I think 06's level design is honestly pretty bad and it surprises me how much praise I see for it, because even with P-06 I just don't see it. It's like the devs tried to blend the open, less linear, and more platformy nature of SA1 with the streamlined, straightforward, and snappy gameplay of SA2 and it just feels like this sloppy in-between that fails to capture what made the two fun and interesting. It's largely huge stretches of flat ground, enemy rooms/areas where you spam the homing attack to kill enemies to open up doors, and automated speed haphazardly shoved in. There are very few stages I feel inclined to replay, unlike how I feel with the Adventures, Unleashed, Colors, and Generations.
They only had a small pool of levels to work with, and decided to try and maximize the space by putting in multiple objectives. Sonic Adventure tries the same thing with the multiple campaigns.
And work on those levels didn't start until Miyamoto was certain that Mario was fun to control in 3D. I don't think I'd prefer a bigger set of closed-off levels in Mario 64 over the open-ended few we got.
With Adventure 1's multiple campaigns, I think you can also kinda view it as an evolution of what Sonic 3 was trying to do with it's Sonic & Knuckles campaigns. While both characters play through more or less the same Acts, the minor differences that the characters possess lead you along different routes. Sometimes the start points are slightly different, and Acts are outright skipped in Knuckles' case. It does a really good job however at selling the illusion that you're playing through entirely different stories with these changes. Adventure 1 tries to expand upon that by going further with the concept. Now you have the addition of voice acted cinematic 3D cutscenes which sell the idea further. Each playable character has pretty wildly different routes or starting points for each Act, but there's also the addition of alternative objectives to clearing the level. I actually feel each alternative objective is pretty fun and it's still more or less 'Sonic' at it's core (with Big being the only real outliner). You could actually do Amy's gameplay objectives in a 2D Sonic game. The issue is that no real official attempt has ever been made. I would definitely gun for a 'ZERO Gameplay Mode' in a Superstars followup! In that regard, Adventure almost seems to be more more plentiful with objectives compared to the 2D titles (as the only other thing you can do outside of trying another character is going for the Good Ending). Only CD kinda shakes it up with two options for obtaining the Good Ending.
Now I get what you're saying, and I think the boost gameplay does have the merit of high-octane action that keeps your attention darting around the screen very often, and at its best you'll feel like you're about to lose control over Sonic. And, if anything, it'd be cool if the games promoted that feeling more often. I think you have a great point. That said, Nothing, absolutely nothing in any boost game has ever made me feel the way I felt when I pulled off something close to this: I know it isn't that impressive to watch. But I felt more like Sonic by constantly jumping frenetically in this stage than whenever I played a Boost game. Because the feeling of being in line with Sonic's identity came by having reaction times and spending like 70% of the time being faster than the camera could keep up. I was being faster than I should be allowed to be, and that defined Sonic to me more than going fast in absolute terms. It's just me, and I'm obviously a lot more invested in Sonic 1 (Master System) than any Boost game, but I think it does illustrate how feeling fast doesn't necessarily correlate to seeing something move really fast on a screen, and whatever immersion that's derived from that doesn't necessarily come from visual stimuli or a correlation to what you see on a cutscene. Human beings can abstract and sublimate stuff like that.
I think theres something to be said about the character-action superhero titles of the later 2000s providing this sort of reversed 'stretched taffy' feel - Spiderman: Web of Shadows, Prototype, InFAMOUS all have some fairly loose key movement dedicated to a setting that has been forged under opposition of physicality itself, and if I may have the pleasure to generalize, the places you really have to go to are half-hearted; the entrance to a building, the top of a big building, between really big buildings... Thats the place, you are already in the landmark. When the places you go are so vilifyingly samely and structured, you can't really say it serves a decent singular punch when it keeps hitting you without remorse. The engagement is so constant and overwhelming that it sometimes all blends together, something that I feel only the occasional Spiderman titles play off with it's hellishly fine-tuned and unique set-up. More-so with this upcoming former, Jet Set Radio and Assassins Creed has a sort of duress by being placed within such cramped spaces that require decently solid jumps and planning to avoid the stupid (though pretty cumbersome) authorities, providing some sort of aggravating entertainment. Mirrors Edge is almost crossing the line set by the paragraph above, but it's stylization with the aggressive highlighting of its mechanics, physical limitations set in place and most literal incentivization of forwardness (while still providing options) when interacting with the parkour keeps it interesting; it's playing to what the City of Glass wont have you do, and lets you roll with it. Totally fair - apologies if that sounded like what I was implying. I apologize, Azookara. All-in-all, I think we're sort of on the same page? I'm certainly of the position that exploration is best within consideration and moderation; If there's any points you felt being missed, do feel free to add more! Keep 'er rolling, this is how we get somewhere. ... It's not really off-topic at all, and is the exact sort of thing I wanted to roll with! (I wont necessarily be answering anything below, they're for people to converse about) Initial Question: What are the significant difficulties that hypothetically 'stretched taffy' openzones / levels provide for a Sonic setting, and how could it be utilized or promptly adjusted in a way for the betterment of a title? -> What currently out there in the games-sphere has a good balance of platforming work alongside high speeds? -> What does Time Attack itself do that can make things feel meaningless with areas such as these? -> What is the balance between being just overpowered enough to skirt the line and have those whimsical moments, with the experience that's needed to keep the incremental process of being able to pull off those stunts interactive and tied to everything else? Let me list a few games down that I can immediately refer to for inspiration: - Competitive Quake {Speed & Platforming} - Titanfall 2 {Speed & Platforming} - Wipeout {Speed} - Neon White {Platforming} Neon White is probably my best case for balancing collectibles with Time Attack shenanigans and still being incredibly fun - if it made Joseph Anderson of all people want to grind at levels over and over again, there's gotta be some benefit to it. The more competitive shooters such as Quake and Titanfall are my best examples for engaging soaring thats dedicated to the strict objective of progressive destruction, and Wipeout has the controls + aesthetics + design philosophy to know how to really push your buttons, promptly wanting to let you push the buttons of the track in turn. The majority of the games I've listed involve snappy, quick-second decisions planting you close to the planes (whether vertical or horizontal), and rarely leave you in a state that comes close to floating - they actively engage you with what you see. This is also a key point to make - the 'visuals of fast' can be sort of moot red-herring. With enough direction, any game could look fast, but not everything needs to. I suppose what I'd written above doesn't necessarily help my case, but my brain currently has a logic I just can't properly put into words atm, so my condolences.
Simply being able to snap to top speed is why the spin-dash exists... But...it doesn't feel especially cool to just hold down a button to Boost at high speed in my opinion. Nothing like swinging on poles, grinding on rails, jumping off ramps...the numerous amount of momentum redirecting gimmicks in the 2D games, and even homing attack chains on occasion are cooler situations in interactive gameplay. --- The problem with, unfinished, 3D fan games is that levels don't really have stuff like that to interact with. Going fast is just a product of the overtuned physics and staying that fast is just a given with whatever Sonic's moveset is in the fan game.
These two things are not mutually exclusive. Being able to burst forward at high speed doesn't preclude you from gimmicks and physics manipulation. Surely we can have the best of both worlds.
I firmly believe a good way to "match what Sonic is in other media" is to make that how Super Sonic plays. Flying over everything or blasting off at mach 1 instantly would feel good if it were the reward for collecting all the emeralds and/or completing the main campaign. And you don't even have to have a lot of scrutiny against the stunts you pull or the ease of doing them, since being OP for the thrill of it is the point.
On the contrary I think "lean into the fantasy of Sonic" is kind of a poison pill for the series, because it's hard to make that and make an interesting game at the same time. For me personally Sonic Team tows the line well enough more often than not, but I'm from a different era. Sonic playing a fast paced platformer level that is contextualized by a realistic background blazing by was enough for me, but as games get more realistic the assignment of capturing the fantasy changes and Sonic starts to feel more artificial. Besides, in between the super peel out and the Spin dash it's not like he didn't have ways to just take. That choice just came with it's own consequences, however small. That being said I think leaning into the "tearing across empty fields" shit is kind of a bridge too far unless you take the right approach. Scorching across a picturesque landscape is the fantasy of Sonic as presented since 1993 so I get the appeal, but not everything can just be a power fantasy if you want to actually make an interesting game. God of War and Kingdom Hearts are two games marketed on flash over substance and can genuinely be played that way with the proper settings and tools, but the designers don't take that as an "out" for designing a video game and design modes of play and optional fights with more engagement required from the player in mind too. These are both fringe cases too. Fighting games and character action games like Devil May Cry are marketed on flashy battles and combos, but your experience playing those games will decidedly not be like that when you first boot them up. Easy modes and stylish control schemes will help bridge that gap, but the overarching point of the game is that the dopamine rush from seeing something cool happened is earned by your efforts. Hell, you could even make the argument that it brings you closer to the characters than you would be otherwise because you get a taste of the finesse and quick decision making required to be them. Friction matters. It might be tempting to downplay it when we're talking about superpowered mascots, but it plays a part in all of these games to give them meaning. If what you want is to just watch a cool animation, there are cool animations all over the place. I think the only way to marry this fantasy with traditional sonic design is if you're willing to make the maps more dense than they are in the fangames or frontiers without breaking that "to scale" feeling. An urban setting makes more sense to me for an open world Sonic game than a war-torn wasteland even if both technically have precedence. One allows you to naturally throw in more dense and deliberate design but couch it well in believability. there's also space to create wide open parks or long high ways that generate a sense of speed as a pacebreaker, the way old Sonic games used to. As an aside...who says Sonic has to take off immediately to be cool? Wouldn't leveraging his environment more the same way Spider-Man uses gravity from swings and buildings as mere stepping stones make him cooler than someone like the flash? I certainly felt cooler playing Mirror's Edge than i did playing Unleashed.
While I wouldn't go that far (I definitely do enjoy some of Project 06's Sonic stages) this is basically the exact same level design mindset that Heroes and Shadow followed, even down to the "sometimes a whole ass chunk of level geometry is completely duplicated" trend, which is fascinating given that Iizuka's US team was basically separate from the JP team working on 06 (to my understanding). 06 does let you do slightly more with creative use of Sonic's movement (I can barely remember a single time Heroes or Shadow let's you just run up a wall like in the Adventure games), but it falters by having way less verticality in almost everything. You could never see the kind of vertigo-inducing heights that Egg Fleet or even Death Ruins had in 06.
You are correct in that the Boost doesn't prevent the things I mentioned from existing... But I do feel there is a major difference in the point of using those things in Boost gameplay and Adventure-esque gameplay, obligation versus optimization. The momentum redirection gimmicks are the only ones that would really work well in both, but Penny's Big Break has one that kind of shows how it would be beneficial in slower paced level design. It speeds you up if you're going slow, but it pushes you on a specific path while maintaining your speed otherwise.
I tend to agree with @Azookara that the Sonic fanbase are a little too hyperfixated on that Sonic CD opening and have been chasing that high ever since. It certainly doesn't help that Sonic Team themselves really started to lean heavily into the power fantasy aspects of Sonic's character starting with Adventure by upping the scale and raising the escalation. Classic case of Spectacle Creep, but that only has a certain ceiling to it. But because that's been the expectation for Sonic for so long, they can't really go back on it now. Its not like Sonic Team haven't made attempts at making more cohesive design (even if they're bad at it) but those are generally met with division from the "GOTTA GO FAST" crowd that just wanna take off and plow through everything in front of them unimpeded. I completely understand the appeal of that power fantasy mind you, but I tend to think that usually comes at the expense of the actual video game.
I don't like using the CD opening as an analogy for Modern Sonic's dull Flash superpowers. Sonic CD's opening understands that Sonic just blasting forward all the time is actually kinda boring to look at in comparison to actually using the environment to build momentum.
This is a small point since I'm in a rush but I think it's funny how as Boost developed Sonic's ball form has becone increasingly irrelevant. Which is funny since he's a hedgehog.
i didn't really think this opinion was unpopular, but this thread has convinced me that it is: it is perfectly acceptable to lionize the sonic cd opening because the sonic cd opening is clearly very good, hence why it's made such an impression on people in the thirty years since it was released. of course people would want to aspire towards a sonic game that looks and plays like it. dragon ball fans were "chasing the high" of getting a game that looked like a playable version of the anime, and we got that game when fighterz game out, and it was awesome*. no person who i've ever seen play fighterz has not been immediately blown away by the game's art direction and game feel - in many ways, it had to look better than even the best scenes in the anime in order to compensate for the nostalgia gap, and it still delivered in spades. why is it bad or unreasonable to aspire toward that sort of experience for sonic? and, to follow up on kazz's point, i think the the reason why the CD intro remains such a cultural touchstone compared to the rest of the animated game intros is because it's much more compelling to watch sonic organically interact with the environment in novel and interesting ways than to watch him just flip a switch and start boosting through things in a straight line. the intros for unleashed, colors, and generations are fun, but are demonstrably less dynamic than the CD intro because they're trying to be the "ideal" vision of boost gameplay - which is, if we're honest, fundamentally about going really fast in a straight line. (perhaps there's some gameplay insight there as well!) (* - of course fighterz has issues as a fighting game and might not mechanically be to everyone's taste, but i don't see how anybody in their right mind would argue that the game's art direction wasn't a complete gamechanger in 2018 - made unremarkable only because of the showings from future arcsys games and the games they inspired)
Because that's translating the aesthetic of a show into the aesthetic of a game. Gassing up the CD opening is asking for the aesthetic of a cartoon to be translated into a playable set of mechanics. Yeah, obviously just going down linear stages isn't amazing, but none of these openings are meant to be a blueprint for gameplay, they're meant to show off apsects of the setting and visuals, to set the tone for the presentation.
If you could interact with the robots and environment the way Sonic moves around Eggman's ship in Unleashed's opening...that would be the ideal version of the Boost gameplay.
first, fighterz did translate the show into a playable set of mechanics. it is obviously a different set of mechanics and in a different genre, but it successfully makes you "feel" like goku, to use a reviewerism. there are a ton of little things that arcsys does to do this, but the most obvious one is that the superdash - the universal mechanic that distinguishes the game from the rest of the genre - is explicitly designed to translate the core piece of the show's "moveset" into a usable fighting game mechanic. in sonic's case, obviously it is not going to be a 1:1 conversion, but what people mean when they say they want "a playable CD opening" is they want a sonic game that allows you to engage with the environment in the way that sonic does in the CD opening - i.e. fluidly (and manually) moving through a diverse 3D landscape while skillfully using the environment to gain and maintain momentum. several fangames have demonstrated that there is nothing impossible about this in theory (another reason why it's important to discuss them in the larger context of sonic's design). you might not want that kind of gameplay, and that's fine, but that is a coherent request that someone can make. i have no idea why there's this strange insistence in this thread to act otherwise.
Fighterz looks the part but it actually is an example of a game making concessions for the mechanics. The game is in 2D which means the obvious angle of the Dragon Ball fantasy(free, 180 flight) is left at the door on the face of it. You can't float indefinitely like you can in DBZ proper with each movement option given reasonable counter-measures and the gameplay being way more grounded than a proper DBZ fight, characters can't out-power level eachother, with the team prioritizing game balance over who's technically stronger in the lore IE you can win with Tien or Krillin against Gogeta. Characters are individualized and very limited in what they can actually do in-game to necessitate leveraging your whole team and to side step the balancing nightmare transformations introduced. It adapts a lot of Dragon Ball elements to the traditional Fighting game format, but they never prioritize the Dragon Ball experience over just making a decent game. It made all kinds of concessions, and the reason it's beloved is because it's a reprieve from the relatively mindless Tenkaichi series, which was always meant to be a Dragon Ball simulator. We're getting a follow-up to that series in the fall because the meatheads demanded it, and all it's old hallmarks including broken movement mechanics, dumb beam clash minigames ripped straight out of the series and a complete disregard for character balance are back in full swing. Sparking Zero is the game you're actually asking for, and I get the feeling it won't be nearly as acclaimed as Fighterz for that reason.