[HN Gopher] My Review of Sonic Frontiers
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       My Review of Sonic Frontiers
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 19 points
       Date   : 2022-11-25 05:16 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (xeiaso.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (xeiaso.net)
        
       | KronisLV wrote:
       | Looking at the videos of Sonic Frontiers, maybe it's just the
       | impression that I got, but the movement across levels feels at
       | least visually on rails, somewhat QTE centric in a sense, but I
       | have to agree that it flows nicely.
       | 
       | However, this was also interesting:
       | 
       | > They estimate Sonic Forces to take about 4 hours. My first
       | playthrough was three hours long. At a $40 game, that was an
       | absolutely awful value for the money.
       | 
       | I've always wondered how that fares against other forms of
       | entertainment, time-wise. I'm sure that many forms of
       | entertainment cost more than approx. 13 USD an hour and people
       | wouldn't bat an eye at them.
       | 
       | And yet, making a video game can be a huge ordeal that involves
       | programmers, game and level designers, visual and audio artists
       | of all sorts, marketing, management and everything else you'd
       | find in many orgs out there. It's a software project that has
       | pretty great complexity and for whatever reason, oftentimes tight
       | deadlines and overworking.
       | 
       | It feels to me that games can only be as affordable as they are
       | in the first place due to economies of scale and being able to
       | sell as many digital copies as needed to as many people as are
       | interested. If you have an employee whose labor costs around 100k
       | USD per year, a single copy of a game that's 13 USD buys you less
       | than an hour of their work.
       | 
       | On an unrelated note, I wonder whatever happened to Sonic Colors:
       | Ultimate. Some people were really happy to see it be developed
       | with the Godot engine, but apparently there were lots of issues
       | with bugs and whatnot upon release.
        
         | oneoff786 wrote:
         | This is sort of what sonic games are and always have been. If
         | you play an original sonic game... it kind of sucks from a
         | modern design perspective. Speed is the name of the game but
         | you don't know the level layout and are thus being forced to
         | stop all the time. It feels bad.
         | 
         | Sonic was built on the assumption that you would learn layouts
         | and speed run the game before speed running was well
         | established. Not work your way through the levels and beat them
         | with much of an "on the fly" planning and execution like in
         | something like Mario.
         | 
         | Something like Mario Maker is sort of the hard delineation
         | between the two. It's hard to enjoy a good sonic level on the
         | first pass.
         | 
         | Sonic Adventures 1 and 2 were, imo, mostly successful because
         | they were just really cool and aesthetic. The orcas from the
         | first level of one and the truck from the first level of two
         | are iconic. Perhaps the first games I can remember to offer
         | that prepackaged hand crafted AAA feel that has leaked into
         | other genres these days.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-25 23:01 UTC)