Sonic Lost World (Wii U, 3DS, PC) Megathread

Oh, come on. This game was refreshing and new. No need to throw out all the good ideas they had for it. It just needs work and refining.

 

They should have refined it before release!

 

Yeah, but then that new mascot will only star in one game and never be used again, just like every other Sega mascot.

From what I read, Lost World doesn't seem to be as bad as it is average, but for the same reason Sonic Unleashed was average. It looks to be a charming game with moments of brilliance, but the bad moments end up balancing an otherwise good game into an average one. To me, there are two types of average Sonic games. The first type of average Sonic game are games that don't do much wrong, they just don't do anything ambitious enough to be anything above average. The second type of average Sonic game are games that have equal amounts of good as they do bad, so the tipping scale of quality tips in neither direction.

The truth about this franchise is there's an equal amount of good games as there are bad ones. There are just too many average Sonic games. They don't do anything to engage us, but when they do engage us, they make just enough questionable design choices to diminish an otherwise good game into an average one. We call these games bad only because Sonic should be more than average.

 

And here I am still stuck with 4.

 

Let's face it, the original 5 spoiled us beyond all reason and gave us an unrealistic expectation of what this series is. We all hope for the next Sonic 3 and Knuckles but that game came out almost 20 years ago. Isn't that kinda sad. 20 years and this series has produced nothing but average to good games since, yet the first 5 were all great (I don't feel the same about Sonic 1 as others do but for the first game in the series I respect it for being so ground breaking).

If the first 5 games didn't exist, this series would have died with Sonic 06.

 

Sonic is just running on nostalgia nowadays... We are blinded by it.

 

If such a timeline existed, Sonic Adventure, SA2, and Heroes would be Sonic The Hedgehog 1-3, Shadow would still have his self-titled spin-off, and Sonic '06 would be... *drumroll* ...Sonic The Hedgehog 4.

 

ITT: People pretend to know how game development works in a professional environment.

I love you armchair "developers."

 

Yeah, this thread's description is starting to make a little sense now.

Very much this. "Refine" is a terrible term to use here anyway. From everything I've gathered, the controls are hardly the problem, it's the hit or miss level design, and there's simply no point in touching up the "bad" levels that already weren't very fun. Iteration is key here, not polish.

So I don't imagine impending deadlines gave them much room to establish what works and what doesn't. However, the next title won't suffer as badly now that they've tried a little bit of everything with this game, and the Sonic Cycle continues.

 

The game's a step in the right direction sort of. Spindashing and parkour are very fun to master and make as great game mechanics.

It just needs more weight to it (regards to holding speed), much faster and more flow-y level design and less things that would frustrate the player so much they want to throw the controller into oblivion. It's good that Sonic is a platformer first again, but in the process they experimented so far into that concept that it almost looks like they totally sacrificed the part where you go fast.

If this is made by the 'Colors' division of Sonic Team (which the credits seem to show), maybe the 'Unleashed/Gens' division will do a better job? Colors suffered from a slower pace and blockier platforming than both of those games, so if the other team has reigns on the next big title maybe we'll see some all around improvement.

 

Oh I was comparing it to the time we were all watching Ian Flynn's charity stream and they were stuck on this level for a few hours. :p

 

I do have to say, I don't outright hate the 3DS version, dispite the complaints I have about it. Some of the stages are fun, I mostly like the ones where you can just move at your own pace...which does kinda cut out a lot of levels where you have to wait, defeat enemies to open a box or have to partake in some kind of gimmick like rolling snow/fruit around. Or on the flipside, levels where you constantly have to move forward, usually on some kinda grind rail or the limited power of a wisp causing you to rush forward incase it runs out over a pit.

Aside from some of the 2D sections just being kinda awful (camera being too close to Sonic makes it hard to know what's coming up) I do enjoy the more 3D areas where you can just climb things, running alongside walls and feeling badass for doing it all without falling off.

 

The console version has one thing over the last 3 games. It's definitely closer to the classics in the sense that it can be fun to slow down and just go at a leisurely pace, whether to explore or just dick around. Generations did not have that quality, although I still think Generations was a better game.

Sega does need to patch this game though and fix a couple of things here and there though. Not even talking about huge level changes or something, but Super Sonic's animations need finishing, they have to fix that epilepsy glitch (that has potential to be really bad), and please add an options menu that allows for options to change volume settings and lets you disable the Wii U gamepad hint icon. Seriously, listening to the deadly six is fine in the playthrough through normal levels, but I don't want to hear it while I'm reseting the level multiple times to speed run.

Gamepad support would be swell but I'm not going to be greedy on that one. In fact I'm pretty confident it'd be impossible to make the rhythm wisp work with a gamepad (even though all instances of that wisp can be skipped, hell they might as well just remove that wisp if using a gamepad)

EDIT: Just encountered a Super Sonic glitch. If you activate Super Sonic, then he gets deactivated for whatever reason (wisp, auto pilot section, run out of rings), and you activate Super Sonic again, you will no longer attract rings to you like you should.

EDIT 2: Another minor glitch. Pretty confident I know what causes it as it's happened 3 times tonight. If you land on the end act capsule on the third bounce as Super Sonic, his animations will glitch and it will result in Sonic not doing his end of act animation (he just stands there instead)

 

http://forums.sega.com/showthread.php?501979-What-should-be-kept-tweaked-removed-from-Lost-World

http://forums.sega.com/showthread.php?502379-Your-pros-and-cons-of-Sonic-Lost-World

http://forums.sega.com/showthread.php?502439-So-what-do-YOU-think-of-the-3DS-version

I'm not 1 to endorse the SEGA forums cesspool, but shouldn't we also C/P whatever feedback we have here to these feedback threads? as much as they are filled with youtube morons, they are still the official SEGA forums and if we want our feedback to count for anything I think these threads will be watched.

 

Really? Do they?

Because I always felt like were on the outskirts of the general population sometimes, I mean yeah we have certainly made a name for ourselves and we got connections but it just still feels like that if I leave an opinion here it'll never really get looked at besides the common forum goers here. but with a person like me whose been on 100s of forums and message boards in the last 10+ years you kind of get that feeling that your just leaving feedback for the community to see and not much more.

But thats good to know that when I or the rest of us leave opinions or feedback, even if its inane like Falsetto's up their, that its being seen by someone who can get the feedback back to the right people. wonder if they keep track of SSMB as well?....

 

That was Lava Mountain 2. Even then, once you figure out that holding left on 2D sections slows Sonic down some, it gets pretty simple. I wanted to show off to my friend how brutal the level was, and wound up blasting right through it, even picking up the two red rings I had missed the first time around.

 

So...there doesn't appear to be a way to rewatch the cutscenes in the Wii U version. Or am I missing something really obvious I should feel like a fucking idiot for skipping over?