Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out on the 12th

Sure. That's not the point though, because we are the fans and we can discuss things like this because it's potentially interesting to us. And just because we do or don't like something, doesn't mean that it's a big deal in perspective. I know what you didn't outright say that, but it's the vibe that these discussions often seem to have.

I could also complain about the colour of the river water in Kingdom Valley being an oddly bright blue, which doesn't suit the aesthetic of the level, isn't the colour that the water would realistically appear to be and nor does it match the way that it looked in '06. Stuck out to me immediately and I don't like it. In the grand scheme it really doesn't mean shit, but it's one of those thoughts that I had whilst digesting footage of the game regardless.

Some people just don't give a crap about level theme reuse and physics, be they hardcore fans or casual players. They care so little about those kinds of things that they don't even notice them in the first place. It takes all sorts.

 

Always weird when you bring up a point to discuss specifically within our circle, and the reply you get is "well, little Timmy isn't gonna care so whatever".

 

Look at Frontiers instead:

 

Everyone else complaining about asset reuse:

Me, who didn't notice and just think the boss looks shit to play:

(insert your own meme pictures)

 

The blatant reuse of assets is more egregious now when they are charging around £60. When Forces came out for a cheaper value price it was more understandable. But this game being so expensive and reusing assets...it is just a bit cheap.

 

Plenty of games reuse assets, I don’t think that’s a problem in the slightest. Sonic Team could’ve just done a better job in this specific instance. As somebody else said, grabbing assets from TSR’s Thunder Deck would’ve been a good place to start. We can also see they’ve already got some Egg Fleet ships modelled, so why not strew some of those around the area? I think what’s already there is evocative of the Egg Fleet so it’s not an awful start, but they could’ve done more to obfuscate that it’s Forces Chemical Plant.

 

It's all about context. If you can find a way to reuse assets that isn't just blatantly the thing we already played, more power to you. I love Fromsoft's action RPGs and they've used the same rat model and AI behavior for like fifteen years (I'm pretty sure the Elden Ring one is still just the DS1 rat with a fur shader). I only recently played everyone's favorite, Fallout New Vegas, and most of that game is Fallout 3 stuff rearranged to be, y'know, interesting.

The thing about asset reuse from Generations to Forces to Frontiers is not just that it happened, it's that we literally are looking at Green Hill, Chemical Plant and Sky Sanctuary over and over again. Some of the environment pieces of the islands in Frontiers use assets from Forces (the floors from Security Hall in particular), but people pointed that out one time and then left it there because it's not being shoved in our faces. This is as much a creative decision as it is cost-cutting. If you make smart use of what you have, you can do a lot with surprisingly little, but they intentionally chose to recreate locations. If Frontiers had shaved off some of the actual iconography, color scheme and general recognizability of its reused stuff for cyberspace, I don't think nearly as many people would be complaining.

There's a mod called original cyberspace themes that tries to do exactly this, giving every level its own aesthetic. And while this is obviously amateur and you can tell what they were before (and some of them just don't look all that hot), the point stands that something like this on a professional level would not have taken an absurd amount of time or money to implement if they wanted to from the start, and it was a case of Sonic Team deciding that aping previous design was what they wanted.

Like Blue Blood said, just adding the ship models they already have floating in the background might have been enough. It's all about making smart use of what you have.

 

Since TSR and the other games were contracted to outside studios, I would assume Sonic Team just doesn't have those assets in particular on hand because they would have no reason to have them. Maaaybe SEGA Hardlight has them since Sonic Racing is technically the mobile version of the game, but otherwise, they're one way.

 

I don't get the issue myself more so when SEGA's own Yakuza series is far more guilty of reusing assets that also comes out more frequently and at full asking price.
It's been years since we had this style of Sonic game

 

Even after a extensive comparasions, I still think it looks organic enough. I'd understand the complaints if it were an actual stage, but as a boss battle scenario, I really think it works. It's not that distractive, and it's coming from someone who has hyperfixation on the series. I'm sure that re-using these assets was made to save some time in the development of the game, this is common thing even for AAA games that way more expansive than this one.

So I dunno, to me, the execution of the use of the assets looks fine so far.

 

I think it looking cheap is a bigger problem than the idea of reusing assets, its just that reusing assets can and has contributed heavily to that feeling in newer Sonic games despite the overall price bump from Forces. It's not a good look even if it makes the most logistical sense. Logistically it would be good to reuse assets as much as possible but you gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere.

It's funny, because the original battle takes place in a stormy skybox that would be easy enough to make look good without necessitating much asset reuse. They might have had an easier time if they had just centered this boss fight around the wing Doom power instead of the water but it's not like I know what decisions lead them here behind the scenes. Maybe they just really wanted the surfing boss fight and Metal Sonic was the best candidate.

 

It's so weird when Sonic is held to standards other, more well-received games are not held to, at least not strictly. Especially when a lot of the same people will say that Sonic rarely ever had the kind of games to deserve that standard in the first place.

Sonic has never been good, but it should also do more and do better than AAA games that get 90+ on Metacritic at the bare minimum.

Yakuza Pirates in Hawaii will be $60 and reuse assets as far back as Yakuza 6 and no Yakuza fan has a problem.

Sonic x Shadow Generations will be $50 (how is $50 expensive, btw guys?), already coming with the expectation that the actual new game wont have as much content as a full game, but one level recontexualizes old assets for a new setting and that's "cheap".

This game of all games I would expect to reuse assets since its already premised as a game going back to old levels.

 

Why do you guys keep saying "I don't understand this criticism" when people are explaining it right in the middle of your screen, right between your posts? Other games reusing assets get better receptions because they do a better job of either hiding or justifying their asset reuse. Is that really so hard to understand?

 

How are you reading all of the posts in this discussion and not understanding that it's not merely the basic premise of reusing assets? It's about how those assets are reused.

Like holy shit this has been explained repeatedly on this very page.

Also as @DigitalDuck said, the Metal Overlord fight doesn't look like it's going to be particularly good anyway.

 

The recent video actually warmed me up to the fight to some extent. It still looks a tad boring, but the visuals have been turned up and you get a lot more options and control than it initially looked. I like how you have to whittle down his HP using projectiles, and shortcuts exist to get close and deal heavy damage.

The Biolizard fight still looks more engaging in my opinion, as it incorporates Shadow's base moveset and is a real platforming boss instead of a trip down a waterslide. And the very obvious recolored assets from Chemical Plant is... disconcerting, but meh. You gotta do it you gotta do it. I do wish they'd throw some battleships in the water like Metal Overlord extravagantly chucks at you.

 

It's not £60, it's £40-45 from what I can see on the stores. Not much more expensive than Forces while already seeming like a way better product.

And yes, digital deluxe is more expensive, but I would not count that as the base price point

 

More than one user makes a comment about the perceived value of the game with the "blatant" asset reuse, which clearly stops being "how it's justified" or not and more about the fact that it does it at all. It being $50 (and apparently that being expensive, even though there are renasters that are JUST the original game but prettier going for up to $60) and reusing assets being the problem.

People are implicitly and sometimes explicitly comparing that to other games and saying it's doing it worse or below standard, even though in all honesty, it's at worst expected.

Nobody outside of hardcore fans would care or even notice that the assets are reused from the Chemical Plant levels from Sonic Forces in the first place, so that makes it weird to bring up price value. As if there's actually people who'd turn away from the game because hey, wait a minute, this looks like Space Port kind of.

But even besides that, uh, no, a lot of games are far more blatant about asset reuse and are still well-received. Games reuse entire settings, far more than just a single boss battle with assets from a single game 6 years ago, to less scrutiny.

To put it in a better way, you'd think the game reused the entire overworld like Tears of the Kingdom or, again, damn near every Yakuza game. Yakuza reuses Kamurocho, animations, movesets, enemies, minigames, etc. all the time. And I'm loving Yakuza but it hardly does much to make it seem like it NEEDS to any of that. It is in fact, very blatant.

Sure, could the boss battle look more like Final Fortress, and the use of Chemical Plant assets obscures that? Absolutely. It's worth notice. I myself was confused as to if it was Chemical Plant or Final Fortress.

But the idea that it makes the game look cheap is silly. Again, reuse of assets is expected for a game like this. If anything, the parts with new assets are a surprise.

The assets aren't even reused to be the exact same place, it's old stuff for a new context.

"They could have done more", okay. "They didn't do enough," what's the standard?

 

I think this a very flawed comparison honestly. Tears of the Kingdom reuses Breath of the Wild's world, but adds so much on top of that - not just the sky islands and the depths, but the various cave systems on the surface, all this peppered with new enemies and puzzles built around its revolutionary new mechanics. Also, Breath of the Wild was massive to begin with and I think the general expectation was that any follow-up would very much lean on that base. Shadow Generations is much smaller in scope and isn't really reusing those assets in a way that enables anything particularly interesting. Granted, none of this addresses your wider post, but I think this in particular is a weak supporting argument.

 

Would Far Cry 4 -> Far Cry Primal be a more apt comparison? :0

 

Filler? Or people online are just really conditioned to say this when they don't care.