Sega Wants To Take "Good Care" Of 2D And 3D Sonic In The Future

Well 2d sonic seems like he's doing just fine. It's the 3d one I'm worried about.

https://sonichacking.org/vault/

The fans know how to do Sonic better than SEGA themselves.

The movie was a good start but Sega really needs to more with its other IP and release that console that is rumored.

If there's never a Sonic Mania 2, that would be pure idiocy.

@RupeeClock "It was a fine exercise for Generations, but a serious misfire for Forces" Yeah, because 2011 was the blur's 20th, so they had to do something special.

Let's face facts they've never even mastered the 3D Sonic and I wasn't even keen on the classic Sonic levels on Sonic Generations. Sonic Mania was excellent though and possibly the best 2D platformer I've played since the 16 bit days

Plain and simple, Sonic, unlike Mario, just does not work as a 3D platformer. 3D platforming is not built for speed. Sonic has not been at his best since Sonic 3 & Knuckles. As good and faithful as Sonic Mania is, it's just a love letter to OG Sonic. 3D Sonic needs to be tossed off at Scrap Brain and Christian Whitehead needs to be given the keys to run riot with 2D Sonic to stamp his own identity on the franchise going forward. He truly understands what makes Sonic great.

People tend to forget that most of days levels in Sonic Unleashed were very good !
But it's the only modern 3D sonic game that I can think of which doesn't suck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivqjq5iswNs

Lol they say every few years "It's time to take 3D sonic seriously". I think they just need to admit that they suck with their own creation and don't know how to make a good 3D sonic game.

@carlos82
I have never played Sonic Mania.What's so good about it and what makes it different from other 2D Sonic games?

Sonic Mania is the GOAT of Sonic games, 2D or 3D. As far as 3D sonic goes?... Never got a chance to play Generations so I heard that was decent, but other than that, hasn't been a good one since the Adventure days.

I want a Sonic Adventure-esque game.

I want for it:
Playable Characters
New Hedgehog character with a twin sister who will be Sonic and Amy’s future relatives.
New male echidna who will be knuckles’ future relative.
Voice actors since team Sonic Racing
Chao garden with old and new gardens
Small animals from SA1 and SA2 returning.
Chaos Drives

@MrBlacky It plays just like the Sonic of the Megadrive/Genesis generation. The feel, the weight, the gameplay etc, Christian Whitehead truly made Sonic right again. If you love old school Sonic, you'll be more than happy with Sonic Mania. Give it a go.

Sonic Adventure 1 is a wee bit hard to play because of age and jank but SA2 is one of my favourite games of all time and totally stands the test of time. Yes, the cutscenes are awful but the levels are great and diverse and the soundtrack is amazing/atrocious. I’d love a new proper Adventure game but they’d just mess it up.

@carlos82 They mastered 3D Sonic in adventure 2, the best Sonic game.

@Goat_FromBOTW it was a good game but I wouldn't say they mastered it

I'm guessing a sequel to Mania might go for a hand-drawn artstyle.

I'll buy a 3D Sonic again if the level designers of Colors/Generations are working on it, or if there's obvious significant improvement over Forces. Forces had 3 level designers and 2 were new to the series - the other worked on Lost World...

Haahahahahah, take good care of the franchise?! Maybe should have thought of that 2 decades ago! Thet've made some of the notoriously worst games ever within this franchise! What were you doing before this, torturing the fans on purpose?!

(but seriously I think the games that were lauded as great sonic games were middle of the road, I can't think how something like boom, o6, forces etc. would play! And at least, how these people aren't just fully bankrupt since the last 20 years! )

The issue with 3D Sonic is Sonic Team has always been them being too afraid to stick to a formula and try to refine it. I've given Sonic Heroes a try a few weeks back for the first time and I enjoyed it a fair bit. It has plenty of flaws but it's something that could've been improved if they tried to do more with it in one more game. Sadly they stripped away the team mechanic and decided to run with the mission structure in the game Shadow The Hedgehog only to abandon that and horribly botch the adventure style in Sonic 06 a year later...

@Papichulo Exactly. Any Sega 16 bit franchise is now in the hands of the fans as far I’m concerned. There’s no evidence that internally they have people that can bring back a sidescrolling video game

1D Sonic, look at him run!!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

@Tipehtfomottob
So Sonic is stuck in the 90s. It's quite embarrassing, if the best Sonic game of today is one you could basically have 30 years ago.

Sonic Mania 2 is all I really want, the 3d Sonic games are always a mixed bag so I am not super interested in another one unless they really nail it.

Uh-huh. Suuuuuuure you will. Totally haven't heard that one before, Sega.

@scottdevine48 As a Sonic fan... this sounds like a horrifically complicated mess and I want no part of it.

Okay let headcannon and that lot take of 2d sonic. And let anyone other than sonic team take a shot at 3d sonic. No one could do much worse.

Would like to see another sonic adventure 2 game, that game had exciting stories, new characters, and great variety of level design rather than endless running

I'll always stick up for the Adventure games, Heroes, and even Shadow the Hedgehog as great, enjoyable games. But I've never cared for the "Boost formula" games, as they're called. I think boosting worked better in Sonic Rush, on a 2D plane.

For 3D Sonic, I think something combining SA2 Sonic levels with Sonic Heroes' flight formation. So you have a fully-controlled Sonic to run through the level with, but Tails follows you and can give Sonic a lift across chasms instead of the ring dash doing that.

I would loooove to see a mania sequel that adds more characters ( including the best character, cream)

@Papichulo
No..... No they don't.

Another day, another generic statement from sega that Sonic will return to be good. This really becomes old after the 100th time....

Honestly, I still have faith.... But knowing the Sonic "fans", they'll bitch at anything even if it is amazing, and still praise that overrated glorified ROM-Hack Sonic Mania, a game that did not need to be made

This just makes me think if the scene in Home Alone when Harry (one of the bandits) is disguised as a cop and says to the McAlister family "It's in good hands" as the camera pans closer to the smirk on his face when he's asked about the safety of their home.

@RupeeClock Sonic Forces is basically Sonic Generations but done badly and Avatar stages/stuff even most of the zones were basically Classic Sonic ones, Green Hill, Death Egg, chemical plant, Casino night now a forest the mobile version Speed Battle even just ripped sky sanctuary and city escape from Generations rather remaking a different zone that wasn't in Generations or coming up with a new one

They should really take in some of the 3D Fan game developers like they did with Mania, to make either a 3D Modern or Classic Sonic game, as long they stay in their own dimensions it shouldn't be a problem, Sonic Utopia is one of the best Sonic games I ever played, even if it's just one stage atm.

@RupeeClock Classic Sonic has always been a little redundant imo since Modern Sonic goes 2D a lot in the boost games.

Suspicious quotation marks around Good Care in the title

Them saying they are taking good care of both 2D and 3D Sonic just means they won't sell the Sonic IP out to other companies (unlike Nintendo selling Mario and Zelda to Philips at one time), it doesn't necessarily mean they would take Sonic games seriously. They still refuse to make a third Sonic Adventure game and never really completed the Sonic 4 trilogy. Episode III was suppose to include Knuckles into the mix and wrap up that lame sequel.

Sonic is not a 3D character. It doesn’t do well in 3D games, and trying to make the levels Mario-inspired is not good for a character that runs as fast as me when I turn the lights off in the basement.

LOL-

You're JUST NOW caring?

It's far too late, Sega. You decided to go on Team Kiddie-Furry and turned Sonic into a joke. #CancelSonicTheHedgehog

@OctoAori20 no

How about fully buying the rights to the Sonic 3 & Knuckles music from Michael Jackson's estate so we don't have to bypass the best Sonic game going forward when these games get re-released?

@OctoAori20 The only people who turned Sonic into a "joke" were his so called fanbase who complain about EVERYTHING if it isn't 2D, even though 2D is not the way to go

Well that's nice. Then again, Sonic is about the only IP Sega has "taken good care of" over the past 20 years...and that itself is debatable when they've churned so many mediocre Sonic titles out during that span.

Remember back when a lot of folks thought that Sega going third-party would be a POSITIVE thing? That time has LONG since come and gone. Sega needs new leadership and direction because their myopic focus on Sonic has tarnished the reputation of what was once one of the most powerful and prolific companies in the industry.

Just Put Classic Shadow In Sonic Media 2 & i’ll Be fine.

3D Sonic should not even exist.

only Sonic ? back catalogue of SEGA is insane and they keep giving us the same games, I hope that mini arcade thing is a thing to keep releasing more hidden gems there is so much I can hardly make a choice for what I want out first.

The sonic advance series was also really good. Even that Sonic Battle game was fun as well. For the 3d sonics, they need to find a way to improve upon Adventure 2.

@MasterGraveheart amen to that.

@PipeGuy64Bit I agree. The thing is that gameplay mechanics usually need to be refined, and while some may be lucky enough to have that done within the pipeline of one game, others have to do it through multiple games, and it's likely that the transition from 2D to 3D belongs to the latter. And what makes things worse is that, from what I'm seeing, Sega and Sonic Team are trying to appease everyone at the risk of stretching themselves too thin, to the extent that any criticism for anything that "does belong in a Sonic game" results in it being removed, thus leading to this problem where the current games, Forces especially, feels too safe and any features and gameplay styles gone missing becomes missed retroactively for some people (i.e. " You don't know what you have until it's gone."), and unless the developers are willing to reconsider at some point, it's likely it won't come back.

I've recently watched a video that critiqued and analyzed the issues about Sonic Forces and suggested ideas that would work better, and while I agree with a lot of the ideas presented, it's at roughly the 43:02 mark (embedded link set at that time) that really struck me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFo4_KcFuLI&feature=youtu.be&t=2582

@MrBlacky its not that much different than those, the levels are larger and reward exploration with a new bonus stage, the bosses more entertaining. Its more like the Sonic 4 we should have had

@somoore94 You do realize how stupid your suggestion sounds, right? Shadow has a set backstory that's been explored in both Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog. Said backstory involves him being created 50 years prior to the events of the former game in the Space Colony ARK, and he spent those 50 years sealed in a pod in Prison Island. In other words, it would be both insulting and confusing to have a "Classic" version just for the sake of it. Plus, if the franchise is so insistent that the Classic and Modern continuity are now separate dimensions, as stupid as that sounds, and that serves as a reason why Classic-era associated characters like Mighty and Ray are locked from appearing in Modern-era games, comics and other related media, then chances are that the opposite would likely be true.

I believe 2d not so much 3d.

Nobody is reassured.

Sonic Adventure 2 is a flawed game which is miserable to go into today as a new player without any nostalgia for it. The controls really take some nostalgia in both Adventure games to enjoy in my experience. But that doesn't mean it's a bad game - clearly people have a lot of fun with it when they get the hang of the controls. But it definitely shows that 3D Sonic can work as a linear mission/arcade style game. If they put the time into it. And care about level design. And don't get distracted by too much side content (Some is fine, but only if it doesn't stretch development too thin). And don't rush development to get a game on the shelves. And there's reasons to suspect they'll do the opposite of all of that...

To be fair, a lot of companies can struggle making good sequels: a good sequel needs to understand why the original formula worked while also branching off in new and interesting directions. In games and movies, you often either get sequels which cling to the formula and aren't different or sequels which don't understand why people liked the old games. Force Awakens is the former for Star Wars; Last Jedi is the latter. Even Nintendo has that problem: they really struggle with say, making a good Star Fox sequel because they either remake 64 or don't get that their audience thinks arcade style flying games are fun. A good starting point for making a 3D Sonic sequel would be to play Sonic Adventure 1, 2, Heroes, and 06 and have their level design people take notes on what the core formula was and what they did and didn't find fun and what ideas they immediately have.

Sega wants to "take good care" of both its 2D and 3D iterations of Sonic moving forward.

Sega: shotgun loading noises

I don't understand why people call it -nostalgia- when talking about whether "hard" control schemes are worth playing through.

I recently played Super Mario 64 and Mega Man 1 having no prior experience, SM64 gave me some trouble but I eventually learned the controls and had fun.

Mega Man on the other hand I hated having to figure out what the best weapon was for each boss, and the super precise platforming took me a long time to get right, when I finally beat the yellow devil and saw I had to boss rush all of the masters I gave up.

This is why I don't understand the new hate for SA/SA2 even Heroes, the different gameplay styles are not challenging, they either take very little time to complete (Amy, Big, mech stages) or play close enough to the Sonic stages (treasure hunting stages), Heroes has mechanics that basically prevent you from sucking, the flight formation makes it impossible to die, the power formation has invincibility frames during ground attacks, it can't possibly get easier, when you get done with the fear of losing you can start getting better at the game and can pull off tricks that make playing it today still very fun.

The boost gameplay has no depth, so if Iizuka wants to reassure the 3D fans they'll go back to multiple playable characters and the Adventure formula.

@Tipehtfomottob did you play sonic adventure 2. Amazing game... ***** since then

@ClassSonicSatAm

Honestly, Sonic Forces was an odd one for me. First time I played it was on the Switch, and I blew right through the game, enjoying every minute. Second time i started playing it was on my ps pro and it just didnt feel right.

I still think its a good game, but I think you really have to be in the right frame of mind for it. The same actually applied to me for Mania. First run on switch it was easily my favorite sonic to date. Tried it on my Xbox X and it just didnt feel as good.

@Tipehtfomottob DKC and Mega Man have established a great 2D identity. Sonic should do the same.

Well Sega you kinda been doing an ass job at both

"some 'really exciting' news is on the way for Sonic's 30th anniversary"

The license issue for Sonic 3 was sorted out and the Switch gets more Classic Sonic ports thanks to Sega Ages?

@AlienX I wouldn't use the terms "hard" or "difficult." There's an interview with Miyamoto and Bill Trinen back in 2016 where they talk about a Japanese concept called "tegotae," hand feeling, or the idea basically of the response of manipulating an object with ones hand matching the expectation from the hand movement. In other words, Miyamoto highly values the sensation when what happens on screen matches what the player instinctively expects from pressing the button. Two qualities which Miyamoto and Trinen say are crucial to this are weight and the response of the player character to the environment.

When I as someone who didn't grow up with Sonic games go to the Sonic Adventure games in particular, they do not have tegotai for me. Sonic feels to me like a frictionless pinball made of feathers. While this is my experience and not a universal, it's clear from watching others who haven't grown up with the games play them that I'm not the only one to have this experience. It's also clear that people who grew up with the games often do not feel the same lack of tegotai or hand feel or whatever and I would assume it's from extended familiarity with the games. I don't think it's nostalgia blinding them to an objective fact that the controls are bad; I think they're used to the controls from having played the game a lot, but that for many players the controls are not immediately intuitive.

Sonic Heroes has, in my experience, more immediately intuitive controls largely because it gives such a powerful midair movement option in flight mode. That doesn't mean it's a better game: it's pretty good, but I think Sonic Adventure 2 has more love put into its level design and world.

No more ***** friends pls..

They most certainly have not taken care of 3D Sonic 😂 For awhile there they had me thinking they might be on a solid path, but then I played Forces and... yikes. Honestly, I would be totally fine if we just got a new 2D entry every few years, better that than wasting dev resources on another middling 3D game.

@PikaPhantom I think a hand drawn style 2D Sonic would be awful.

I’m sure Christian Whitehead would have no intention of changing if he has the chance to do a sequel.

@Runex2121 But it's no different from Sonic Generations only Modern and Classic have way better level designs, and you had skillz you could customise them, like giving Classic a homing attack/back up shields Mario World/New Mario Bros style, or make Modern's Boost faster/unlimited, using a time stop/chaos control like power as I said Forces even uses the most of the same zones from it too with minor changes Green Hill to Sand Hill tho being way shorter,less open and 3D, even most of the time it auto pilots Sonic so you don't even need to turn left and right, top that off with the pointless fanfic/avatar story, such a step back it makes Sonic Colors seem more polished

as for Mania I loved it at first but bit like Forces it's gotten a bit old reusing classic zones, the best part of Mania was the new zones/speical stages, feel the next Mania title should go all out on, atm when I play a old zone in it, it just makes me want to play the full genesis game it's ripped from.

Agree, and the huge success of streets of rage 4 proves that. I think Sega game library is better than Nintendo, but their management sucks big time.

My favourite 3D Sonic games have been Sonic R and Sonic and the Secret Rings. Haven't played enough of the others to form an opinion. Didn't like the portable 2D versions. Screen seemed too small for the speed of the action.

The 2D look is great but I think Sonic 4 was a good way of providing 3D graphics and 2D gameplay. The quality of them was poor though. I remember reading that the problem with making 3D Sonic games is the speed, which requires the levels to be huge. I reckon the Sonic 4 style is a good way to merge the two without having huge levels. Gotta sort the jumping out in Sonic 4 though. Totally ruined it.

Then let literally anyone else make them.

@X68000 It really depends on their approach. If it was something along the lines of Sonic Mania Adventures it would be great, but it could also look bad if they went for a different look.

I hope I'm not the only one here who wants this but I would love to see a true sequel to the 32X game Knuckles' Chaotix. It would also be great if they released the orginal game Knuckles' Chaotix on modern platforms so more people could play it. Once you really understand what the game is all about it really is a great game and I think underrated. It is one of the reasons I have a 32X system today.

Shame on you if you fool me once, shame one me if you fool me twenty-seven times.

I’d like a Sonic Maker.

All I want for the 2D side of things (aside from S3&K) is a Sonic handheld collection with the Advanced and Rush titles, Colours (DS), and Generations (3DS), with the DS and 3DS games upscaled to 1080p. Probably won't happen, but I can dream.

I actually kind of like modern 3D Sonic, but they need to use a little self control and NOT try to squeeze every idea that popped into their heads into a single game. I have Lost World and Forces and they both have serious identity issues. Now it's 3D, now it's 2D, now it's back to 3D but different, special powers only on some levels, parkour, oops, random control scheme change! Whoa, slow down there Sega! Pick one basic concept and fine tune it to built a cohesive game rather than a slapped together mess of ideas.