Sonic Forces - What Happened?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to another episode of that's right sonic your sonic is all that sonics wow simpson's reference in the first three seconds we have an all-time record there folks the last time we checked in with the blue blur was all the way back in the mid-90s which as we all know was a decade of extremes but it's now finally time for us to go fast into the future of four years ago with 2017's sonic forces a request you've all relentlessly bombarded me with ever since its release now even to this day forces is still a bit of an enigma in the puckering blue hole that is sonic's video game career with plenty of hearsay and hoopla made about its development the one thing we absolutely 100 legit for sure know however is that it didn't exactly go to plan and unfortunately resulted in a critically maligned 3d entry that most fans are very much split on yeah that's pretty much how i roll so strap on your speed shoes and slip on your favorite sonic shirt rookie it's time to find out what happened to sonic forces sonic how i hate him some of you might recall that in 2013 sonic took a bit of an extended stay in nintendo land as per an exclusivity contract between old rivals sega and nintendo oh did i say extended stay i meant locked in the wii u prison with the key enthusiastically swallowed by big the cat so during this time while sega was giving bad news to big red button and was trying new things with varying levels of success with lost world the ps4 and xbox one which had just launched were gonna remain dry and parched of the precious sonic juices that fans crave now even though they had lost a lot of time in the wii u jail sonic team felt the best and most responsible path forward was to upgrade the hedgehog engine to better take advantage of these more powerful machines especially since they had been using that engine ever since 2008's unleashed please stop that this was hopefully to avoid the situation that occurred with sonic 2006 there remember that one oh you don't well allow me to jog your memory sega demanded that there needed to be a new sonic game to celebrate his 15th anniversary which hung an immovable release date over the team the same team that was suddenly split and twain so they could produce two distinct games all while building a brand new game on a brand new engine on brand new hardware they then had to contend with getting several senior staff members head hunted by yuji naka who quit halfway through the project all while sega refused to hire or allocate more staff happy birthday sonic if you'd like a more detailed breakdown of this cursed tale you can hear all about it in this video right here back to forces now a sonic team is sort of known for course correcting every time they do anything really and after combing through fan opinion they felt there was general apathy and burnout on the more whimsical happy-go-lucky natures of colors and lost world and a fervent desire to return to the grittier more cinematic storylines of sonic 2006 and thus started to brainstorm what engine-wide improvements would work best to support that the planning phase of the engine overhaul reportedly took time a lot of time ranging from a few months to a full year by some reports it then took the technology and programming teams a good long while to put these plans into practice which have again ranged from one to two years but that's never been 100 confirmed now that didn't mean the art concept and story teams were sitting with their gloved fingers up their butts no they were kicking around numerous ideas trying to hone in on one that made the most sense for the franchise's future trajectory and to be fair to them there were a lot of potential places to take the ip make a full-on continuation of a previous entry it rebooted from the ground up to do a prequel everybody loves prequels or just forge on the head with another self-contained adventure that didn't necessarily connect to past games now i think we can all agree this feels like a much more sound and forward-thinking plan but of course it came with its own problems and pitfalls that wouldn't be felt until much later because quite frankly it seems like it was this design phase which was the wonky bolt in the machine that sent stuff just slightly off the rails sonic team spent a while trying to figure out what fans wanted and eventually settled on a standalone adventure that suddenly had eggman conquering 99 of the world and a decent chunk of space to boot the sonic team big boss takashi azuka played out in an interview with nintendo uk on who they were aiming to please with this new game during development we decided to target current sonic fans and also casual gamers however in the sonic fanbase there are also those who started playing sonic during the mega drive era so we wanted to create a sonic game that could also appeal to those old school mega drive players and that's the reason why we created sonic mania but we suspect there may also be many fans who enjoy playing both games so for 2017 our aim is to please the entire sonic fanbase now he says we created sonic mania which isn't exactly accurate as that was developed by fan modder christian whitehead as well as other staff members from independent studios headcanon and pagoda west games now again deciding to cater to a completely separate demographic with a completely separate 2d title was without a doubt the better choice than trying to make a catch-all 3d game to trying to appeal to every sonic fan on earth now that sort of worked with generations but azuka nakamura and the rest of sonic team didn't want to create a direct sequel to that as it was meant to be more of a one-off concept to coincide with sonic's 20th anniversary despite them you know randomly throwing in bits of anyway since i seen you you okay it's generations so with the scenario and tone mostly settled on what would be the gameplay hook well was apparently one that was another big fan request and they were going to lean into it and when i say lean into i mean revolve the entire game around azuka once again explains how this came to be when we were thinking about the concept of sonic forces we received a lot of fan letters and messages from fans where they wanted to create their own characters so we listened to that and wanted to make their dreams come true ah so that's one of the reasons why we created the custom character system if you happen to be one of those people that sent them a fan letter going yeah sonic's okay but i really want to make my own original character well leaning close cuz i have something to say good for you i hope you're living your best life so yeah most of the adventure was going to task players with controlling their very own 69 the depressed prego edge wolf who is referred to as the rookie by the rest of the cast and is an animal of few words now while this change was not expressly bad it didn't exactly make the sonic experience any better or more immersive and when you consider the energy spent programming a character creator designing hundreds and hundreds of items and custom bits of clothing and then testing every variation of horrible animal it could conjure you can't help but think that same energy might have been better spent elsewhere this is because while the planning and technology phase was given a lot of time and leeway the actual main production life cycle of sonic forces was relatively short now a japanese famitsu interview with sonic team seemed to imply that the core development lasted only a year but this was apparently a mistranslation the truth is is that while the main development wasn't a scant 12 months it probably wasn't all that much longer either this is quite evident in a lot of areas of the game from the main campaign being one of if not the shortest 3d sonic of ever clocking in at just four hours but also due to a litany of cut content story sequences and dialogue that never made it into the final game we know this because sonic forces japanese script was leaked onto the vile nightmare landscape that is the internet in 2016 more than a year before its ship date this early script was called by its original title of sonic wars a change that was most likely done because saying the word wars in the title of a kid's game equals bad ninten does what seg don't the main story was by and large the same thing that players wound up experiencing the next year although there were still numerous minor and even a few major differences between what was planned and what was completed the script had a more coherent flow and narrative clarifying several events character appearances and key plot points that were left unfinished or unexplained in the final version for example classic sonic appears and then vanishes for no reason in the final game whereas in the early script implies he's secretly a phantom ruby construct right right that makes sense infinite the new villain is made even more threatening and intense being the crap out of sonic in an extended scene while methodists yes that methylis was originally planned to appear in the final battle in general this draft was a good deal darker more serious and had even more implied violence going so far as to have eggman planning to have sonic executed early on but in the final game he's vaguely going to be banished to space the smacks of sonic team pushing hard maybe too hard in one direction only to get cold feet and to start cutting scenes and changing lines at the 11th hour this left the finished game story filled with plot holes and inconsistencies as well as numerous black screens of text trying to fill in all the missing gaps many of these issues were pointed out by aaron weber director of strategy and communications at sega of japan in that same leaked script you can see his comments attributed by a aw pointing out many of the script's flaws some of which did get changed but the vast majority remained ignored we move forward with the plan of course tails defeats eggman alone in essay 1. why is he suddenly so weak here is it just dramatic effect tales and code just let sonic get captured big loophole here wait what silver why is he here let's not call them the rookie buddy sounds childish why doesn't tails remember the events of generations the line we're going in hard and fast will be the most played line from the game on youtube out of context videos then finally there's his reaction to the game's finale which once again saw sonic's crew give him enough friendship energy to defeat the final boss ugh we do this every single time every single time generations end 06n essay 2 and all of them why outside of story what the game struggled with the most was technical performance when it finally did launch towards the end of 2017 with most of those issues plaguing the steam version things were rough on the very first day highlighted by tons of bugs and crashes including a nasty one that everyone just had to deal with upon completion of like the second or third missions the game would just crash with no consistent way to circumvent it and it affected the vast majority of rigs and configurations not only that players reported crashes when just making their avatar and even cited the simple sand particles in mission 1 as the root cause for another more random assortment of crashing all of this resulted in an overwhelmingly negative rating on steam especially when it was revealed that forces utilized nouveau drm which many attributed to the game's poor performance but wait there's more oh come on now what the steam version also required you to always be online something that so many people complained about that sega eventually backed off and patched out but not denuvo strangely enough despite removing it from older and even newer releases like sonic mania and yakuza 0 as far as i can tell sonic forces still has it developers slash publishers there is literally no advantage to ever trying to sneak that in you're always gonna get caught everyone's gonna complain and any benefit you get will never outweigh the fan ire ever oof and while things were better on console it wasn't that much better due to the game's incredibly short play playtime under-baked narrative various technical shortcomings and lack of anything truly new or exciting about its gameplay forces wound up being the lowest reviewed sonic team title since uh the black knight or 2006. this was contrasted sharply by the stellar reviews and fan reception to sonic mania which released just a few months earlier now while it's nice fans of the blue blur had something to rally around in 2017 it also made forces look even worse by comparison sales wise however it seems things are more positive while sega has never officially provided hard numbers forces has been estimated to have at least cleared a million copies or more since its launch with the switch version being far and away the most popular all of this was certainly a learning experience and i i know i say that at the end of every sonic video but i really mean it this time the reception to forces was enough for sonic team to take a good long look at how best to approach the next game whatever it winds up being called oh wait it's actually going to be called frontiers with azuka saying i really hope that this new title releasing in 2022 lays the foundation for the following future sonic titles much like how sonic adventure laid the foundation for 20 years of sonic titles after its release moreover aaron webber gave his take on what modern sonic development needs to do in order to succeed going forward a lot of people are asking when are we going to see a new game trailer a new anything this is the million dollar question this is a case where if you've seen this change happen back in the day it used to be like every year it was a new sonic game as a result of that there were a number of times when kind of because of that rush production schedule quality of the games wouldn't be where they really needed to be and so a few years ago we actually said that's gonna change going forward we're gonna put more time into things so that's gonna mean you're gonna have to wait longer between trailers and announcements and that's kind of annoying because you just really want news we're really excited for what's to come but we can't really say anything right now so to sum it all up while sonic team didn't have anything drastically go wrong with forces and it's not an inherently bad or broken game well not anymore it's one of those thousand cut style situations where a bunch of tiny problems resulted in a less than ideal experience that let down a lot of people in the end hopefully they'll stick to their word and strike a balance between design and technology where they can focus on a clear goal with enough time to properly execute it and even more hopefully frontiers will be that game and if it's not well i guess we'll all be back here doing the same old song and dance in 2022 if you know of any other problem bound games that roll around at the speed of sound let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or take a tornado ride over to the flaphouse vip patreon and become a big boss and nominate what i tackle in a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 637,356

Keywords: Matt McMuscles, What Happened?, Sonic Forces, Bad Sonic Games, Sonic The Hedgehog, Video Game Documentaries

Id: 8hXvYTW-3h8

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021