That's the best reason I could think of to stick it with through hell and back. If so, I would imagine someone at BRB had a connection to Crytek which if so should have helped with the Wii U port.
2) If they really had 1.5 years to port the game to Wii U code, and if CryEngine was that difficult to work with, then I would imagine at that time it had gone to the point where it was easier to re-code from the ground up. There was no real reason CryEngine was needed - nothing Sonic Boom did was outstanding by the standards of a PS2 3D platformer, not even the supposed "better" graphics of the reveal trailers. Thus I doubt they spent 1.5 years trying to do something that apparently is SO IMPOSSIBLE many consider it a lot more difficult than simply cobbling together something in Unreal Engine 3 or even from scratch. There was nothing significant or necessary about Cryengine 3.
3) At least some people have proposed that Sega forced them to stick with CryEngine 3, but why the hell would Sega do that with absolutely nothing to gain from it? They have no big deals or connection with Crytek, and they don't use CryEngine on any of their other works. The only real explanation would be if Sega paid a heavy sum to license CryEngine 3, which wouldn't make sense if they planned for Wii U exclusivity as far ahead as 1.5 years before launch. Sega would probably have been glad to switch to middleware better suited for Wii U.
4) Was CryEngine really suited for the kind of game BRB was working on to begin with? What kind of character-action-platformer required Crysis-level graphics in the past? Hyper-realism is not suited for wacky, cartoony antics the likes Sonic Boom was meant to have (but was mostly absent on.). Most 3D platformer fans are Fine with N64-grade polygons as long as it looks whimsical and approachable. It sounds to me like the concept in and of itself was badly thought out.

Also, while BRB may have had less employees than Ubisoft, it wasn't like Ubisoft threw 1000+ of their staff on Rayman Legends. Ubiart was a team more the size of a typical Nintendo game development team - the large numbers are for the AssCreed crowd.

As for the leaving employees, IIRC most of that happened in June 2014 and based on the testimonies it seems many of them weren't exactly informed of them being out of the company before it happened... poor Senn. :<

He has fangs and his color is grey.
Maybe we finally found the character design Kalinske claims to have rejected?