/v/ - Video Games

It's been 25 years since Sonic 3 was released today on Groundhog's Day or "Hedgehog's Day", as it was promoted. And after playing it and going through the levels, taking the different paths for reaching the emeralds, shields, rings, or simple curiosity, it reminded me how different Sonic Team's philosophy.towards designing stages would end up being with the addition of more springs, bottomless pits, homing attack chains, etc in later games. Partially because they were unable to wholly reproduce the original games in a 3D space, and also because they wanted to push the boundaries of the speed that players could handle. Since it often resulted in short campaigns by themselves, it led to the team experimenting with other gimmicks to pad out game length, with mostly negative results.

Another thing is that when granting the players speed in 3D, they would rely more heavily on the spectacle side of things, not really letting the player explore outside of rail like corridors.That culminated in "hold forward/right/boost to win" being coined that veteran fans and others used to express their discontent. Looking back, I found these excerpts from one of Sonic's original co-creators who directed and designed large parts of the Mega Drive trilogy. He would go on to develop for Naughty Dog before jumping ship to Nintendo.

It was a very interesting and informative interview about his creation process for levels, player psychology, and the difference in eastern and western traits in video games. What particularly caught my eye was when he was discussing the limits of player freedom which brought to mind all those times people here have shat on open world games like say MGSV: TPP for being barren, full of repetitive missions, recycled content, and how they wished that it could have taken more cues from it Ground Zero Prologue where it was smaller but more detailed and given more memorable ways to complete it. The reverse also happens when a series like Metroid becomes more linear from the likes of Zero Mission/the original and Super to Fusion and Other M, with the feeling of additional hand holding and sacrifice of control at the mercy of following the game maker's script.

Since the Sonic series ran the gamut of having levels that that ranged from being exploration based with no fixed end point (The treasure hunting stages in Adventure 1&2) to on rails-action (Secret Rings) and everything in between. 3, in particular garnered a lot of praise for melding exploration, platforming, and speed together in relatively balanced amounts, as its predecessors to certain degrees. Had fixed A-to-B goals (and in some cases in 1 & CD, an extra exit above the "normal" one) while still retaining alternate paths and shortcuts that would reward players with extra items or ways to shave time when clearing through a level.

There's quite a lot on this subject, and I feel like I'm rambling on so I'll wrap up this post with these questions (TL:DR): Do you you prefer maps that are open sandbox-esque levels that leave you to your own devices or more linear ones that are akin to obstacle courses? Then I suppose you could answer in more detail like an ideal cross between the two or talk about how difficulty is applied to either of these that have their pros and cons. The interview can be found here: http://archive.is/r52I0