So everybody says Sonic is "dead". Not so, given how well his games sell (although SATBK is doing questionably), but in the eyes of many gamers, including many of you here, Sonic is "dead", a shadow of his former self. You think you could do better? Let's see.
Let's say, for discussion purposes only, YOU are the head director/designer of the next Sonic game. SEGA wants this game to push boundaries, to be fun, to be suitable for sale and, more importantly, to bring the franchise back up to the level it used to be at. You have the kind of budget that high-profile games like Super Mario Galaxy and Halo 3 get, and you have relative control of who is in your development team as long as they are within SEGA's reach.
How do you revive the franchise? No, you can't just say "let Sonic die" or "make Sonic 4". I'm talking about pushing Sonic forward and making him work in the third dimension. How would you go about it, in a realistic and feasible manner?
I would personally try to work out the kinks in the development process before tackling anything else. Problem with Sonic is, he's a runner. He runs fast. Very fast. And the faster you run, the faster you plough through a level. A Mario level would be completed by Sonic about 10x faster than Mario, and so to compensate Sonic would need 10x longer levels. For Sonic Unleashed, the dev team crafted every level by hand, polygon for polygon. That's just not at all practical for a game where you speed through every stage quickly, because they're spending too much time on areas that you spend little time in. Because of this they can't make enough raw Sonic action and are forced to compensate with slow tripe like the Werehog, the Big fishing stages, or treasure hunting stages. My idea is that since these levels are simply rushed through, SEGA need to spend a little less time hand-crafting them. My idea is for the devs to use Procedural Generation. Procedural Generation is the concept of software taking in predefined values and using them to render something. This is pretty shaky to do on the fly, but as a dev tool it is perfect for Sonic. Using the procedural generation tool CityEngine, a person successfully created a full model of Rome in a day. What if the Sonic devs used this tool? No more spending weeks creating those background cities of Unleashed, they simply have to render it quickly with Procedural Generation and then manipulate it into a Sonic stage. Using this technique it is more than viable to have a Sonic game composed almost entirely of speed and thrills. The levels themselves would have a simple, block-shaded kind of charm to them, like much of Mario Galaxy, with simple, easy-to-render, colourful textures. However, they would probably have immense trouble fitting this on a 360 or Wii disc, so PS3 exclusivity may be a possibility.
Structure-wise, my Sonic game would take all of the functional features of 3D Sonic titles and meld them into one, but still maintain originality. It would be a multi-platform (or PS3 only, if space issues arise) game running on the Sonic Unleashed Daytime Engine with a few changes to tighten the controls.
The game would take place starting from one big hub world, ala Sonic World from Sonic Jam, with missions to partake in, only much bigger to compensate for the speed Sonic has acquired since then. From this central hub, you can access the 11 main stages. Each stage has 3 acts, that play like Sonic Unleashed Day Stages. That's 3 acts for 11 zones, making for 33 "daytime" stages. A heaping helping, I'm sure you'll agree. However the fun doesn't stop there. The game squeezes every last drop of gameplay out of these stages. Once you've completed the three acts of a zone, you can play them through in various ways. You can play through them in backwards mode (start from the end, boosters are reversed, etc.), you can play in Speed mode (you die if you drop below a certain speed), and you can even play 2-player mode, in which two people race to the end of a level. You can save ghosts for each level, like in a racing game.
Like in 3D Mario games, you would have to get a certain amount of macguffins (in this case Emblems) to unlock each zone. These Emblems are obtained by completing acts, completing the extra modes for acts, performing tasks in the hub world and by fulfilling miscellanious criteria.
But don't go thinking that pure speed is all this game has to offer; every stage has its fair share of platforming sections, just like in the Adventure titles. There are also Special Stages which resemble Sonic 3D Blast's Saturn Special Stages, a complex and unique boss for each of the 15 main stages, a Chao Garden like in Sonic Adventure 1/2, and unlockable recreations of Genesis Sonic stages just to please the bitter, jaded Genesis fans.
Design-wise, it would keep character design as is, with little change, and the story would have ONLY Eggman as the antagonist. Graphically the stages are colourful and varied like those of Unleashed, but with unnatural, geometrical looking foliage (trees, grass etc.) like the old games. The game would have two or three music composers, possibly established ones, like Jun Senoue, Richard Jacques, and if possible, Japanese band Dreams Come True (composers of Sonic 1 and 2). Also, Badniks return. That's right, badniks. Not generic killbots, but unique, creative and varied robots with an animal theme, like we saw up until Sonic Adventure 2, and we've been seeing again in Rush Adventure. Focus would be on gameplay, with story only being there to give context to the action.
And that's how I'd fix Sonic.
How about you?
Let's say, for discussion purposes only, YOU are the head director/designer of the next Sonic game. SEGA wants this game to push boundaries, to be fun, to be suitable for sale and, more importantly, to bring the franchise back up to the level it used to be at. You have the kind of budget that high-profile games like Super Mario Galaxy and Halo 3 get, and you have relative control of who is in your development team as long as they are within SEGA's reach.
How do you revive the franchise? No, you can't just say "let Sonic die" or "make Sonic 4". I'm talking about pushing Sonic forward and making him work in the third dimension. How would you go about it, in a realistic and feasible manner?
I would personally try to work out the kinks in the development process before tackling anything else. Problem with Sonic is, he's a runner. He runs fast. Very fast. And the faster you run, the faster you plough through a level. A Mario level would be completed by Sonic about 10x faster than Mario, and so to compensate Sonic would need 10x longer levels. For Sonic Unleashed, the dev team crafted every level by hand, polygon for polygon. That's just not at all practical for a game where you speed through every stage quickly, because they're spending too much time on areas that you spend little time in. Because of this they can't make enough raw Sonic action and are forced to compensate with slow tripe like the Werehog, the Big fishing stages, or treasure hunting stages. My idea is that since these levels are simply rushed through, SEGA need to spend a little less time hand-crafting them. My idea is for the devs to use Procedural Generation. Procedural Generation is the concept of software taking in predefined values and using them to render something. This is pretty shaky to do on the fly, but as a dev tool it is perfect for Sonic. Using the procedural generation tool CityEngine, a person successfully created a full model of Rome in a day. What if the Sonic devs used this tool? No more spending weeks creating those background cities of Unleashed, they simply have to render it quickly with Procedural Generation and then manipulate it into a Sonic stage. Using this technique it is more than viable to have a Sonic game composed almost entirely of speed and thrills. The levels themselves would have a simple, block-shaded kind of charm to them, like much of Mario Galaxy, with simple, easy-to-render, colourful textures. However, they would probably have immense trouble fitting this on a 360 or Wii disc, so PS3 exclusivity may be a possibility.
Structure-wise, my Sonic game would take all of the functional features of 3D Sonic titles and meld them into one, but still maintain originality. It would be a multi-platform (or PS3 only, if space issues arise) game running on the Sonic Unleashed Daytime Engine with a few changes to tighten the controls.
The game would take place starting from one big hub world, ala Sonic World from Sonic Jam, with missions to partake in, only much bigger to compensate for the speed Sonic has acquired since then. From this central hub, you can access the 11 main stages. Each stage has 3 acts, that play like Sonic Unleashed Day Stages. That's 3 acts for 11 zones, making for 33 "daytime" stages. A heaping helping, I'm sure you'll agree. However the fun doesn't stop there. The game squeezes every last drop of gameplay out of these stages. Once you've completed the three acts of a zone, you can play them through in various ways. You can play through them in backwards mode (start from the end, boosters are reversed, etc.), you can play in Speed mode (you die if you drop below a certain speed), and you can even play 2-player mode, in which two people race to the end of a level. You can save ghosts for each level, like in a racing game.
Like in 3D Mario games, you would have to get a certain amount of macguffins (in this case Emblems) to unlock each zone. These Emblems are obtained by completing acts, completing the extra modes for acts, performing tasks in the hub world and by fulfilling miscellanious criteria.
But don't go thinking that pure speed is all this game has to offer; every stage has its fair share of platforming sections, just like in the Adventure titles. There are also Special Stages which resemble Sonic 3D Blast's Saturn Special Stages, a complex and unique boss for each of the 15 main stages, a Chao Garden like in Sonic Adventure 1/2, and unlockable recreations of Genesis Sonic stages just to please the bitter, jaded Genesis fans.
Design-wise, it would keep character design as is, with little change, and the story would have ONLY Eggman as the antagonist. Graphically the stages are colourful and varied like those of Unleashed, but with unnatural, geometrical looking foliage (trees, grass etc.) like the old games. The game would have two or three music composers, possibly established ones, like Jun Senoue, Richard Jacques, and if possible, Japanese band Dreams Come True (composers of Sonic 1 and 2). Also, Badniks return. That's right, badniks. Not generic killbots, but unique, creative and varied robots with an animal theme, like we saw up until Sonic Adventure 2, and we've been seeing again in Rush Adventure. Focus would be on gameplay, with story only being there to give context to the action.
And that's how I'd fix Sonic.
How about you?
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