Playing Sonic CD Felt Spiteful

I mean, my issue with calling the Futures "useless" is kind of what I outlined in the first post, if you do go into Sonic CD already knowing how everything works and trying to do an all-roboticizer run then yeah, they don't serve a purpose, or their existence might even be an annoying hurdle. But the existence of the roboticizers and what they do is a big part of the mystery of the game and the existence of the Futures is a big part of it. Going to the Past and destroying each of the roboticizers isn't even something the game rewards you over just getting the Time Stones, it's there for the sake of building this sense of mystery and wonder about what the possibility space of the game is and what you can do in it. The level design tricking you into hurling you into the Future is a part of it, they want first-time players to accidentally warp there. I think that's pretty cool, and again, yes, I would've liked if the Futures had something *more* to them to get me to want to poke at and play with them more, but I think what's there isn't *bad* and I think trying to introduce more function to them runs the risk of becoming convoluted - imagine if instead of just trying to find the roboticizer location and going to the Past you had to get a key from the Future first that was *also* hidden somewhere else. I feel like that'd be pretty annoying to do.

I also hate the framing of "gameplay" because what the hell does that word even mean. I'm playing the game, I want to go to the Future, I do it. Does it give me a reward for it? Does it interact with other discrete mechanics? No, but should everything within a game do so? You could argue that it's a big waste of resources to make huge levels that most players won't want to bother with. I think it's a part of the game's unique appeal and sense of wonder. This is why I like Trip World for the Game Boy - play it. You might come out of it with "this game is weirdly easy and barren and nothing I do in these levels is of any consequence" or "holy shit there's so much to try out here and it's making my imagination go wild"

 

The futures aren't useless! Every form of a zone has slightly different structure from each other and in many cases have slightly easier challenges from the other time zones! Enemies that are in the present and not the past tend to be broken down and less functional in the future! In the Wacky Workbench good future the coils don't turn on at all!

 

Respondung to your entire post but just quoting some parts in particular...

Clarity isn't my strong point, so bear with me if if I don't know how to get my point across. At best, the futures are an obstacle that players quickly learn they never have to engage with (boss acts not withstanding). The futures are not an obstacle that players need to deal with or plan around. They're just something that's so inconsequential to the gameplay outcome that they might as well not even exist. Whenever I do go back to CD, I completely ignore the futures because they add nothing that I can't get elsewhere from the game regardless of what kind of run I'm doing. If you enjoy travelling there, power to you. But it's probably not for the gameplay. The gameplay doesn't change or give you a new objective like when going to past. Sounds like you're going there because you find yourself immersed in the world, the atmosphere and mythos of CD. Not my jam personally, but I can respect it.

That's a fallacious argument though. You've taken the time travel structure of CD that I said I dislike, suggested an almost objectively worse alternative version and then said "well at least it's better than the alternative". Would anyone be in favour having to go back and forth within a single level so much? Those are not the only two options and it's not really fair to suggest that that's the case. It's not an "either/or" situation.

CD already offers two ways to make good futures and get the good ending. You can either travel to the past and destroy the teleporters, or you can beat the special stages. The futures could have offered yet another way accomplish that (the exact objective isn't important right now), perhaps then giving players a choice about how they proceed. They could go to the post for a few zones and go to the future for a few zones, all the while beating the time zone objecting and thus making good futures. To be honest, I'm not convinced that time travel in vein of CD is an ideal mechanic for a Sonic game. But without changing much, that's how I'd suggest improving it.

Ngl, these differences are miniscule to the nth degree.

 

Adding yet another way to make good futures in the future would completely nullify the point of visiting the Past since Future signposts are so much more abundant, and chasing a single teleporter in each and every single level is already a pretty specific task. Balancing two objective structures in a single level map already seems like a tall order -- let alone three. And to what purpose?

Maybe you'll go to the future and will end up finishing the stage without a good future. Then you'll go on to beat the game and find out there's some specific thing to get a better ending. How is that in any way disruptive, or misleading? No one thinks a shmup is betraying you by giving you a Normal Ending if you use Continues even if there's no way to know it before you do get a Normal Ending. Seems like a strange gripe to have.

 

Maybe just make the Special Stage ring only appear if you finish an act in the future? Just spitballing here

 

Don't you dare ruin my preferred way, by a LONG chalk, of getting the good ending! :P

 

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm gunning for here. Nothing elaborate, and just repurposing what the game already has.

 

See but this right here is what I mean - you don't know of *any* objective when you first play the game other than going rightwards and how that's the way to finish a level. It does mean the Futures feel "function-less" when you do know all about how the game works, but the idea is that you *don't* when you first play the game, and the Futures exist in playing in that space. Even the Past "having" an objective is a secret that's not spelled out in any way, and for the Past to even have an objective, you need the presence of the Future to clue you in. I like this lack of "neat-ness" to the design because it keeps the robot transporters (and other stuff like the Metal Sonic holograms!) as weird presences for you, the player, to make sense yourself, the robot transporter -> Good Future "objective" being a strange secret rather than an actual real goal of the game.

If you want to introduce function to the Futures, letting you do a Good Future in a Bad Future I don't think is a good idea, because, again, the function of the Bad Future is to give you the idea that you can do something to change it in the other timezones. Being able to change it in the Bad Future itself is not very "time-travel-y". If I were to give them more function, I would try to figure out more ways to interact with the different timezones via time travel, but again, these would just be "neat things you can do" rather than an objective or something too useful. Here's a few ideas I considered in case Sonic CD gets a "sequel" or a "remake":

- Like I previously said, removing all traps from the Good Future and making it completely safe, making it an "easy way" to finish a level with a bunch of Rings. Wacky Workbench is the only level that sort-of does this and I believe it only does so in the re-releases, not in the original game.

- A level could maybe have a "ring bank" like Sonic Adventure's Casinopolis, and going to a timezone forward to the one that you're in lets you cash out 10% more Rings than the amount currently deposited there. If a "ring bank" exists in the Past, you could game the hell out of this and get a truly insane amount of Rings by depositing a bunch in the Past, then going all the way to the Bad Future, cashing out, then going all the way back to the Past again, perform a Good Future, go to the Future again, cash out in the new Future, then going back to the Present to cash out in the Present. This is convoluted as hell but also would be pretty funny to figure out and pull off.

- Item boxes not taken in the Present get "upgraded" in the Future, regardless of whether it's a Bad or a Good Future. Meaning that it's both better to go to the Future first and nab things from there, and that maybe certain items could only be "gotten" in the Future (Elemental Shields could only be obtained in the Future, for instance, and upgraded Ring boxes would be worth double in the Future). This could also help design the Bad Future as a high-risk high-reward version of the level: Make them be very clearly harder than the other timezones, but you can obtain a lot of Rings and very good items from it.

- To aid in the design of the previous point, Special Stages could work like in Knuckles Chaotix in the sense that the amount of Rings you finish a level with also carries over to the Special Stage as a resource, giving players incentive to try to collect much more than 50 Rings and thus play around with the timezones more, or risk playing the difficult Bad Future for its much higher rewards.

- Futures could have special switches that open up areas in the 3rd Act (since it also takes place in the Future) that gives you items that can be very useful for the boss

But again, I feel like most of these ideas are sort of unnecessary and rather than make the game "better", it just tries to give function to the Futures for the sake of giving them something. The strength of Sonic CD's time travel really is on creating a sense of mystery within the game itself so you can poke at it and have curious players figure out about the robot transporters by themselves. Now I know about all the robot transporters and so it is "useless", but it really was a wonderful experience to figure all these bits out by myself, and feel my curiosity rewarded for it. And nowadays I'll still just go to the Future and explore the Bad Future levels just to find out bits of level design I wasn't familiar with before. There are some strange and unique level gimmicks that straight up only show up in *one spot* of *one level* in the Future, and it feels awesome to still find out new things about Sonic CD even after having "figured it out". It feels like the development team having fun with the immense storage space of CD-based media and cramming the game full of things to find out, while still making the game have an arcade-like pace and be easily clearable in 30 minutes.

 

Classic CD Tweaks has that as a setting. If you go into the past and destroy the robot teleporter, then go into the good future, there'll a be a big ring waiting for you at the end of the Zone, whether you have 50 rings or not. Another reason why I like that mod so much.

The game already does this, in the good future there are no badniks, only the stage hazards themselves remain. Enemies still count as obstacles, and the good future removes a lot of them, making it way easier to get through the stage, not only that it's easier to get Time Stones in the good future because of the removal of the badniks. That's really helpful in Zone 1 and 2, especially if you do a robot transporter + Time Stones run like I like doing.

 

I know, but this is why I specified with "all" traps - the fact that the Good Future keeps the traps from the Bad Future means it can make players feel betrayed when they go there and think it'll be a cakewalk, only to get gotten by a devious trap, and it means the Good Future doesn't feel that much easier, or outright deceptive, the traps are usually more dangerous than the enemies since most of them are broken down anyway in the Bad Future.

 

Personally, while I do have fun with Sonic CD, I also feel like in some respects, it can be messy. The fact that most all levels have some sort of wide-open area with little in the way of geometry, the sloppy and unoptimized state of the code, and things like introducing bottomless pits in the last level (this screwed me over so much initially). I'll say that the idea that looking at the bad future, thinking "maybe I should fix that", and warping twice to go to the past was not on my mind the first time I played (it was the 2011 version); that's three warps in a game that often has you warp when you don't want to and not warp when you do want to. And that's assuming you go to the route that has the transporter in the past or present, have the patience to backtrack if you missed it, figure out stuff like Wacky Workbench 1's transporter location (which to me is as obtuse as the accursed Barrel of Doom), and find that to be a better use of your time than the Special Stages (which frankly can be frustrating to get a hold of).

This so much. Doubly so when the bouncing floors launch you into active electrical wiring.

No, it does it in the original.

 

The idea is not that you're going to do that in a single playthrough, the idea is that you're probably going to play this like a regular Sonic game, going to keep noticing that the Future is always screwed, probably get a Bad Ending, and then on subsequent playthroughs you'll start to connect things and want to poke at different things in these levels ("what do the different timezones do? I don't have to time travel to beat the game, so is there something else to it?", "there's a weird broken down thing in the Present, what does it look like in the Past?", "are there ways I can do things in one timezone and affect the next one?", etc). The idea that you can and should do everything in one playthrough, is, again, not really how a lot of old games are designed, and this is why on the first post I made in the thread I specified that going into the game already knowing everything and trying to get your very first clear of the game by destroying all the robot transporters (which isn't even the most straightforward way to get a Good Ending and something I consider more of a secret rather than the main goal of the game) is a somewhat strange way to play that only makes sense that someone would do it that way today, and not at the time the game was made and how the game itself is presented.

 

Aren’t all the ememies destroyed in the good future? You can debate how useful that is, but it means you can explore the levels for fun more.

 

I was about to bring up that exact point; that there are literally no badniks in Good Futures, making them the optimal choice of the four available timelines if you want a bunch of those special-stage entry rings.

 

In my experience you'll visit them so rarely that you will never see their unique traps coming, and will lose your rings regardless. So you need to adjust the muscle memory from so many times in the present and in the past, and it isn't really that simple.

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I'll try to entertain the idea of a 2025 Sonic CD that people who don't like Sonic CD's progression would like: it's a game that has a built-in level select feature (like a map or something, with a toggable future version) that lets you replay stages to your heart's content and allows you to go back to an earlier stage to destroy its transporter whenever you want. Then, you can only go to the Special Stage by finishing a stage's Good Future holding 50 rings or more. By making a good future in all zones, you get a Good Ending; by getting all good futures and all time stones, you get the Best Ending. Metal Sonic transporters (which serve this purpose) don't exist, or are purely decorative.

(A level editor lets you make new levels and their time zones by swapping palettes and adding or removing stuff, and add them online as side missions for other players)

So. That seems more fitting to modern game design theory to me.

 

I mean, I love Sonic CD as-is but what I'd really want from the game is an 'arcade' mode that just plays in a linear fashion where you select a timezone and play the whole game (minus boss acts, which are their usual selves) like that.

Mainly because that would enable me to have a Bad Future speedrun and actually rock out to the best tunes in the game.

 

The bad future tracks tracks in the Japanese soundtrack are just wild and unhinged. Absolutely fucking brilliant. I would kill for music as ridiculous as Palmtree Panic bad future again. They perfectly capture the feeling of the present and past tracks, now under the chaotic and corrupted rule of Eggman. Simply can't fault the output.

 

On that we can agree 100%. Literally my favourite videogame OST ever, primarily on the energy those post-apocalyptic rave tunes give me. Ugh, so good. <3

 

I think it would make sense if you could warp from the past to the good/bad future without the intermediate present, or if hitting the generator somehow warped you to the good future automatically.

 

Sorry, I'm quite late to the conversation. I feel as if you have to look at CD through a different lense than the rest of the classic sonic games. I once heard online someone describe the relation between CD and 2 as "2 looked to cut out what made Sonic 1 bad and focus on the good, CD looked to take what was bad from 1 and try to fix it"

Sonic 1 had plenty of levels that were bit more dragged on, slow to play through, and had many small areas to explore, which is why the common favorites from that game are the levels that are faster by design, I.E. GHZ or SLZ.

This is why CD's level design is a lot thicker and dense as to 1 and especially 2 and why to get the good ending (one of) the ways to do so is to break all the robot transporters, and as a bonus, find and destroy all the metal sonic projectors.