Thanks for posting the news - but that's not very enticing Sega. You couldn't have come up with something better? Anyway I guess I'm one of strange ones still holding on to the glimmer of hope that this game will turn out to be good and review quite well. Though at this point I'm probably grasping at straws.
I mean considering the only day 1 DLC we've received has been pretty much garbage (NiGHTs boss gauntlet in Lost World, Casino Night Pinball in Generations), this is par for the course really.
Frankly, I'm just surprised by the low price point of this game. It's routinely being listed for £30 to £35, and even £40 is considered relatively low for a high profile over here these days. Sonic games generally suffer fro being short, but with Forces seeming like the biggest game since Unleashed, it's a surprise.
Unless I'm mistaken, wasn't Lost World only 49.99 USD? Or was that Boom? I seem to remember several recent Sonic games coming in at $10 under the standard.
I can't wait to deck out Quack-Quack The Not-Duck™ in some sick Puyo Puyo swag. Only thing that would be cooler is some sick Girl's Garden items on fleek. Dab. fidget spinner. Yay Forces. It was possibly both, I think Wii U titles generally ran $10 cheaper than Sony and Microsoft games, but I never ended up buying a Wii U so I can't say for sure.
I definitely payed $50 for Rise of Lyric. Can't speak for Lost World, I bought the 3DS version (fuck me) and then the Steam version (unfuck self)
Lost World WiiU went for $50 at launch. Most 3rd party WiiU titles actually targeted $50, despite how high profile they might have been. Plus, it's not unheard of for a large profile platformer to target less than $60. If I'm not mistaken, Ratchet and Clank PS4 targeted $40 at launch, and that was a pretty well received game, and a lot of money went into it.
I paid $49.95 USD for a Sonic Generations pre-order on Steam. I'm expecting Forces to be the same price, but we'll see.
Difference being to the price range of Unleashed and Forces, Unleashed had entirely new content with original ideas, even if it didn't play out as well, though a lot of people enjoyed the Werehog levels. Forces on the other hand so far has a lot of re-used resources, such as enemies, villains and level design and the so called Character Creator which is just recolors and accessories but instead of taking their time, coming up with something good, Sonic Team made up the terrible excuse saying "It's easter eggs for the older fans" to cover up for their lack of creativity. Instead of re-using textures and adding sand to make a zone, make something brand new instead of revisiting places that are Green Hill but not Green Hill but Green Hill, that is why we have Generations. To be honest with you, I'd expect the price to be lower than what Unleashed was due to all of this but they are money grabbers so it won't happen.
Almost like Sega are thinking "better price this on the low-end because the game's not going to be any good". Prove me wrong Sega, prove me wrong. Still holding on to a glimmer of hope that the game will turn out good and review quite respectably. I really want this game to be good. I was looking forward to playing it. Much more excited and hyped for Mania however and that seems to echo most people's opinion on both games.
The alarm bells for Forces started ringing the moment that Classic Sonic showed up. And they've been continually blaring this entire time. The fact that Mania exists only seems to be making it harder for Forces to look good. As Generations/Colours 2, Forces is little more than a copy of the two most acclaimed 3D Sonic games to date, and yet opinions seem to be tepid at best. On the one hand, it's because the games were never that brilliant and that's only being widely recognised now because everyone was blindsided by not-awful 3D Sonic games a few years ago. They're not bad - they just don't hold up the Classics not other games on the wider market these days. But more importantly, being juxtaposed to Mania which is doing the Classic style better and more authentically, makes Forces look like trash.
I remember asking the Gamestop fella why Unleashed for 360 was 50 bucks when I picked it up, and his response was actually, "I think they're apologizing for last time."
*super late response* Probably because outside of a few faces, Generations was designed and directed by a completely different group of Sonic Team staff. Not in the sense of the rumored "Unleashed team / Storybook team" narrative either, because only a few of them designed any of the preceding Sonic games, and none of them were brought in for the following Lost World. They seem to have been a "B-team" that were exclusively formed to start work on Generations while Colors was being made. Which is a bit odd if you ask me, given how Generations was considered just as good as Colors, if not better. I wonder how Lost World would had turned out if the guys who did Generations were behind it. Compare the designer/director staff for the past four games: Black Knight: Producer/Director - Tetsu Katano Lead Game Designer - Morio Kishimoto Game Designers - Harumasa Nakajima, Shintaro Kai, Takahiro Ono, Midori Iwabuchi, Kanano Yamaguchi Colors: Director and Lead Game Designer - Morio Kishimoto Lead Planner - Harumasa Nakajima Planners - Shintaro Kai, Takeshi Yamazaki, Jyunpei Ootsu, Mitsuru Osakada, Kiyoteru Mizuhara Lead Level Designer - Takayuki Okada Level Designers - Natsuha Matsubara, Takahiro Ono, Katsuyuki Shigihara, Kanano Yamaguchi, Midori Iwabachi Generations: Director - Hiroshi Miyamoto Lead Game Designer - Yoshinobu Uba Game Designers - Daisuke Shimizu, Katsuyuki Shigihara, Utako Yoshino, Takamasa Usui, Takayuki Okada, Kanano Yamaguchi, Haruhiko Kashiwazaki Lost World: Director - Morio Kishimoto Level Designers - Natsuha Matsubara, Takayuki Okada, Kanano Yamaguchi, Rei Hata, Yuma Matsunaga, Jyunpei Ootsu, Takahiro Ono Given that Forces is being directed by Kishimoto, he and his crew probably decided to use the Boost gameplay they adapted from Colors as their gameplay template, following Lost World's polarizing reception.
Good feature from Blaze over at TSSZ. Can't link it because I think the site's still banned but I think he echoes what most of us are feeling:
^ This is literally what I am thinking about the games to date, the 3D ones Sonic Team create at least, it's like they have turned into edgy-teens them self, can't be bothered to put the effort into a game and come up with something original and creative instead of reviving old used content and plastering a different name over it and claiming its all Easter Eggs for older fans. Older fans, like most of Retro here, don't want our games full of annoying puns, having characters giving constant remarks to every moving object in game and just generally most content they have created. If they put their focus on the actual fans instead of listening to pun/meme fueled kids who want everything to be a joke and then complain about bad gameplay and short confusing plots then they'd realize they have two gameplay styles, 2D side scroll and 3D, if they kept them separate from each other instead of combining both through lack of creativity then they'd be seeing more of that lovely thing called money they like so much as there would be two teams focusing on one style each, giving them a lot more time to come up with something decent. It is not that difficult to figure out, they just cannot be blessed to design something new and original, they just prefer the quickest method of gaining profit when in actual fact with each release they are doing a lot worse. If they could all think like Christain then the games would never have gone downhill, oh wait let me thing like Sonic Team for a second... downhill? Down.. Hill... Down Hill Zone... where we re-use Green Hill content but its all steep so its totally something new and not Green Hill! It is just that dumb, how are people getting paid for being such idiots who produce rubbish content lately?
Quick question for fans of the "Boost" formula used in Sonic Forces: (Disclaimer: I'm not anti-boost formula. I mostly enjoyed the games from '08-11.) There are a good number of people saying that they were looking forward to more of this style of gameplay in Forces and that they "Don't know why SEGA abandoned it after Generations", "It had more potential to grow", etc etc.... Do these same people remember the history of development leading up to Generations? Generations was to the boost formula, what Sonic 3 was to the classic formula, in the sense that Generations had perfected what could fundamentally be done with that style of gameplay since Unleashed. This led to Takashi Iizuka and company to claim that they wouldn't make any more of that style of game after Generations, and why they bothered to search out another style in Lost World (and in early in LW development, they seemed to have a strong sense of pride in approaching a solution to Sonic's classic gameplay in 3D, from many interviews at the time). For good reason in my opinion because the Boost games had proven to not be able to carry an entire game for Sonic without heavily relying on gimmicks or alternative gameplay/2D elements. Why am I asking this and why does it matter? Sonic Forces, to my impression, does not seem like a game that has had 4 years of development time. To be frank, it seems as though this game might have still been early in development even last summer leading up to the 25th anniversary party. Sonic Team after Generations had already committed to finding a new direction for 3D Sonic games but due to the backlash from LW's mediocre reception and Boom's hit to the franchise, they may have been forced to play it relatively safe. Everything about this game just reeks of corporate groupthink. It seems plausible that Sonic Team had some other 3D prototype on the table but was forced to shelf it for the time being. We may not discover this for a few years but I'm willing to bet that Forces was not the game they originally started development on after Lost World (2013), when the next-generation Sonic game was already confirmed to be in development. So maybe after Forces release in a few months and Mania's already successful pre-release, Sonic Team will go back to the prototype stage for a new mold of 3D gameplay. Or maybe circumstances will change but still encourage SEGA to find a replacement for Sonic's 3D gameplay.
This reminded me of my old 3D Level Maps thread; Prima Games' guides back in the day included detailed 3D level drawings of every stage, so I compiled the guide images so that they could be seen as complete, documented levels. (Imageshack deleted the originals when it stopped being free, but luckily Wayback Machine grabbed them.) Looking at them this way, Sonic Adventure's stages (forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=29011&view=findpost&p=690976) definitely feel like they are less linear than Adventure 2's stages (forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=29011&view=findpost&p=694162) , which mostly look like thin winding hallways in comparison to its predecessor. EDIT: For some reason, the post permalinks aren't working.
I'm actually now quite curious how long Unleashed was in development because if its the same amount of time or less, they have seriously downgraded their attention and care since then as they managed to create Unleashed which was completely fresh with ideas and levels but not Forces? I don't believe Character Creation covers for years of progress as I doubt it was too complicated to implement into the game unless of course Sonic Team are idiots... oh wait, there are.
