Sonic the Hedgehog's Way Past Cool Panel (Comic-Con '18)

In that "new games" department I'd bet for some mobile game or a minor F2P title for any other platform. They're enough for an announcement without being really a shocking reveal. If it's really a new title of the main series, I wouldn't expect it to be a better reveal than the one for sonic project 2017.

 

They don't need to confirm a new game explicitly. A fan asking if there will be a full Mania/Forces followup would be enough to give us at least a possible answer worth chewing on.

"We're not taking a sequel to Mania and/or Forces off the table just yet." For example.

Panels like these are the perfect place to get a general idea of what the marketing team is considering, or heck, even implant ideas in their mind with audience reactions they haven't considered. I've seen it happen before at other comic con events (franchise creators hear an audience reaction and at least partially take it into account for a future decision.)

 

A new main game probably wouldn't be released until Xmas 2019, so I hope they don't announce it until May 2019 at the earliest. It's just frustrating when a game is announced too early.

After the whole Sonic R non-tease, I am wary of excitement when it comes to sega.

 

The movie comes out November 2019. There's most certainly going to be a tie-in game or two released along with the movie. Going by the past decade plus of Sonic announcements and releases, games are typically announced in Spring and then released in Fall of the same year (Unleashed, Colors, Generations, Lost World, Team Sonic Racing). Forces was announced earlier in the Summer of 2016, but no real news came out until Spring 2017, and then it was released in November of 2017.

Based on the Forces announcement we can assume a tease at what's to come, but chances are they're gonna be throwing their weight behind Team Sonic Racing since that's launching this year. There wasn't a game coming out the year Forces was announced, but at the same time TSR is a spin-off title so it wouldn't be unheard of to make an announcement for the future. If Sega's smart they'll put a Boom-sized or bigger marketing push behind the Sonic franchise in 2019 regardless of the quality of the movie, the movie itself will put the Sonic franchise back in the thoughts of the public and even if it stinks a good game can still reap the rewards of that publicity.

Spoiler

Its also entirely possible that we'll see some sort of compilation of classic titles, again going back to the publicity that the movie will drum up. Parents are gonna be hit with a nostalgia wave when they hear there's a Sonic movie they can take their kids to, since we've reached the point where 2019's parents were 1991's kids. Baseless speculation, but I think we'll see the Taxman Sonic 1 and 2 remakes along with Sonic 3 and Knuckles with all the rights issues resolved. Brad Buxer seems to be open to music licensing considering a few Jetzons songs appeared in the Netflix series GLOW. At the very least we could see re-releases of Sonic Adventure 1 & 2, Sonic the Fighters, and Sonic CD considering modern ports were made just a few years ago.

 

I doubt they'll give much away.

It doesn't look like another Mania project is in the works yet (because the team were looking for work), so unless they've just started something, there'll be nothing to announce on that front.

Sonic Team are unlikely to be releasing an main Sonic game until 2019 at the earliest, so there will be nothing to announce for that (True, they announced Forces well in advance, but that was only because they had been teasing it so heavily and it seemed to have slipped behind it's original 2016 release date).

In fact, with the Sonic movie coming out in 2019, there's a good chance that there will be a game to go with it. So Sonic Team might not release their next main game until 2020, possibly even 2021 so they can tie it in to the 30th Anniversary.

I think the most we will get is an update on the racing game, and Sonic 1 for Switch. It'd be neat if they announced ports of the remasters, but with M2's Sonic 1 coming to Switch, it looks like the remasters will be staying on mobile.

 

It's a bit late now, but live twitter updates are happening at TSSZ on twitter.

 

They didn't really reveal much, as was to be expected.

 

That's dissapointing. I really wish they would handle press releases better in the future so as to not be misleading. Ice course does look cool though.

 

Well, Classic games at least implies they could come back again, and says there could be more than one.

WHY Izuka refuses to bring back the missing 5 (Mighty, Rey, Nack, Bark, Bean) I will never figure out... but it's not like the modern era is short on characters either.

Now I kind of wonder what Classic Rouge, Shadow, Big, and Cream would look like. Oh dear.

 

It does seem a bit odd. Out of the Modern Sonic cast, (barring Charmy), all the original crew have been well received. Meanwhile, characters created exclusively for the Modern era haven't 100% gone down so well with people.

Does Iizuka just want to keep focus away from bringing back more old characters for the sake of pandering (at the expense of moving forward with original new characters)?, or does he legitimately think that people wouldn't enjoy seeing Mighty or Fang in a modern title?

 

Perhaps Iizuka thinks that Mighty and Ray (and other classic heroes) should remain in the classic series to avoid overlap? At this rate, if the Chaotix come back as playable, it'd clearly be in a modern game. If Ray and Mighty were in said game, they really wouldn't be much different than Charmy and Vector, would they?

Maybe that's overthinking, and maybe he just doesn't want to over-clutter the modern cast. At any rate, I'd rather the classic players be in the classic series anyway. (Come on playable Fang and Amy in Mania 2...)

 

I'm all for keeping the Classic 5 in the Classic universe if it means that that universe can be fleshed out a bit more. The Modern universe is already pretty bloated and doesn't necessarily need more characters anyway, so why not give the Classic universe it's own flare?

 

Now I kind of wonder what Classic Rouge, Shadow, Big, and Cream would look like. Oh dear.

EDIT: Three are covered for you!

 

Seconded. I still think making the classic stuff its own universe was one of the best decisions they made. Now we can have stuff like Mighty, Ray, Fang, and Super versions of all the heroes again without Iizuka losing sleep over it. Keeping the amount of characters shared between both universes to a minimum also gives them more of an identity.

The classic universe already has a very strong line-up too. There are plenty of characters both heroic and villainous, and they all have very distinct personalities.

 

I think the reason why Sonic Team separates the Sonic Series was because it was fractured already, so they might as well split the classic and the modern so they can pander to both crowds more easily.