That I can agree with. The series typically doesn't do outright difficulty levels but something like optional kaizo Sonic (for lack of a better term) can only add to the replay value.
I'm tired of Sonic games being piss easy man.
Especially if we're sticking with Boost; I can take easy levels if there is some level of depth there. This is how Mario games operate, and how the Classic Sonic games operate too.
But Boost doesn't have that and that's the style Sega have decided to stick with. My philosophy is; the game needs depth if its going to be easy for casuals, otherwise you're gonna need to ramp up the difficulty to justify repeat playthroughs if the gameplay is more simplistic.
Otherwise, at its worst, you're gonna wind up with a game that's lacking in depth and offers no challenge whatsoever. Which is exactly how I've felt about Sonic games lately, including Frontiers :V
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:09:19 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.Eh, I find them just as exciting, but way more fair.
But to also be fair, I don't like grueling hard gameplay and never felt it necessary for the regular Sonic games.
I especially can't stand Press X to Not Die. I can kind of stand it in mini-game stuff like Mario Party, but I don't play rhythm games either cause "twitch gameplay" isn't something I can handle. I can handle habitual-based(memorization in general coincides with that), stuff like perfect move inputs(so typical fighting games, as long as it's not that long. Unleashed got super long in these inputs and felt way more punishing than any fighting game I ever played. And I've played Ivy in Soul Calibur in general, soooooo).
Though I'd say the worst is how the game is programmed. If it's punishing you for playing too good, I'd definitely call it bad gameplay design. That's not fair. It's one thing for RNG in a racing game when a player finds a way to give them a chance. It's another when the computers magically get items to make you go from first to near last just cause you were too far ahead. Giving other players chances is cool(while sometimes annoying, but still a balance idea). Screwing you over because you are actually skilled? That's dumb.
Shadow?
Well, rhythm gameplay and twitch gameplay are completely separate things, but that's getting off topic.
I agree on the QTEs, though. Even ignoring the gameplay problems, 60 rapid button presses is not a satisfying final blow.
My musician pageI think there's fundamentally different types of "trial-and-error" gameplay. On one hand, a game could be considered trial-and-error in that it presents you with a situation that isn't immediately obvious how to solve, and the player is expected to poke at it in various ways and make use of basic scientific method-like thinking to come up with a solution.
I think any good action game has something like that to some extent, but you don't want the punishment for poking the problem wrong to be too harsh or else you'll annoy players with by wasting their time just because they didn't immediately know what the solution was. Even most old games from the 80s and early 90s that can described as trial-and-error often work in this way, they tend to just fall into being more punishing.
But then there's the other type of trial-and-error gameplay which is purely memorization with no thought or strategizing on the part of the player. This when the game is effectively putting some buttons in front of you and tells to push one - push the right one and you continue to the next set of buttons, push a wrong one and you get zapped and told to try again. So you just push buttons until you reach the end and memorize what order to push the buttons and when to get through it without getting zapped. That's Sonic Unleashed's style of trial-and-error gameplay. The player has no meaningful agency in what to do, at best there's maybe a couple different button combinations that gets you to the end, but only one of them gets you an S rank if pulled off well. At that point what you're actually making is a rhythm game, not a platforming-based action game.
I can't say I like this as a direction for the Sonic series because when I play a Sonic game I want to play an action game, not a rhythm game. I don't like rhythm games.
They're the same difference, as it's about having perfect timing in everything overall, when I say that. That's why I lump the two together for the overall thing. They're not identical, but the core thing behind them is having the right twitchy fingers to hit everything you need as the perfect timing, if that makes sense.
Anyway, if a combo requires 8+ movements in a row(not a long-winded combo like you can do in Smash Bros.), it's a bit much at that point for any game. Rhythm is a little different in that they're always some time between each ones, so it's not that quick in a row. I'd call that more or less similar to the Smash Bros. thing I said.
Shadow?Well like I said, I'm a very old school oriented player lol. I love games that push me to improve, games that make my blood boil, because they're games that I just find inherently more rewarding.
There's a huge sense of catharsis I get when I finish a hard level because its a validation of the effort I put in and there's no greater feeling for that for me.
The unfortunate part, I am in the minority of players who are like that, especially in a franchise like Sonic. Which I could tolerate if, like I said, the games had more depth to them.
The difficulty isn't really the problem, but the lack of depth. If Sonic Team wanna make games for their more casual oriented audience, fine by me. But could you please add some level of interest in these games?
Most of the "challenges" in Frontiers for instance, are so simplistic and don't offer much creativity in the way in solving them and they're so easy that I just kind of fall asleep doing them.
For me the scale is: Depth & Challenge >Simplicity & Challenge>Depth & Straightforward> Simplicity & Straightforward
I can't say I like this as a direction for the Sonic series because when I play a Sonic game I want to play an action game, not a rhythm game. I don't like rhythm games.
The ironic part about this is that this is exactly how most Sonic games after Sonic Adventure 2 were designed. Very binary sequences of button presses with only one solution. The best example, the classic "Homing attack these floating enemies to get over a bottomless pit" that is literally in every 3D Sonic game at least once. No exceptions.
And Sonic Adventure 2 is the game everyone touts as the best 3D game in the entire series.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:24:05 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.I feel like there was a real way to expand on the Boost gameplay to have depth and difficulty...
They just ran out of ideas and pretty much only relied on spectacle.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice."Mastery" isn't really something that comes to play with trial and error gameplay. You play the level, comes to a point where you have to guess, guess right or wrong. If you guess right you memorize the choice. If you guess wrong, you do it again and do the thing you didn't do.
It's not really something you learn or intuit. It's memorization of a sequence of choices.
That's why it's usually a form of Fake Difficulty. It's not really making things challenging. It's just a form of padding out gameplay by forcing the player to repeat things a lot.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 28th 2022 at 6:28:08 AM
That is still mastery on some level. I did say the game lacked depth, but simplistic mastery is still mastery.
And like I said, I think the bad reputation surrounding "Fake" difficulty is incredibly overblown.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:28:28 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.Mastery implies there's a skill or learned intuition involved rather than just memorization, so I'd disagree.
You can't go from one level that relies on trial and error to a new one that does the same and use what you've learned on the former to the latter, because it's doesn't really work that way. There isn't a mastered ability to engaging trial and error, you just learn how the level itself works and know how to always ace that level once you do.
It's a problem the Boost gameplay has always had an issue with, even without the trial and error, mostly because the faster you go the less choices or moves the player is able to make. Memorization in Boost is easy - if not encouraged by the way the gameplay works - so it's easy to overlook how the way they approach it now is different than the way they approached it at first. On the whole, it's easier now because they stick to things the player can intuit and master vs things the player might struggle to.
But even so, it's why Frontiers just leaned into it and made every Cyberspace level a time trial. Overall, I think not only did the hardest Cyberspace levels feel more challenging than the hardest Unleashed levels, they felt more engaging to progress through because the game never throws anything at the player that they haven't already learned.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 28th 2022 at 6:34:56 AM
Memorization is itself a learned ability, just because what you learned in a single level doesn't carry over into the next level doesn't mean you didn't learn anything. You yourself just said you learned how to clear the level you just played.
Now if that isn't your idea of what "difficult" game design should be, then that's another topic entirely. I've described my preferences for what type of games I like and I've already conceded that Boost games are inherently simplistic in design as they are.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:33:57 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.Designing a game where each level's learned skillset only applies to that singular level and is irrelevant to the rest of the game is bad game design, yes.
You're supposed to be capable of learning and growing with the game, such that in later levels you use what you learned in previous levels allow you to engage later ones. Unless you're specifically making a game to squeeze that time from the player (IE, Dragon's Lair has trial and error gameplay, but it's also designed to eat quarters).
Or in short, yes - you're mastering the level. But you're not mastering the game itself, so it doesn't contribute much to your overall gameplay. Again, it's literally just padding dolled up as "difficulty."
Also, memorization is a skill, but it's not part of the skillset that platformers ideally challenge. Sonic isn't a puzzle game, or an FMV. You can't both be a momentum based platformer and a trial and error game - Unleashed (also Advance 2) tried to do both and it wasn't a good outcome. Nowadays, Sonic does try to separate those two, but even the twitch reaction games like Dash and Runners minimize the trial and error.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 28th 2022 at 6:40:20 AM
I don't really have much else to add. I do not agree with that idea at all.
Most of the my favorite games ever are designed with that in mind and I don't enjoy them any less for it. I understand that its not popular, but that isn't my concern at all.
I like what I like basically.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:39:11 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.Imo trial and error gameplay is inherently bad game design (it's one of the most obvious examples of Fake Difficulty) unless you're setting out to make a frustrating game a la YWBTG, especially in a platformer. Referring to it as a "crutch" is a good way to look at it imo: as it's generally a fallback developers use if they can't think of anything more substantial to throw at the player. But if the player cannot intuit how to play it, it has no business being there.
Agreed.
If Sonic games are going to nix rote level memorization difficulty, then its going to need a playstyle that has more depth than Boost to sustain it.
As I said; the games are both simple to play and almost entirely effortless to beat. If trial and error gameplay is "bad game design", then its on the developers to figure out ways to add more depth to the game so that they don't have to rely on that.
And they have yet to do that.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:42:56 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.As I said; the games are both simple to play and almost entirely effortless to beat.
That I can agree with. Boost is hard to apply difficult to. Sonic is just too powerful at the touch of a button. Level design is hard to balance because he is capable of blowing past any segment at a button. Enemies are usually a joke for the same reason unless you make Sonic stop moving. Etc.
Nearly every game has tried something to try and balance it, but few fully succeed.
That said... I'm not sure the developers are interested in difficulty any more. Frontiers does feel a bit like them throwing up their hands and going "well, if we can't make this hard, we'll make this the biggest spectacle the series has ever seen instead."
The bosses in Frontiers, especially, use this philosophy. Most of the bosses are super monotonous in fight design, or (with the minibosses) are designed to be tutorials / trials for specific skills, but they're visually and cinematically designed to hit the Holy Shit Quotient as much as possible to compensate. They're pushing Sonic's defining traits as anime inspired stories and big, flashy cinematic experiences, and not so much a challenge.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 28th 2022 at 6:51:26 AM
Yea, and that pisses me off especially when the fanbase treat the games as the second coming of Christ purely off the spectacle alone.
This is why I feel like Frontiers is not going to age well at all, and why the fanbase started to turn on Colors eventually despite the initial good reception. And why Unleashed has been Vindicated by History.
Because once the initial hype and adrenaline wears off, you start to analyze the game underneath the surface and start realizing that there isn't much there to begin with.
By contrast, Unleashed has tons of depth under the surface that is nowhere near present in the current games. Things like that are what give games their longevity. Its why games like Devil May Cry still have fans to this day, because fans are still discovering cool shit.
Even Classic Sonic games have that and why they've stood the test of time compared to a lot of the 3D games and the lack of that is part of why Sonic's reputation got so rocky in the Modern era.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:53:22 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.Unleashed has been vindicated by history you say? Interesting; this is the first I've heard that.
My musician pageIf you've spent a lot of time in certain circles on the Internet, its effectively got a second life. Particularly after it came on the Series X and finally got 60FPS.
Nowadays, the conversation has kind of shifted that Unleashed, while flawed, has much more going for it than Colors (and especially Forces).
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:54:42 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.I don't know if I'd agree that the fanbase turned on Colors, so much as everyone else moved on except the Vocal Minority that already hated it. It's still, as always, generally well received.
Likewise, I doubt people as a whole will turn on Frontiers for the same reason people still fondly remember Adventure 2 despite it's many bugs and poorly designed levels. If you give people a plot they really love, people won't remember the bad parts.
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I attribute it to the modding community, maybe. Mods gave Unleashed a big boost (no pun intended) of adrennaline when it was down.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 28th 2022 at 6:59:01 AM
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"Certain circles" wouldn't qualify for the trope, so maybe that's why I didn't think of it in that term.
That amuses me, as most of my time with Unleashed, especially more recently, has been in the form of the Unleashed Project mod for Generations.
Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:56:35 AM
My musician pageTrial and Error level design isn't "bad", it's just the easiest to get wrong...therefore the most likely to be done wrong overall.
Depending on the challenge it's so obvious to see how it can be unfair and isn't skill based.
It works better when you can see everything a level has to offer and only need to react.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.![]()
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I mean, I think it says an awful lot that the most fondly remembered parts of Sonic Adventure 2 have nothing to do with its gameplay.
Which is most Sonic games actually.
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Its effectively the inverse of what Unknown described; once people moved on, the people that remained discovered there was a lot more to the game than initially thought.
06 is similarly seeing a revival of sorts.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:56:58 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.In any case, if the initial reaction was "this game is jank, but its fun so who cares," then the future of Frontiers has little to worry about. People who enjoyed the came initially were already well aware of its shortcomings.
Gamers' future selves aren't going to discover anything they didn't already know.
