Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

And neither do fans know how they want to control Sonic. Everyone has different opinions on the matter. Some people like the way Sonic feels in Unleashed, I find it too unweildly and fast. Some people like how he feels in Forces, they're like 10 years old, but still that's how they want him to feel. So sliders really are the best solution for everyone.

 

This is going to sound a bit mean. But….

Well….

You know what, you’re right.

In fact, EVERY game should have this design. Why can’t I control Mario’s jump height or long jump speed and stuff like that? Give me more.

What? Having the player play with something as core as the PHYSICS OF THE GAME in a game genre about movement makes it impossible to actually design levels that are engaging because you have nothing consistent to base it on?

What are you taking about?

What do you mean we saw an example of this when people turned the air deceleration down so low in Frontiers that getting up to speed and jumping irrelevantizes entire levels and areas

That’s awesome right?

RIGHT?

No.

I think Sonic should just have good, well tuned controls that can work for the majority. And by majority, I don’t mean Sonic fans. I mean the gaming community at large. I mean, you don’t need to adjust sliders to enjoy the Classics.

 

it'd certainly add to a sense of flow, currently the boost is very stop and start, something I very much do not like. Adding anything that allows you to convert vertical momentum to forward momentum would make things so much more interesting.

 

Also, by the way, that is probably some of the best Shadow gameplay we have seen so far in that stream. Some parts even look fun, and not just to be homing attack chains, subway surfers, and automation.

Some of this gameplay appears to be call for actual control or precision.

 

And I suppose you consider yourself to be part of this "majority".

There is literally no downside in giving players the option to fine-tune the way they want to play the game. Games should be accessible to everyone, and not just to some nebulous "majority". This is why I'm also in favor of more accessibility and difficulty options in videogames in general. Whether it's giving the choice to make bosses easier to defeat or to toggle on or off spiders.

All things that "the gaming community at large" doesn't care about.

 

When I said gaming community at large, I meant EVERYONE that plays games. Including casuals and stuff.

Also, I mean, accessibility options are fine. That makes sense to add. But that’s not really the vibe I am getting from things like this.

More comparisons I have. Being able to customize how many bullets your mag can hold in a fps or the size of the reticle or your bullets hit box or if you can take damage from behind.

or the size of the goal in a soccer game and the movement speed of enemy opponents.

These are things that are fundamentally removing gameplay. Which I guess can kind of be the goal of accessibility options and stuff…

I don’t know. I’m just not too sure about this solution to not being able to figure out and commit to how Sonic should control. Some degree of limitation and restriction is needed as far as things like this for the sake of the challenge and engagement of the game.

At least clearly communicate that these are “accessibility” options or somethkng or what the “intended “ way to play is. Celeste has something like that in its assist mode, and I think that probably works pretty well. (I don’t know for sure. I didn’t use it)

 

Nintendo is criticized constantly for their lack of customization for their controls, including lack of key binding or not being able to disable motion controls. For a game like Sonic, changing how fast he runs or how fast he stops would absolutely fall into the realm of accessibility. Some people genuinely cannot handle that. Sonic Frontiers does not allow you to change the controls in such a way that it breaks the game, but it does provide a meaningful difference for people who would still enjoy the game being slightly slower and easier to handle.

Frontiers, at least, has several sliders of minute volume, so maybe you can interpret that as too much customization. But Shadow Generations has exactly one slider for how much Shadow doesn't stop when you let go of the stick.

There is no objectively perfect set of controls. There are people who despise how Sonic Adventure plays and probably wouldn't mind a few sliders.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 lets you choose exactly how much EXP you get from battles. In an RPG where EXP is everything, is that bad design?

 

It’s a bit of a difference between choosing what button does what among the mechanics they have put in the game and adjusting somethkng that can lead to trivialization of what the game is about, this case being platforming. Like make your jump high and far enough and you can just soar obstacles meant to be precisely maneuvered around with no effort.

Can we really not see the difference here?

Also, I don’t play rpgs. I can’t say anything about that.

 

Real life should also give you the ability to toggle on or off spiders.

 

No there is not. Why do you think key binding is a thing at all? Mario doesn't have those, and Mario's amazing, so why doesn't everyone just do like Mario does?

For games like Super Monkey Ball, how your deadzones are set can change how the entire games plays, and that has nothing to do with the physics of the game, but how much the game wants to read into pushing the stick. Would you insist that Monkey Ball should simply have a "perfect" deadzone you can't customize or it's bad design?

I do not have a problem with these sliders if the games are designed for them. Despite the many sliders, Sonic Frontiers did well with them, so imagine what I think of Shadow Generations having exactly one slider.

 

My guy, do you know what play testing and focus groups are and their purpose?

I can’t say much of anything about monkey ball because I neither play it nor care about it.

I will say I don’t think it should be on the player to figure out what’s going to work for them for something like that as that sounds like a lot of trial and error and tedium and stuff.

And I will say that the ability to adjust some things will make it harder to make design that they actually have to engage with and that Frontiers is actually a NEGATIVE example showing exactly this.

Also. I am not complaining exactly. It does show to me that they couldn’t get this stuff together, at least in Frontiers (again, I think Shadow Gens looks good), but above all I just find it amusing. Really, I will appreciate the opportunity to customize the stuff to my liking in this game I am probably not going to buy.

 

If I understand you correctly, you think that the fact that Sonic Team is giving us the option to adjust momentum is them admitting they have zero clue on how to make Sonic work?

Really?

 

It doesn’t give off that impression nearly to the extent what they did with Frontiers did. But to a degree, yeah.

I mean, if it at least came with recommended presets saying essentially “do you want this to play like a Sonic game or nah?” instead of the full slider I’d at least consider otherwise.

 

And then you get people online arguing all day and night about whether their definition of "play like a Sonic game" is correct or not.

Thanks but no thanks.

 

My guy, that was a joke. It won’t literally say that. It’s about how much momentum the dude has.

And let losers like me argue about this stupid stuff online. Who cares? In what way does that actually matter?

Online communities who can’t agree on anything makes up a relatively small portions of the people who play these games anyway. I imagine most casuals don’t even come online to talk about this stuff at all. And you probably would have made a better game for most people to play.

 

I found it funnier when you joked about an inoffensive momentum slider being somehow proof that Sonic Team doesn't know how a Sonic game is supposed to play.

 

I think straight up decimal sliders are a bit clunky and overly technical, at least for the target audience. It makes sense since momentum is such a hot-button issue, with no super clear answer as to what do with it in 3D, but I still don't really respect it as a design choice. It feels like being handed the Shadow.cfg file and being told to dick around with the values in Notepad until it feels right. When I think just a few concise, more clear options for momentum would've sufficed. Might just be projecting my feelings about how Frontiers handles it but yeah I still don't love the idea as they've implemented it. I think ideally I'd prefer something more diegetic like different types of shoes you switch between or something lol.

 

Well, as long as those shoes aren't a collectible you first have to unlock.

 

What if the freakin’ drop dash’s speed could be increased by, not just your horizontal speed, but your vertical speed as well? What we think of that?

Probably be an actual nightmare in the 2D games where you may be so high up you can’t see where you’re going to land and thus cannot predict how much speed it will give you, sending yourself flying straight into a bed of spikes, but for a 3D game with more visibility that might be fine.

Wait no. What stupid stuff am I thinking?

This ain’t Classic Sonic which is expected to be as familiar and simple as possible.

This is modern Sonic. We can do whatever in the world we want.

Sonic is always ripping stuff off, yeah? How about we rip off something that’s not only actually good but fitting for Sonic. Give Sonic somethkng like the yo-yo swing from Penny’s Big Breakaway. Nice physics based gameplay going on there.

Now THAT is a fun and interesting way to convert downward momentum into vertical momentum. A way that is more fun even than anything you’d find in the Classics, like landing on a ramp.

 

Slap a couple of more chili dogs charms on my crocs to increase my weight so I can slam into the bigger robots...
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I'm 100% double underline with you on this one. I have no issues with customizing options, but I felt Frontiers handled it in one such a lazy way that most people would have overlooked it. My brother didn't even know about it until I told him. I think bringing it in as an actual mechanic that you can mess around with would have been better and more fun way of letting people experiment and actually engage with those options instead of just sliders burried in a sub menu.