Sonic Origins Collection - General Thread

Yeah. I thought maybe Sega wanted them to wait until after release to announce it, so everyone would still buy the standard edition... but it's out now, and still radio silence. Weird.

 

Probably a silly question, but did we ever get confirmation on who primarily handled Amy/Knuckles? I remember some debate on if Headcannon just handled the sprites from the wording of their Tweets. Besides a few expected glitches, the two new playable characters are handled very competently to supposedly be the work of a team that couldn't get the Drop Dash right and even after Plus didn't quite fix it, but then again the new SCD routes have drawn ire for looking like a Sonic Team Forces/Missions-esque level design/tiling oddity, not sure if Headcannon was responsible for that? I do assume all the neat smaller touches patched in like the KIS2 title card returning were Headcannon's mentioned updates and enhancements.

 

Only thing we can assume is that HC did the main work in 3K and then SEGA took that work and applied it into all the other games.

 

There is one big difference began Amy's implementation in S3K vs the other games, which may suggest that @Chimpo is right. Amy's hammer rush can't make it through loops or up steep slopes in S3K, as she'll just fall when the incline reaches 90 degrees. But in the other games, she'll automatically put her hammer away and start to run normally instead. That inconsistency makes it look like she was implemented by different people in different games.

 

I remember reading something about a newer collision system developed during work on the new 3&K because the existing one didn't play as nicely with that game's geometry. I could see that being a culprit, if it wasn't backported to the earlier entries.

 

Yes, the Headcannon Path Tracer. Seems it isn't perfect, but 3&K would not have worked in the Retro Engine without it.

https://twitter.com/Head_cannon/status/1537545702238130177

 

Rented the physical Switch version from my library (check yours, you'd be surprised) and beat the story mode in about 5 hours. Overall, it's still the games. However, being so intimately familiar with them, the stuff that felt wrong nagged me the whole way through.

S3K in particular, fresh in my mind after an AIR playthrough last month, was pretty egregious. So many strange squish incidents, transistion issues, bizarre Blue Sphere handling, and the poor quality music, really soured me on the collection. On top of the Plus content being inaccessible due to code requirements, there was also a 425MB update required. It really brings home how sloppily this was handled just to get it out for the anniversaries and to hype Superstars. Now this is the only version of the games available and will likely not receive significant updates beyond this.

A real shame that they limply struck when the iron was ice cold, eight years after we begged for 3K. We have the decompiliations and AIR, maybe 3K will also get work after decompiliation. Still, what's here was unnecessarily rushed and I don't think I'll be purchasing it anytime soon.

 

To ask another question, did we find out if the more "generous" physics in S3&K were from being built off of Mania? Or was it how the Retro Engine handles the original game's exact physics values? Maybe it's both? Also kinda confused if the crushing (if still there) is just RSDK being stricter or S3&K-specific with the new path tracer.

I kinda wish Sonic Team just let Headcannon do more with addressing the game's issues (they clearly care about minutia like Knuckles getting his KIS2 title card back) if they really weren't going to fix some of the more obvious ones themselves with a year off, like the games looking slightly blurry with no proper filter options like Mania or SCD just needing to lower the volume a bit for its cutscenes (for some small but really obvious issues). Especially after the backlash Stealth gave with how S3&K turned out and reparations thereafter (wonder how HC feels about it now?), and when it's small stuff like that image quality that the fans fixed ages ago, or still straight up crashing or at least bugging when certain cheat codes are enabled. Official quality Sega product right here. They might as well have just removed Sonic+Tails in S1 like they did a few other minor mobile features if it still can't be properly used without some trickery.

It just sucks because there was a perfect storm of oddball choices for what should've been a slam dunk of a title, that's kinda what Origins has been like. Most of all probably getting Sonic Team to mostly oversee an engine they clearly had some trouble working with, rather than Tax/Stealth, put inside the Hedgehog Engine, both of which might've caused the image problems, for instance. In addition to the reveal of their solution to the MJ problem and ripping S3&K's music, Amy having a safer moveset than desired, Senoue providing an S4-style song for a new Super theme, mandates or whatever causing SCD to mute its characters, and so on. As well as just some general rushed development/lesser polish in areas. That's not to say there isn't care put into areas of the game, on either team's side, and some complaints are maybe more nitpicky, but I saw Plus as an opportunity for the game to regain more of a reputation, a fresh start for the product, and even with RSDK people on hand (who admittedly can only do so much in their bit) and a year development time they still can't do some things right.

Don't know if it's worth asking if you can take certain scripts from the decomps and pack them to load them in Origins (LittlePlanetCD made a Tweet about that) to add things like Super Peel-Out/Insta-Shield in S1/SCD/S2? If Sega's calling it there on additional options like that for Origins, I might as well ask if a fan combination of things is possible right now. Though I'm not sure if fans made Tails partnering in SCD possible yet. Sucks that Origins still doesn't have universal, cheaty options like all games having Max Control/Tails partnering any character/Elemental Shields/Super Forms/etc. and maybe that's something RSDK would've added, but maybe Sonic Team is concerned about mandates or authenticity, or just don't want to add even more stuff they'll struggle to fix.

 

Screwing up follow-ups and ports feels like it's been Sonic's M.O. for a while now. Lost World and Forces respectively ignored and botched the boost foundation Generations had successfully continued to lay, Team Sonic Racing was a step back from All-Stars Racing Transformed with questionable replacement gimmicks (and teased a Sonic R connection that never was), the Colors port managed to be a mess... And now Origins has failed, arguably twice, at giving us the full-featured Retro ports on traditional systems.

Hopefully Frontiers and the upcoming Super Stars will be a turning point. Especially if certain other Sonic titles are ever in the cards for the ol' porting treatment.

 

Does the process of decompilation mean, at least with the S3&K remaster, that it has to run as its own thing extracted from and outside of the collection, kinda like Mania's decomp? Because that would be cool to see S3&K get some proper script mods, but it no longer being able to be part of the game collection it was made for would be a bit awkward.

 

There's been some work porting the decomp scripts and projects to Origins and even swapping the games within Origins in and out, so I don't think 3 would have to run independent of it, no.

 

It's too bad Origins isn't getting the type of updates that Frontiers is. With each Frontiers update, it feels like the developers spent a long time playing the game and making a list of all the unpolished bits to address.

But with Origins Plus, it feels like they were just trying to see the barest minimum they could get away with (even though unlike with Frontiers, they were charging $10 for the update).

Obviously, the market for Frontiers the market is bigger, so that's why it's getting all this support. But given that Sonic revenues must undoubtably be up, it feels like Sega probably could afford to give Origins the love it needs.

 

I think it comes down to two things:

1. SEGA as a business sees Sonic as a product that will continue to generate money as long as they put products out, and don't see much reason to put in the resources necessary to bring the quality up very much.
2. The people of Sonic Team (Iizuka, Kishimoto and all of the assorted programmers, artists etc) have the best of intentions, but struggle to get the right products out because they're not the best of game developers and have to contend with whatever demands SEGA gives them.

Origins coulda-shoulda-woulda been fantastic, but it in end feels like a product that's torn between being a labour of love and the result of forced labour.

 

Also for Amy, I think they were stuck either way, since it was a promotion for Superstars and it seems like that game halfassed her gameplay too. Quite possibly the worst thing to show off from that game as a first impression.

 

If I were them, I'd just let Headcannon do more tweaking of the games themselves, especially if Sonic Team's going to lose interest soon, but the weird way Origins is organised where they had to send off their work so it could be approved/implemented by Sonic Team or whatever presumably just further complicates things?

Perhaps best case scenario is that there'll be another patch or two just for fixing some of the egregious remaining aspects they see as issues rather than creative choices (particularly new ones introduced with Plus) and they'll call it there, maybe a notorious obscure crashing glitch from a specific cheat code still present. That'd be something, at least, and mods would certainly help it further, but it sucks that there's clearly people on board who care to fix small things like the Spikes in Metropolis Zone and they just weren't given more reign to fix things in the long time between updates. Either because they have to check each addition with Sega (though that sounds standard even outside of Origins) or were also busy with adding Amy, Knuckles and a weird stereo effect in the Game Gear games that you disable by setting your system audio to mono. Not that changing things in coding can't also lead to other issues because code is fickle, but even with the presumed language/coding barrier between parties making the games in Origins, I'd at least expect that the remaining game crashing bugs were taken care of.

 

I've been playing the Sonic 3 & Knuckles part, and the music doesn't sound that bad to me. How does one tell if it's muffled?