In terms of recent video game remasters, we’ve seen ones that have worked out great (eg. “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition”) and ones that… didn’t (eg. “Grand Theft Auto” definitive editions).
The just-released “Sonic Origins” on the other hand seems to fall somewhere in between. On the one hand, reviews have been very good with the game pulling in a 79/100 from critics and an 8.7/10 from audiences on Metacritic.
However the final product has also come under some criticism for glitches and AI errors – not game-breaking, but enough to be a concern. Now, one of the game’s developers has posted a Twitter thread (via Polygon) on the game’s launch day going into what happened.
The compilation release includes remasters of “Sonic the Hedgehog,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” “Sonic 3 & Knuckles” and “Sonic CD”. Headcannon Games, the company behind 2017’s well-regarded “Sonic Mania,” worked on some of the individual remasters with their primary work on “Sonic 3 & Knuckles”.
However, the ‘Origins’ collection itself was then developed, integrated and compiled in-house at Sega using those remasters and Headcannon developer Simon Thomley has now spoken out about the resulting issues:
“I won’t lie and say that there weren’t issues in what we gave to Sega, but what is in Origins is also not what we turned in. Integration introduced some wild bugs that conventional logic would have one believe were our responsibility – a lot of them aren’t.
Regarding Origins, we were outsiders creating a separate project that was then wrangled into something entirely different. We knew going in that there would be a major time crunch and we worked ourselves into the ground to meet it just so this would even be made and released.
Again, I can take responsibility for my and my team’s mistakes, and there were some. Some actual mistakes, some overlooking, some rush jobs, some stuff we noticed but weren’t allowed to correct near the end. It’s absolutely not perfect and some of it is from us. It’s complicated.
I’m extremely proud of my team for their performance under such pressure, but every one of us is very unhappy about the state of Origins and even the Sonic 3 component. We weren’t too thrilled about its pre-submission state either but a lot was beyond our control.
We asked to do major fixes near submission but weren’t allowed due to submission and approval rules. We asked about delays early and repeatedly but were told they weren’t possible. We offered to come back for post-release fixes and updates – we do not yet know if this is happening… We want these problems to be addressed.”
Fan sites have been compiling lists of issues including character collision issues, sound glitches and muffled audio in all games, problems with widescreen boundaries and odd Tails AI behaviour – particularly in Sonic 2.
“Sonic Origins” launched June 23rd for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Source: Polygon
