SEGA going forward with modern and legacy Sonic, issues with first Sonic Boom
In an interview with USgamer, SEGA producer Omar Woodley spoke about the future of the Sonic franchise. Woodley indicated that there are plans for both modern Sonic and legacy Sonic (Boom and the other side handled by the Sonic Team).
He said:
“Sonic Boom is meant to branch away from the classic/legacy Sonic. Our plan is to go forward with both the modern Sonic and the legacy Sonic, but the Sonic Team will handle the legacy side of things in Japan. For us, the Western initiatives will tie into the toys, merchandizing, animation – movies potentially even. We’re branching out into the more upbeat adventure style theme for Sonic Boom.”
“Our main target audience is 7-11, but what we saw when we released the first game is that Sonic fans picked it up. That’s a challenge: you’ve got your older audience and younger audience, but the older fans had a harder time getting into it, because it they’re so used to classic and legacy Sonic, and that’s what they thought Shattered Crystal was going to be.”
“It can be tricky sometimes. You’re developing a game that is for an intended audience, but we have a legacy group of people that played the Genesis and Megadrive games. Then you have the audience that played the Dreamcast and GameCube era games. Then you have the modern, younger audience. Each of these three groups is looking for something slightly different. Our challenge is how do you make a game that appeals to everybody. That everyone can play and say, “I like this.” That’s the challenge we’re working with.”
“We have all the Sonic Boom stuff, but we also do classic lines of stuff. There’s all sorts of merchandizing that’s designed to appeal to the older audience and the younger audience. When we first announced the Sonic Boom initiative, the fans were all, “why is Knuckles so big, and why does Sonic have a scarf”. All these little things. But we said, “don’t worry, we’re not taking the old Sonic and getting rid of him.” The original Sonic design is still here and he’s here to stay. They’re just two separate universes that are running parallel to one another.”
“We’re thinking bigger than just the video game. We want to branch out into the Western market a bit more and update Sonic’s look and appeal to a younger age group – the new gamers. And so we wanted to do something exploration-based. We didn’t want to just reboot the classic series. We wanted to do something new – and not alienate the classic players.”
Woodley also commented on issues that were present in the first Sonic Boom, which were presumably directed towards the Shattered Crystal on 3DS.
“I think we went a bit too far with the exploration in the last game. There were a lot of speed runs and rhythm play sections, but they were so spread out you lost that speed aspect of the game. That was one of the big things that people complained about – “if you slow down Sonic, it doesn’t feel like Sonic.” Now we’re trying to fix that. We want to keep what’s going on in the animated series, the adventure and exploration, but we also want to keep the feel of classic Sonic. So now we’ve made the levels smaller, and cut a linear path through them, and plugged in all the classic Sonic pieces, and now the game feels more like the classic game.”
