#saturnw0lf

[blazehedgehog]

Do you share my suspicion that part of the reason Win10 support has gone on way longer than they expected is because even Microsoft sees that thanks to all these AI data centers, no one can afford new tech right now?

That and it sounds like opinion of Windows 11 is reaching a critical point that a lot of people are just being driven to Linux. I know probably close to a dozen friends who abandoned Windows 11 and installed Mint or something instead.

And most likely thanks to Valve putting so much focus on Linux for gaming, support and ease of use for Linux is constantly getting better all the time. It's not this weird thing for supernerds who want 50% of their operating system to be command line operations in a terminal console anymore.

So Microsoft put out a statement that was effectively "Sorry Windows 11 sucks so badly, we're gonna start trying harder."

I assume Windows 11 adoption has probably nosedived pretty hard, all because people are sticking to Windows 10, people are leaving Windows behind entirely, and nobody can afford to upgrade right now anyway. I imagine there's a non-trivial number of people like me who simply cannot afford a TPM3 module and don't care enough about Windows 11 to bother with the workarounds.

[blazehedgehog]

In an age where we have like, the Metroid Prime Trilogy collection and the Mario 3D All Stars Collection, why do you think Sega seems to *only* do Genesis collections, and not like, their GBA/DS games, or DC titles or anything later than that?

I've never understood it, personally. Like, maybe you could say Sega only wants to re-release "quality" titles, but we've got folks like Piko Interactive buying up the rights and putting out literally everything they can get their hands on. They've re-released so many games I've straight up never even heard of before, like Super Hunchback and Impossimole.

Sega has a huge library of games where they aren't necessarily bad, they're just weird and different. I can't imagine quality is actually a barrier.

There was a theory they didn't touch their GBA library for a long time because THQ published those games originally, but I can't imagine that still matters. I would think Sega owns all of the original code for those games, and I know Sonic Advance has been ported to a few different platforms (NGage, Android, etc) without THQ's involvement.

I can only assume that somebody high up at Sega just doesn't have any interest in their older games.

I can kind of see it, too. I think Sega has made poor decisions on how to present their retro library. Like I know games like SA1 and SA2 have probably sold very well, but I think about, like, in the Xbox 360 era Sega ported Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter 2, and I think Fighting Vipers to XBLA? Perfect 1:1 arcade ports. They were incredible.

They sold them for $5 each. In an era where the average XBLA game was $20. I think that created a perception that they were cheap or bad games and I don't know if they sold very well. They probably didn't make a lot of money from them. They're all delisted now.

Or what about Sega Ages on the 3DS and Switch, right. Again, flawless ports, occasional new features, worth every penny. But then they started getting into games nobody cared about, like G-LOC Air Battle or Ichidant-R. Did we really need Sega Ages ports of both Puyo Puyo 1 and Puyo Puyo 2 separately? Did we really need Sega Ages ports of Lightening Force and Thunder Force AC? I can think of dozens of games that needed the Sega Ages treatment before we started double dipping like that. And as such, the Sega Ages line is dead now.

I think it kind of sent a message to Sega corporate that old games "don't sell very well." Like you have to think about this stuff like a corporation does, and a corporation goes where ever the money flows. If they fumble a series of releases (due to poor price point or lack of interesting titles) then all they see is the flow of money changing directions.

That's why we only seem to get old Sega games through Yakuza anymore. Yakuza games still generate bank for Sega, so RGG Studio (the development team) can justify needing the budget for porting old games to play in the virtual arcades. The money still flows around Yakuza.

For Sega to care, they need to actually make money on these old game releases, and they've had bad luck with anything that doesn't have Sonic's face on it.

[blazehedgehog]

Isn't it like...a little weird that they're not touching the Adventure games in the interest of "moving the franchise forward" while we had to spend like...a decade begging them to stop shoving green hill/chemical plant/sky sanctuary into every single game?

It feels like there's some mandate from above that's preventing things. Takashi Iizuka just gave an interview recently where he said if it was up to him he'd have every Sonic game ever made released on every platform.

Also interesting to note that he says that the budget for a remaster is the same as creating a new Sonic game. I feel like you can read between the lines on that pretty easily, because remasters are usually treated like quick, cheap ways to generate easy money.

Like I've been watching some of Jason Schrier. If you aren't familiar with that name, he's one of the higher profile game press people, very smart guy, works at Bloomberg right now on their gaming side. So I would say he knows his stuff better than most people. But he's started a solo channel on Youtube where he talks about the game industry. Recently he did a video on game budgets and why games cost so much to make.

And he does some quick napkin math on how something like Marathon from Bungie costs an estimated 300 million dollars. The cost of living has gone up, the number of people working on games has gone up, so on and so forth. It adds up very easily.

So I think you can take a step back and say that on the cheaper end of things, 80-100 million dollars is a low end game budget for a AAA studio these days.

I do not think there is a remaster in the world that costs 100 million dollars. Let's look at NightDive. Now the Mobygames credits page for the Heretic/Hexen remaster lists more than 940 people, but in terms of the actual development team there was maybe 45 actual developers who put that remaster together, and maybe 19 of them worked for NightDive.

If you compare that to the credits page for Marathon, it lists 2,700 people in the credits and Jason Schrier says the actual number of people employed at Bungie is more like 400. So it's the same deal; big number in the credits, but a fraction of actual developers. And since some of those were still working on Destiny 2 during the production of Marathon, you could say around 300 people at Bungie made Marathon.

Versus 20-40 people on a remaster from NightDive, a company mostly known for some very high quality work. Some of the best, most robust remasters in the business today come from NightDive.

You see this at Digital Eclipse, too. Again: known for a very high bar of quality when it comes to remastering. Maybe 50 actual developers per project, and nowhere near the numbers credited on a brand new, big budget game.

That means that when compared to a brand new, big budget game, it takes maybe 10-20% of that to make a good, high quality remaster from some of the best remastering houses in the business today.

So when Takashi Iizuka says remastering one Sonic game costs as much as a new game does, he's telling on Sega, either on purpose or by accident. Especially given Sega's track record of bungling remasters. They are not paying top dollar for someone to do them correctly. They are being extra cheap.

It really comes down to someone in a department above his issuing marching orders and he's just trying to keep his job. And that person above him, whoever and wherever they are, they are not seeing the value in legacy content the way someone else might have felt 10 or 15 years ago.

[blazehedgehog]

Why do you think 06 in particular has endured so much, like as *the* game everyone points to with this series, when we've had far worse games before, and arguably since?

We do not have many games worse than Sonic 06. For me, personally, the main "worse than Sonic 06" game was Shadow the Hedgehog in 2005, a game that isn't just bad, it's mind-numbing. Requiring you to see all 11 endings to truly "finish" the game, when some of the objectives are SO deeply tedious really is monstrous.

The thing for me about Sonic 06 was the expectation. Sonic 06 was the first time where it felt like Sega sort of admitted that Sonic games had gone off the rails. Sonic 06 was originally pitched as kind of a reboot, a chance to start over and do it right.

This was reinforced by Sega PR, who reassured us that early demo footage was rough and any problems we noticed would be getting fixed. They also, either intentionally or unintentionally, straight up lied and hid information about certain features, like claiming there were only three playable characters in the game.

It all came together as one of the biggest shocks and letdowns the Sonic franchise has ever experienced. I've been told by others things like "Sonic Forces was my Sonic 06" but I feel like that belittles exactly what a surprise disaster the release of Sonic 06 truly was. Sega was openly stating they were trying to get things back on track and instead they gave us a game held together by chewing gum and tattered kleenex.

Like, say what you will about Sonic Forces, even say what you will about Shadow 2005, but those games are at least moderately functional. They are not good games, not by any definition, but they function. They can be finished. They're just boring and kind of clumsy. Sometimes, soul-crushingly so.

But Sonic 06 is broken. There's no other word for it. It's not just unfinished, it routinely falls apart in your hands. It fights back against your attempts to play it. Though I've never been able to find it since then, I seem to recall that one year, GDQ ran a bonus incentive for what it called "Sonic 06 Soft Lock Percent", because it's possible to get the game to save in such a state that it can no longer be completed.

This gives Sonic 06 fuel to become uniquely memorable long term. Breaking games is fun, and it's not hard to break Sonic 06. That, combined with being the first and biggest letdown in the Sonic franchise makes for something that will never be forgotten.

[blazehedgehog]

How did they fuck up Sonic Forces so bad? Was it complacency? Lack of resources? Letting bad ideas get too far along? Some combination of those things?

From what it appears, Sonic Forces was originally pitched as a different game. A codename called "Sonic Wars" is referenced in the code, and there's a VR demo that never saw the light of day:

Now, worth mentioning: the effects of the Phantom Ruby are officially called "Virtual Reality" so it could just be something cheeky, or it could have been Sega was proposing some kind of HMD mode for Sonic Forces. This "VR Demo" splash screen doesn't even call it Sonic Forces, after all. Calling it "2nd ROM" might mean this is the second milestone demo ever produced for the game, meaning it was probably pretty early in development.

Sonic Forces was that weird time where the natives were getting restless. Sonic games were still on this tireless schedule of, like, a new game every year or two. Sonic 06, Unleashed in 2008, Colors in 2010, Generations in 2011, Lost World in 2013.

(You be quiet about the spinoffs that launched between those games, internet commenter. I see you.)

And once we'd hit YEAR 3 without a mainline Sonic game, people started freaking out. Where's our Sonic game?

What I assume happened is that Sega was developing Hedgehog Engine 2, but they did not want to get into another Sonic Unleashed scenario, where it's this big expensive showpiece game and it comes out to mixed reception. So whatever game was being developed to take advantage of Hedgehog Engine 2 got cut off at the knees and reconfigured into Sonic Forces. The same goes for Hedgehog Engine 2 itself, which was an underwhelming side grade.

Notable in this conversations are the liner notes for the official Sonic Forces soundtrack, where Takashi Iizuka is surprisingly candid and admits the game had a very troubled development and was apparently even almost canceled at one point:

A translation by Windii:

It is with deep emotion that we are finally be able to deliver Sonic Forces to our fans. This is because the road to this project’s fruition was anything but smooth. There were changes made to the content along the way, and there were times when the very survival of the project was in jeopardy. The most significant event for me personally was my transfer to Sega of America to oversee the Sonic products for global release. As a producer of Sonic titles since Sonic 4 and Sonic Colors in 2010, I have always been on the frontlines of the development process, but with Sonic Forces I had to leave Japan halfway through the project with painful reluctance. However, with Producer Nakamura taking over for me, a profound story was realized, and with Director Kishimoto and Sound Director Ootani, who have worked on many titles in the series, continuing to work on the production, I believe we have created an orthodox masterpiece that strongly inherits the DNA of the series. At the start of the project, I asked Ootani to make the main theme with vocals, as I had been holding back on vocal music since Sonic Generations in 2011 due to requests from overseas, but I had always felt like something was missing. Every time I saw fans enthusiastically singing the theme songs of past titles at fan events and live venues, I became more and more determined to include a theme song next time. Ootani agreed, and the main theme song, “Fist Bump,” was completed. When we released a short version of “Fist Bump” on the Internet prior to the game’s release, we were surprised by the response, which exceeded our expectations, not only in Japan but also from overseas. It was an event that made us realize once again that music is one of the attractions that make Sonic’s fans go wild. In this title, we have prepared a variety of music to enhance the profound story, including “Fist Bump,” orchestral pieces by the London Symphony Orchestra, and Infinite’s theme song, which is the first character theme song in a long time. We hope you can feel the heroes’ success against the mighty evil as the resistance, as well as us developers’ passion for Sonic, through the music. -- Sonic Series Producer, Iizuka Takashi

It's a rare moment to see anyone from Sega say "Yeah, this one was kind of a mess."

I have no idea what the prior game was or what the originally had planned for Sonic Forces (or Sonic Wars). Even the leaked script from 2016 doesn't seem that different from what we ended up getting. And by that I mean it doesn't feel like a script written for a different game. Most differences from the 2016 script feel like budget cuts, as the script describes cinematics with better detail, visuals, and direction than what we ended up getting.

The script is not a game design document, though, so it's impossible to tell what the meat of the game was going to be like. But it's clear it was very troubled. Maybe more than most Sonic games.

[blazehedgehog]

What do you think of this current season of Fortnite?

It's bad! It's really bad! And player numbers have been dropping so much Epic's actually been dramatically shifting things in the season around because they've lost like 80% of their players this chapter.

This was the start of the chapter, on January 21st. 321,000 players in Battle Royale.

This was four days ago. 65,000 players.

Now you can account for things like it being a fresh chapter, so that means a new map. It was January, so maybe some people were still off for Holiday vacation, etc. But still. It's a staggering drop. And it wasn't all at once, either. Here's July 23rd:

84,000 players.

In my opinion, Epic has royally DESTROYED Fortnite's matchmaking algorithm. It's true that I play a lot of Fortnite, but since around, say, the Star Wars season, things have gotten wacky. At first I blamed the guns: The Star Wars season introduced a bunch of energy-based guns with infinite ammo that mainly operated on cooldowns. So smart players realized they could pick a favorite gun, carry around five copies of it, and just rotate to the next slot to keep shooting while the previous gun cooled off. It was a deeply frustrating season.

The frustration continued into the next season, which was about a superhero academy. You had all of these super powers and you could collect buffs. There was also a, like, grading system? The better you were at the game, the more your grade leveled up, and better grades made your buffs stronger.

That rating has carried over to this season, where an infestation of interdimensional bugs is spreading across the island. The bug hunter faction, O.X.R, inherits the superhero school rating system and now when you level up, you get a drop pod full of guns and even more buffs. Higher grades, better guns, better buffs.

And it has turned the game into a nightmare. It's like every match is a ranked match now. You're constantly being graded on your performance, and the really good players are being rewarded for being good. This creates a "rich get richer" slope where a pro-player is naturally going to be faster and more capable than you are, because they are decked out in high-ranking buffs and gear. They are good at the game so they get goodies to play the game even better.

And I assume this grading/ranking system has been tied into the matchmaking algorithm because it has completely wrecked how this game places you into matches. I have been punted up the MMR ladder so that I am now playing with tournament level pro players. It takes upwards of two or three minutes before it puts me into a match, which is the same problem guys like Ninja and SypherPK complain about. I am not that good at Fortnite.

On top of that, the last three seasons have had a REAL power creep problem, and it's the worst its ever been now, with guns that will straight up erase most players in one or two good clean shots. They compensate for this by constantly dumping heals on you, everywhere, all the time. Unless you are at max health and max shields you basically can't survive anything else.

So you have a season with matchmaking creep, and power creep, where if you just look at a dude the wrong way then it's over. And now the map is covered in bugs! These are hostile entities that will track you down and poke at you. So it's in your best interest to kill them, and there are even quests for killing certain numbers (or certain types) of bugs.

So I'll be doing one of those quests, some serial killer psychopath spots me, I'm distracted shooting bugs, and I may as well just close the game at that point because I can't pay attention to both. Even if you ignore the bug enemies, the drop pods you get for ranking up still land in your general vicinity and basically tell anyone nearby "HEY HE'S OVER THERE."

Two days ago, Epic posted that they are taking drastic measures to massively rebalance the loot table and get the game back under control. Just last night, I noticed that those drop pods now spawn significantly further away from the player. They used to drop almost right on top of you, but now they make you hike for them:

And higher rank drop pods come down further and further away from the player, too.

So... it's a start. And I even got my first victory royale last night after like 1+ month of getting blown out in the high 80's in every match.

Maybe the Halloween season that starts in October will actually be fun again.

[blazehedgehog]

what effect do you think p06 will have on the overall legacy of 06, if any?

Part of me wonders if it will. I would definitely much rather play Project 06 than ever willingly boot up vanilla OG Sonic 06. And even though I know there are mods like Legacy of Solaris, to me that feels like doing things the hard way compared to just playing Project 06.

Because I think Sonic 06 is so broken, so unfinished, that it is absolutely faster, easier, and better to just straight up remake the entire game from scratch. It feels like so much effort to hack the Xbox version to become playable. Learning its file formats, learning how data is structured and how to decompile/insert new code...

It's like, getting a boat, learning how to disassemble the boat, fixing what's wrong with it using era-accurate materials, and then learning how to reassemble the boat... versus just building a new boat from better materials. You know?

Some people do that, of course. There's a whole industry of people who restore cars, and computers, and all kinds of stuff. But I dunno. If I am personally looking for a game I can play and enjoy, I'd rather pick P06.

And yet we still got the Sonic 06 recomp project (Marathon). The diehards would rather have the original game. People who care about Sonic 06 will probably treat P06 as something else entirely and still stay focused on the original game.

Feels like a waste of work, but if people have an itch they need to scratch, I'm not going to tell them to stop.

[blazehedgehog]

Who is the best voice of Blaze, and why is it Erica Lindbeck?

Because I can't remember any of the other voice actresses, honestly. I think it's one of those things where her other voices just kind of sounded like Erica Lindbeck anyway.