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Sonic Mania (Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC...Netflix?)

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by TimmiT, Jul 23, 2016.

  1. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Didn't they do that already in Sonic Heroes and Rush Adventure (and maybe Colors)? Never again, please.
     
  2. SpaceyBat

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    Mm, yeah, there are several reasons traditional Sonic games aren't more combat-focused. Fighting badniks willingly requires you to slow down, they don't offer anything reward-wise other than points, and since Sonic and friends' only real form of attack is to jump into things, it isn't particularly fun unless you have a huge boss-like target to aim at. That's generally the reason why badniks are little more than cannon fodder to add a bit more activity to the stage. If Sonic had a variety of agile fighting moves he could perform, then there would be more of a reason to include complex enemies to give the player a chance to use them creatively.

    As it stands, boss battles are the best place to ramp up the combat depth since they halt the player's progress anyway until they're destroyed. Even then it can be tricky to get right since Classic Sonic moves like a bowling ball at low speeds.
     
  3. Beltway

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    I don't think Deef was referring to combat or having multiple HP in terms of making enemies stronger in his post. Even so, I'd say that's not inherently bad, it's just that those games (referring to Heroes and Rush series, I don't recall Colors doing this) handled it terribly. I don't think anyone's calling for sections where the game grinds to a halt and you have to fight badniks with 9+ HP. (I'd say something akin the Snowy badnik from Sonic 4: Epi. II would be more ideal way of going with this.)

    Deef's comments seem to be referring more towards "puzzle enemies" that take a bit more intuition to defeat them, specifically in this case by being integrated into the level design itself.
     
  4. Chimera

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    Ah yes, combat in sonic games. One of the great taboos of the series it seems, next to multiple characters, plot, and, well, voice acting.

    Honestly I think combat falls under one of the many things in this series people mever want revisited SOLELY because the way it was done when attempted was just bad. . Sadly vets of the series often confuse bad solutions to problems with inherently bad ideas. Sometimes they do overlap, but honestly I think combat could work great in a high speed action game because it HAS worked in a high speed action game before.

    Notice how I didn't say "in a sonic game." At its core, all this series is is a quick romp through a stage. Outside of that, I see no reason why combat in the likes of DMC or Bayonetta, but maybe scaled down a bit, wouldnt work. Just had to not interfere with the pace of the action.

    Please don't confuse bad combat with combat being inherenty incompatable :p
     
  5. The current Mania stuff (demo/art/soundtrack) screams confidence, so from everything we've seen so far I get the feeling they know it's going to be good and aren't really worried about it.
     
  6. trakker

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    Behind the scenes.
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wS4I7iKhI4[/youtube]
     
  7. Jason

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    I truly cannot tell if the proposal was real or not.
     
  8. Blue Blood

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    Because it wasn't weird enough already.
     
  9. JaredAFX

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    1:35 "Yes, I'm happy Aaron has wifed up."

    These subtitles are the greatest things I think I've ever read.
     
  10. Lilly

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    This commercial is the gift that keeps on giving! Those subtitles got me too.

    "Aaron Webber Husbando™ still sold separately. Some assembly required."

    They have some great running gags in the captions!
     
  11. Yuzu

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    I've lurked this thread a few times, but I would just love to point out that I am super hyped for Sonic Mania.

    From what I've seen so far, this game will have no issues succeeding my expectations.
     
  12. Deef

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    Thanks Yeow, yeah it looks like I didn't express myself clearly.

    I didn't mean that individual enemies were weak, I meant that the use of enemies is something Sonic games have always been weak at. I wasn't thinking about combat at all.

    The overall application of badniks has always been really shallow. It'd be nice to see something like Sonic Mania 2 change that. I don't want to sound pretentious here and just champion "so much potential" like some pseudo Sonic-design intellect, but it has always stuck out to me. I'm not just saying it would be cool if they did more, I'm saying it's kind of obvious, and ugly, that they don't. It's noticeable.

    Haven't we all noticed that there isn't a single place in Sonic 3 & Knuckles where the fire shield means access, not just protection? Not a single place where the double jump means you can reach something you couldn't reach before (and hey if I'm wrong here, you know it wasn't deliberate design).

    It's noticeable like that, except badniks are way more integrated and common. When it comes to affecting motion, enemies are more versatile than any other gimmick. You get dynamic response height that controls in a number of different ways, depending on how the hit occurred. They can move around, can be placed anywhere without needing background content, they can react, and can do absolutely anything the designer wants motion-wise. Yet how many places do we see any of this being applied? Zero. In these games that evolved into wonderfully giant, complex levels that still manage to be playgrounds, where it's all about junctions and flow, how often are badniks involved with access or paths or secrets? Never.

    I want to discover the secret 2 screens to my right that a badnik 3 screens below me is the key to, just from one bounce. Or escort badniks some distance to reach something new in a way that isn't just an unintended glitch. Or puzzle over how to get Sonic across a ceiling some badniks are clinging too because rolling will cost too much speed. Or recognise that once I water-run, the aggressed badniks will form a wave of themselves, which becomes a staircase to that place above me earlier. Imagine the player that didn't realise for a week that the "huge knockback when underwater" badnik is actually the key to accessing the upper path. If these kinds of things happened, players would start looking around the screen more when they encounter enemies. "What do you mean to me? What are you hiding?" And if the answer to that is "Nothing" 90% of the time, that's a cool 10%.

    The bad part is, the one time we saw badniks actually meaning something to the level's design, it was with the freaking homing attack. We can all acknowledge that it would be cooler to bridge those chains without the homing attack, and so we dump crap on a homing chain in Sonic 4 for not letting us play it "properly", without noticing there aren't any such chains or tricks or connections in the entirety of the classic series for us to play properly either. It seems that the entire absence is less noticeable than one device's (the homing chain) brainless implementation.

    The absolute furthest thought we ever see going into their application is placement. Blastoids are placed well, Skorps are placed well, Spikeys, etc. That's all fine, no complaints, but that is literally the height of badnik usage design. Every classic badnik matters for about 200 pixels and that's it.



    (Yes I do also think many individual badnik designs are also pretty unexciting, but that's completely fine; it's the stuff above that matters more imo. I'm in agreement with ICEknight and Strife, in that extending badnik fights isn't a good thing.)
     
  13. Flygon

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    Fire Shield doesn't unlock access to certain areas. But it makes certain areas a hell of a lot easier. Rendering you fireproof... ever notice how Sonic 3 and Knuckles has a lot more Fire based obstacles than the previous game? And this isn't getting into Lava Reef Zone!

    That, and the "Sideways Fire Attack" allows you to punch through a few Spindashable obstacles too.
     
  14. Sean Evans

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    See, I've always felt the enemies were exceptionally weak aspects of the series as well, but take into account that a lot of people's major complaints with the series is generally that they're always poorly placed. The challenge of the enemies in Sonic games is about being able to properly time your movements to avoid them, or take them out and keep going without slowing down. They're there to keep you attentive and on your toes, rather than legitimately challenge you, which given how a lot of people play Sonic (hold right and jump occasionally), they became a much greater threat than they seem. The loose placement of the badniks also gives the player a wider margin for messing around with them. One of the draws of Sonic is that by mastering it's mechanics, the game opens up tremendously, and things that seemed previously inaccessible become child's play. A badnik placed in a seemingly harmless spot could be just what you need to get up to that platform you could never reach, which might net you some rewards. Having all of that become a deliberate part of the gameplay would definitely encourage players to improve more, but it would also take away from the thrill of experimenting with the environment, and being rewarded for it. Approaching design for Sonic in the same way as Mario is always going to be a bit of a bad idea to me. In Mario, every aspect of the level serves a very distinct singular purpose, and it all relates to the goal of using that thing correctly. You do something in Mario not because you can, but because you need to in order to progress. That's pretty much what Sonic was always trying to avoid. I will say that I like some of those ideas though, badniks placed in spots other than the floors and the air. On walls that Sonic can actually maneuver along. Or in patterns that take advantage of the momentum Sonic gains when hitting them. It would be a great way to help establish Sonic's unique qualities even further.
     
  15. Deef

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    I had forgotten that bad placement was a thing too.

    I have to break up your solid brick of text...

    I don't think the blurb I wrote above has much effect on this either way, but I agree with it all the same.

    Pretty much. The big point here is that motion connected to badniks is just as big a part of the game's mechanics as anything else, yet in the actual games it is exploited zero times.

    Yep, I completely agree. Except I'd replace "would" with "could". Shields are the perfect example too; would it necessarily be a good thing for "lightning shield required" paths to exist? Quite possibly not. But also quite possibly yes. I have to admit it would be easier for a designer to get it wrong than to get it right. With shields, it's very easy to imagine shield-exclusive paths just being plain stupid.

    However, I don't think that means the concept of connecting badniks to access play is automatically a negative. Like I said, for me personally, I notice its absence to the point where it just feels ugly. Badniks barely seem to know the world they live in. I notice the absence of access play with shields too, but it's not so bad, or necessarily bad at all (as just mentioned). But badniks... to me they've always felt like these bouncy playful versatile things that the designers just completely overlook.

    I should acknowledge then that restricting paths with badniks isn't what I'm asking to see. Maybe that would be good, but maybe not. It's just the playfulness I feel is lacking.

    Oh. Yep. Exactly.
     
  16. DigitalDuck

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    Badniks were also used within level design (albeit rarely) in Sonic Generations. What immediately comes to mind is the first Buzz Bomber in Green Hill Classic allowing you to reach an upper path that's otherwise inaccessible, by giving you extra height.

    I think things like that have a good effect on level design. There are areas in Sonic 3 & Knuckles where you can use badniks to access paths/take shortcuts, but none of them seem to be intended (although it remains fun to do regardless).
     
  17. Beltway

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    For me, I think shield-exclusive paths could work, and it's actually a notion I'd like to see done, but I do feel it would have to be a really well-thought out implementation. As in, it would have to be designed in a manner that the player would only realize on a subconscious level and not clash with the level structure/setting. The most immediate ideas, like a platform visibly placed out of normal jumping reach or the aforementioned homing attacks chains would be too obvious. Areas where the player is just exploring on their own terms of even simply mucking around would be a far better approach; and would act as a reward to try and explore/fool around/experiment with the game mechanics more without resorting to spoon-feeding.

    A possible example with the Lightning Shield would be in Death Egg. Act 2 in particular had a load of electric generators, namely as hazards for the bottomless pit areas when you steadied yourself on the flying conveyor belts. Anyone who decided to take a stroll on them with the Lightning Shield would find a life placed out of sight or another hidden room with a Special Stage ring for their troubles.

    A more dramatic example would be the Fire Shield in, say, Lava Reef. Someone for fun decided to grab a Fire Shield and jump around the lava areas, thumbing their nose at it due to their added protection. They run away from the main path, and then find at the far end of the pit an open geyser. Jumping into said geyser reveals its an opening to the several interconnected pipes of lava that you see decorating the zone, which the player then travels through to rooms hidden above and below the main paths, each of them connected by the tubes (think Chemical Plant's tubes). The result is the geyser revealing another route, which was literally hidden in plain sight.

    A third example, which goes for "pushing-spikes-in-Flying-Battery" levels of subtlety: Someone gets a Bubble Shield in Sandopolis, and just for the heck of it lets themselves deliberately sink into one of the various quicksand pits...only to find that instead of dying, they fall down to an entirely new act of Sandopolis, which is set underground and has freely flowing sand everywhere. Maybe top it off by adding a specially-marked goalpost at the end of the act, and have the player transition to an entirely new zone. (This is actually directly inspired by a World 2-2 level from NSMBW; which had a secret room where the second Star Coin was located. I drove myself nuts trying to find out where that second Star Coin was; and one day I let myself deliberately let Mario sink into the single quicksand pit before the checkpoint for kicks. Needless to say, I was kinda thrown in for a loop when the camera panned down with Mario to the bottom of the screen --rather than staying positioned at the top-- and the level transition effect happened lol.)
     
  18. Deef

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    Yeah, that's right on the money imo. All of that stuff sounds neat. An idea I've also liked with the fire shield is discovering that you can run up a lavafall.

    So yeah, if it can be done with shields without appearing obvious/game-changing/patronising, badniks could surely be used in the same way. The water shield suggests a way to combine both also, for Sonic, what with the massive bounces it can create underwater. It would be easy to have a vertical chain of only a few badniks that is many screens high; so tall the player would barely notice, and too high for flying. You could layer several horizontal paths on top of each other that don't otherwise connect for ages, with this hidden chain allowing the player to bounce up through all of them to perhaps another secret route.
     
  19. While I like the brainstorming, I kinda feel like it's a bit too design heavy for a multi-route Sonic game (at least in my eyes.) A lot of the times when I replay the old Sonic games I like that each route is fairly easy to access, I don't tend to mind the underutilization of badniks as they've always been fodder and I think they work well like that (personally.)

    One of the appealing things of the various routes in Sonic 2 and so forth was that they were distinct and you could pick and choose easily without doing enemy chain bouncing or anything elaborate, and I'd kinda like it to stay that way to be honest, I imagine it would feel very natural to play and give every playthrough a similar flow. If all of those above methods, as clever as they were, were employed, I'd probably just end up playing on the solitary route that didn't require a specific shield or whatnot (I like to do no-shield challenge runs, this would be a bit more of a thing if insta-shield was a mechanic cause tbh outside of Lava Reef and Hydropolis there was no point in S3&K where I wanted a shield as Sonic and it wasn't cause of the level design, it was cause insta-shield was deliciously broken). I don't know how to word it adequetely, I suppose it's just a matter of clashing tastes but I like the current design schemata for multiple routes in Sonic when they're based on how fast you're going and/or how well you can stay at the high point or low point of the level. Just feels....good.
     
  20. Retroman

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    "This is truly Aaron Webber as you imagined it" -Ken Balough (Just joking Ken :P)