Sonic Superstars: A New 2D Sonic Game (Fall 2023)

I had no idea modeling, UV mapping, texture work, rigging, shaders and animation was lazy work. All these skill sets you need to know or have a team of people that specialize in them to make cheap and lazy models. Thank you for opening my eyes Josh.

 

Arzest supposedly didn't create the character models - they're from Sega's archive.

Whether people want to call this cutting corners or laziness is up to them, but idk, it doesn't sit well. It sems disrepectful to the original artist who wasn't expecting their work to be used in this way, and the art team of Arzest, since you're denying them from creating the most important art.

 

EVERY single character model, enemy badnik models, mech boss models etc. is from their archive? Even the brand new character they just made for this game? Come on man.

 

Its probably an intentional design choice. From what I've heard, a bunch of the previews praised the level design for being immediately readable in a way past games weren't. I'm not too fond of the lacking backgrounds either but if it means more people are able to have an easier time enjoying the game then that's a sacrifice worth making (and tbh I've had that issue with some games too).

 

I for one am holding out hope that everything is greater as the sum of its parts. I have been avoiding gameplay and spoilers ever since they bummed me out earlier back. Also, I actually enjoy the character designs. They have this wholesome 90s look, as though the CG promotional art of the 90s or Saturn-era came to life as an actual playable product.

If nothing else, we can be happy that Sega is creating this separate Classic stream, and if it succeeds, they will almost certainly improve upon it with the next entry. I know I'll be slammed for saying this, but I think those of us who are able should support this game even if it is very flawed... It's a sad reality that if we don't support this game, then Sega will likely conclude there is no appetite for it. Let's be generous even if they don't knock it out of the park in the first instance. We will foreclose on the future potential if we make "perfection" the enemy of the "good".

 

E: Trash please

 

If and when Sonic Team sticks by their initiative to keep the franchise and games consistent and unified long enough, the franchise will hopefully be in a place where whether a game breaks sales records isn't much of a concern and they get more experimental with game concepts.

In other news, Game Informer has an article on the co-op and mention something I haven't heard.

https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/2023/08/29/co-op-in-cyber-station-zone#comments

In co-op, if a player dies in a boss battle, they can't respawn for the rest of the battle. That's surprising, but I appreciate restrictions like that.

 

I think this game looks fantastic, especially after the underwhelming Sonic 4 Ep 1&2. And yeah, I know it's been literally over a decade, but I don't care this is such a step beyond what they've previously done in this regard that I'm really happy that we're seeing a 3D 2D Sonic game with this amount of care put into the characters, environments, and art style as a whole.

idk maybe im just not as jaded as much as some of you here, but I'd love to see them build on Superstars with another entry in a few years.

 

The only real issue I have with that pixel quote is, like @synchronizer stated, it's nebulous if by "pixel art" Iizuka is talking about ruling out future 2D Sonic games with a retraux aesthetic, or ruling out 2D Sonic games that primarily/entirely use 2D graphics in general. Because with the latter statement, you can have a 2D game with 3D graphics that still has a deliberately dated look. You could build a side-scrolling Sonic game that uses 3D graphics, but aesthetically all of the models and textures look like something straight out of Sonic World from Sonic Jam, or the original Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast.

If it's the former he's talking about--no big complaints there. Mania's Saturn-era retraux approach was part of what made the game special, and I'd rather keep it unique to that game instead of diluting it with more retro games that wean down the novelty of that aesthetic. That's not to say I don't want another retro-looking Sonic game, but I'd rather it take its own unique approach (like the aforementioned "early 3D" approach I mentioned above, or a pixel game that takes a completely different aesthetic approach from the MD-era games.)

In the meantime--I hope that when the time comes to do another 2D / MD Sonic game, Sega reconsiders their earlier notion of doing a 2D game with hand-drawn sprites/animation (which was discussed with Evening Star on a hypothetical Mania followup, and also considered for Superstars during early development), and decide to run with it. Whether it's having everything done in 2D or having 2D sprites interacting in 3D environments, I would love to see what they would come up with either way.

 

https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/2023/08/29/co-op-in-cyber-station-zone

Says Cyber Station is a single-act zone also. Damn.

 

That's a plus for me. Seems the transformation gimmickry won't overstay its welcome which was my biggest worry.

 

I've said this before but any time you create something at a company or studio, you create with the understanding that it will just be reused later, whether in whole or in part. It's just the nature of things because reinventing the wheel every time you go to is unsustainable and a poor use of production time, it's a luxury only really afforded to composers.
It's not like Arzest couldn't modify the Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy or Eggman models however they saw fit, if they did see fit. They had 2 years to do so.
Sumo Digital adopted the models from Sonic Team's Secret Rings / Black Knight / Mario and Sonic (both Wii and DS) models for all 3 of their racing games, and they still managed to make it work for themselves every time, including Team Sonic Racing, even for their cutscene renders. It isn't THAT big of a deal.
It's safe to say Arzest is satisfied with how everything turned out visually considering they made everything new match the aesthetics. Personally I would've added more detail to everything but I'm not them.

 

Guess the return of one-act levels (that aren't final boss levels like The Doomsday and Egg Reverie) is a signal we could be looking at a more unconventional campaign of levels, a la Sonic 2 and S&K. With Superstars reported to have 12 individual zones, that leaves a decent amount of options on the table as to how they could mix up the progression structure.

 

I think a lot of people are really miss interpreting things in this thread due to bias. I like both pixel art and the style that this game is in. I've done work in both realms. Both types of styles take an incredible amount of work.

I think what a lot of people are missing is that pixel art is more finite with what you can do with it once it is made. 3D art, however, once completed has a lot more flexibility of where it can be used/reused by being able to change things such as textures, shaders, and other esthetics.

As far as producing more with less, 3d rendering wins hands down. It's not that it is more or less difficult to do (as it's basically comparing two different crafts), it's just that one avenue has a lot more prospect of adaptive reuse than the other. In a nutshell....it's corporates safest cash cow

 

someday, I would also love to have a Sonic game that (visually) looks like Hollow Knight.

 

In IGN's preview (I think), there is an act in Pinball Carnival called "Act (Fruit)" which has you in a bounce house so on top of one-act zones and character-unique acts, there seem to be bonus acts.

 

Those seen to be a Donkey Kong Contry-like bonus stages, and honestly? I'm here for it.

 

Comments like those are coming from pure stubborn ignorance. Calling 3D work as the result of lazyness just demonstrates they hold no respect for any art field. I WISH I could be lazy when doing UV mapping. I WISH I could be lazy when it came to rigging a model to a skeleton. There are people that specialize on just those specific spots because how involved those tasks, especially on higher fidelity models. Suddenly you need a team of people to do one character? How is that lazy or cheaper? It isn't, but in the long run it can be for the reasons you stated. You can repurpose those assets elsewhere a lot easier than you can with sprites.

I know we all love sprites since a majority of us either grew up on it or just love the aesthetics of retro games. It's not cheap, it's not easy, and the work almost always goes underappreciated by the masses. No amount of marketing will escape the modern gamer's disinterested in pixel art. SNK spent a fortune on KOF 12 to give it some beautiful sprites and that game suffered for it with so many cut moves from returning characters. They recycled them for KOF 13 but the same issues still existed. By the time it came around to KOF 14, they abandoned them and went full 3D. It just wasn't economically viable. If you're a big fan of Clark, you know you were hurting during that era because they couldn't bother to animate his other moves.

You'll hear everyone on Twitter tell you those two games were great because they were so beautiful but you damn well know none of those people actually played the games. And then you go over to your friend's house and find out how they play their old games.



Would another pixel art Sonic game be cool? Sure. But I don't blame them for not choosing to go down that route again.

 

Oh! Good to know that's one of the bonus acts, I thought that was like an autoscroll section at the start of the act, it kinda made me nervous lol.

I think we talked about this like... 80 pages ago, right? This idea of unlocking additional bonus acts? That's one of my favorite things in a video game, I love being rewarded with more content just for playing the game and trying to collect everything. I'm really glad they're actually going down that route after all, especially since we're already getting the character-specific bonus acts.

If there are 12 zones with 2 acts each (except Sky Temple), each zone has one additional fruit act, and there is at least one character-specific bonus act for each character, then that gives us a total of potentially 39 acts.