Sonic Colors: Ultimate - Announcement, with additional information

[EcoShifter]

 

 

(Physical) Standard Edition

Preorder content- Baby Sonic Keychain (that's it)

 

Digital Standard preorder contents

• Sonic Movie Boost (electric boost and aura)
• Exclusive Player Icons (different from the movie icons)

Release date: September 7th, 2021

 

Digital Deluxe Edition contents

*Exclusive music brings 3 original game remixes

 

Preorder contents:

• Early Access
• Exclusive Player (not movie) Icons

Release date: September 3rd, 2021

 

Quote

 

Features:

Sonic Speed and Non-Stop Action-

• Accelerate to adrenaline-pumping super speed, zoom across challenging worlds, and maneuver through hazardous obstacles. Time your attacks perfectly to charge your boost and reach Super Sonic speeds.

Interstellar Amusement Park–

• Explore and adventure through immersive environments, like a Sweet Mountain filled with delightful sweets or an Aquarium Park filled with sea life and countless pools-all centered around a mysterious astro-amusement park.

Wisp Power-ups–

• Transform Sonic by harnessing the magnificent alien power of Wisps to defeat enemies and discover the secrets of the interstellar amusement park. Pass through solid objects and discover alternate paths using the "new" Jade Ghost Wisp [from Team Sonic Racing].

Better Than Ever–

• Available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch and now more colorful than ever with enhanced visuals and graphics, refined controls, and many more gameplay upgrades. The game is also playable on PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility and Xbox Series X|S.

(*New*) ‘Rival Rush’ Mode–

• Put your skills to the test and go head-to-head with Metal Sonic. Outrun Metal Sonic to unlock rewards (*including some customizable items and songs).

Developer - Blind Squirrel Entertainment (previously worked on Bioshock: The Collection and Mass Effect Legendary Edition)

 

Other *new* features

• 4K and 60fps.
• Remixed soundtrack.
• Additional languages supported such as French, Italian, German, and Spanish (as with all installments since Sonic Generations onward). 
• Tails Save - acquiring the Tails shaped collectible allows Tails to rescue Sonic from pits (with his rings intact and without having to restart from the latest checkpoint).
• Park Tokens - a collectible serving as currency that's exchangeable for different shoes, gloves, boost, and aura on Sonic, as well as songs and artwork.
• Lives system has been removed (mirroring Sonic Forces).
• 100 Ring - a ring bonus pickup that gives Sonic 100 rings and invincibility.
• HUD momentarily disappears during scripted events for a cinematic effect.
• A bar timer has been added to result screens to indicate how long the player has to interact with the score, and Sonic does before his final animation.
• "Sweet spot" - an extensional mechanic that gives a layer of depth to the homing attack by rewarding Sonic with boost energy and producing a rainbow trail upon perfectly-timed inputs.
• Customizable controls.
• and more.

 

 

 

 

Latest trailer:

 

Edited September 4, 2021 by EcoShifter

[MidnightDragon]

The baby Sonic preorder bonus is cute.

[Thephoenixshow]

Omg fuck yesssss

[JavaNext]

Never played the original, is this one of the good ones?

[Honor_Hand]

Looking good. ^^

 

Colors was, certainly, on the best side of Sonic games that came out during this past decade. It's not perfect by any means but I remember it being good and enjoyable on the Wii. This remaster looks like it's going to be on par with that.

[BGriff1986]

Looking forward to revisiting Colours, but have to say the announcement of Sonic Origins was probably a bigger draw for me. I know some of those 2D games have been remade over and over again, but the thought that we’re finally gonna see Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (and presumably also S3&K) reworked is really exciting 

[EverythingOnFire]

17 minutes ago, JavaNext said:

Never played the original, is this one of the good ones?

 

Didn't blow everyone away, but I think most people enjoyed it. An 8-outta-10 type game. Some reviewers thought it was poorly designed & too difficult. At the time, I think it stood out and got a pat on the head because the previous 3 or 4 Sonic games were considered bad-to-meh by most people, not counting Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing.

[Conker]

Looks totally awesome 

[DaaneS97]

Didn't expect that at all, is there a chance for a future remake of the Sonic Adventure games?

[BGriff1986]

3 minutes ago, DaaneS97 said:

Didn't expect that at all, is there a chance for a future remake of the Sonic Adventure games?

I feel like they would have mentioned it during today’s presentation if it was on the cards, but never say never. After all, they did position this as the first of multiple Sonic Central presentations this year 

[AihaLoveleaf]

Real cool. The Wii version has been sitting in my backlog forever. This may finally get played.

[Nightstream88]

Likely will get it even though I have on the Wii, and getting the Sonic Origins collection
Feels like it has been a long time since Sonic 3 & Knuckles seen a re-release, 
 And Sonic CD is in it as well. 
Was hoping for a Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 Remaster though.

[The_Retro_Maniac]

Never ever played this Sonic game is it any good?

[SelectiveGamer]

I'm probably picking this up so I can replay it on a current gen console and get some trophies for it too maybe

[LoveInHell]

Omg I’m getting this

 

This feels kinda nostalgic.

[kidson2004]

3 hours ago, BGriff1986 said:

Looking forward to revisiting Colours, but have to say the announcement of Sonic Origins was probably a bigger draw for me. I know some of those 2D games have been remade over and over again, but the thought that we’re finally gonna see Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (and presumably also S3&K) reworked is really exciting 

What got me was them announcing S3&K being playable for the 1st time in YEARS! They must’ve finally settled that legal battle. Super pumped to play the OG’d as well as the new Sonic and Colors remastered. 

[blue_blur_98]

I've always had a soft spot for Sonic Colors. Already own it on Wii but I may pick this up, since having it on PS4 with 60 FPS + trophy support sounds great.

 

Really curious to see the Metal Sonic racing mode. Metal Sonic wasn't in the Wii version at all (he may have been in the DS version but I don't remember for sure).

[EcoShifter]

New information regarding Tails added above, in addition to other things.

 

Tails's new function is an assisting role for Sonic via a system called "Tails Save" rather than becoming playable, like Coco Bandicoot in the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy remaster. (This actually makes sense, because a character like Coco is a model swap of Crash with an identical moveset, something Tails wouldn't and couldn't be of Sonic. Adding him would also be directly at odds with some of the game's original design philosophies, like the game being solely focused on Sonic and the wisp functioning as not just powerups to compliment him but also partly existing as substitutes for other playable characters). Though, it's quite a nice quality of life feature, for gameplay and character design purposes (i.e., giving Tails a larger role in the game), and reference to Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Sonic 4: Episode II. (Meanwhile, in regards to level design there are physical changes made to some of the stages in the game to some capacity.)

 

Sonic lifted back up to the surface by Tails.

 

Sonic using the Jade Wisp to phase through the upper platform.

Extension of the Jade Ghost Wisp- When its power is activated Sonic will undergo a ghost state and be unaffected by traps and enemies' attacks. During normal normal actions he will float in the air and not phase through the stage.

 

Sonic using the Jade Wisp to phase through the first platform.

Edited August 19, 2021 by EcoShifter

[EcoShifter]

Last week seen a lot of coverage on the game, including several interviews and a number of new videos.

 

Asteroid Coaster Act 1 (Summer of Gaming 2021)

 

Planet Wisp Act 1 (Game Informer exclusive)

 

Tropical Resort Act 2 (Future Games Show E3 2021)

 

Planet Wisp Act 4 (Gematsu)

Few points here. One of the two highest quality capture between all the uploads thus far. Based on multiple official sources (including the video interview) which have said all the music is remixed, the fact that the original music is playing here, especially in addition to other information, confirms that it's in the game, possibly similar to Spyro: The Reignited Trilogy. The HUD is completely disabled; it'd be awesome if it's togglable in the final game.

 

Tropical Resort Act 3 (Shacknews exclusive)

"Don't fall. You have nothing to land on." New voice line(s) and by none other than the original voice actor.

 

Interview with Producer (Shacknews exclusive)

 

Sweet Mountain Act 2 and Act 3 (Gamespot Play For All 2021)

Some other new Tails voiced lines can be heard.

---

The abundance of videos is nice, but this (obviously) does not reflect the finalized state of the game, even without factoring in the inconsistencies between promotional media contents. 

Edited August 6, 2021 by EcoShifter

[EcoShifter]

Been a while since I've posted an actual new comment, but here's some of the latest updates.
 

 

 

 

Some new information I've picked up from the recent videos-

• Dialogue that didn't support subtitles now does (e.g., one of Cubot's ramblings in a cutscene now has subtitles, when it didn't originally).
• Tails Saves amount has been decreased from 2 to 1 per collectible. (Was hoping that would happen.)
• There's now a sound test menu for the game's music (includes originals and remixes) to be listened to. 

There's also this essential and elucidative interview with the producers which talks about how challenging and ambitious the development process has been 

(note slightly modified with improved formatting, including dev's direct quotes in blue, and the originally irrelevant images replaced with relevant ones)-

Quote

(Moved from bottom of the article to the top->) Aaron Roseman is a producer at SEGA of America, and Calvin Vu is an associate producer at SEGA of America. We want to thank them both for their time, as well as SEGA for the opportunity to speak with them.

Contrary to how it may seem, bringing back an older game like Sonic Colours and touching it up for current-gen platforms wasn't easy. A lot of the original game's code had to be rewritten and updated in order to account for modern development features and techniques. . . not to mention that, when simply porting Colours' 2010 base code into a 2020 PC, you run the risk of Sonic going. . . too fast.
 

“Have you ever played an old PC game on a modern platform, and it just runs at about a million frames per second? We had a very similar situation here,” Aaron Roseman chuckled. “You have to optimize it and make it run just right – a lot of graphics shaders had to be retooled for this remaster."

 

“The game does use a lot of the baseline code and logic [from the 2010 original], but there were changes that had to be made. The game was originally made for the Wii, so there was a lot of Nintendo-specific code in there which wouldn’t work anywhere else. The effects, lighting, animations, all were impacted by these Nintendo toolsets – the talented engineers at Blind Squirrel Games redid a lot of that work and managed to get it all talking to a new, modern engine.”

 

For Calvin Vu, one of the critical challenges was making sure the game was able to hit improved resolution and framerate targets (SEGA confirmed that Sonic Colours Ultimate will run at 60fps on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, and 30fps on Nintendo Switch in both docked and handheld, with “more capable” platforms able to play in 4K). "There was a lot to step up. Back in 2010 this game was on screens that had a lower resolution than your smartphone today, so increasing that, supporting 4K and adding improved lighting, that alone was a huge undertaking."


(Original version vs modern version comparison.)

 

“We definitely wanted to make sure this game looked good against the standards of today. That means improving framerate, remixing the audio, sound effects and all that jazz, but we also wanted to add in some new features so it isn’t just the same game you played in 2010.” He points to quality of life tweaks such as refined Wisp controls (which are no longer tied to any kind of motion), improved stage hazard alerts, a modified moveset for Sonic (including an altered wall-jump that was “too sticky” in the original game) and a more forgiving lives system.

 

“It’s been life by a thousand (happy) paper cuts, honestly,” Aaron added. “We had a long list of refinements that made it through the game, just to make things more accessible. Things like making the jumping in Sonic’s movement a little easier so it’s less punishing and more exciting to play.”

 

One new feature in Sonic Colours Ultimate that aims to alleviate some of those original ‘punishing’ elements is the Tails Save, a token you can collect that offers a rescue if you manage to fall off the stage. Calvin runs through how the idea came about. While there was a lot to love about the original Sonic Colours, "back then if you ran out of lives, you’d straight-up get a Game Over. Back to title screen, go through the menus again, start at the beginning of the level. We didn’t think that was a great playing experience. It was kind of punishing – we already made the game challenging and difficult, and with this it was just like slapping you in the face while you were down. So we wanted to remove those type of hard resets, change it to a checkpoint-focused game, where if you run out of lives you just go back to the last checkpoint. And the Tails Save adds to that, where instead of going back to a checkpoint, Tails just comes in and drops you off at the last ledge you were standing on."

“I wouldn’t say the Tails Save was geared towards younger players either, per se, but obviously while we want to showcase Tails and all of Sonic’s friends… it’s more about the usability of the game,” Aaron added. “We want to maintain that player enthusiasm in wanting to play the game, and some of that is lost if you start forcing people to navigate through menus and replay everything over again. We want to keep the players playing, keep them happy, maintain the fun.”

 

(Tails Save in action.)

It's clear that the teams at SEGA and Blind Squirrel Games wanted to enhance the enjoyment of a game built with 2010 sensibilities, but it was also important for them to do so while respecting the essence of the original. For all the cool new features and modes — ranging from custom button layouts, character customization options, the addition of the Jade Ghost Wisp from Team Sonic Racing and a new Rival Race mode featuring Metal Sonic — much of what made the Wii original great has remained intact.
 

“With regards to the actual level design, we kept the levels – outside of the visuals themselves – pretty much the same as they were in the original,” Aaron confirmed. “We didn’t want to make any drastic changes to that. We know that fans of the original game will appreciate that.” Asked if elements from post-Colours Sonic games were implemented into Ultimate, Aaron added that beyond the Jade Ghost Wisp, “we didn’t adapt any systems from future games; any changes we did make are unique to this title. We did definitely borrow from aesthetics [of future games] and learned from their techniques to get better visuals, but from gameplay, no.”

 

“Obviously, being faithful to the original game was the big backbone of this project,” Calvin said, “but when we first got stuck in we really had this whole new arsenal [of technological progress] available to us. Beyond just up-res’ing the graphics and adding more polygons, we were thinking about what we could try to add that might add some more character [to the environments and scenes] and make it closer to what the original design team in 2010 was maybe hoping to achieve.” He pointed to the different lighting effects in stages such as Tropical Resort, which gives a different feel in Ultimate than it does in the Wii original, as well as improved textures, more shadows and god rays to give Sonic’s space-faring world a little more flavour.


(Sweet Mountain with the newly added god rays.)
 

One of the most striking elements of Sonic Colours (besides the… colours) was its incredible music – and SEGA has been hard at work updating and remixing the entire soundtrack for the Ultimate release. All helmed by Sonic sound director Jun Senoue, Calvin explained the intense process; “Senoue-san has been an absolute talent and incredible resource for SEGA and Sonic. He was available to connect with everybody who worked on the original game – and it wasn’t just music, he decided to just remaster all of the audio in the entire game. Sound effects, jingles, you name it, he went back to the studio and did it all over again. If there was a question about how a track was supposed to be laid out, he’d pull someone from the original game’s sound team and get them to listen to the remix and get their feedback.”

 

“Jun Senoue and the original composers, they really collaborated to up the ante for the 2021 sound,” Aaron added. “It’s given a little more celebration to the songs in Sonic Colours. The remixes are awesome… and Jun Senoue is an absolute rockstar. He comes into meetings with his own branded Sonic guitar. You don’t get cooler than that!”


(Notice the newly added music menu.)

If updating Sonic Colours for a new generation of fans wasn't hard enough on its own, the world threw an extra hard mode challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe in early 2020, forcing many countries — including the US — into lockdown. All of a sudden, development had to transition from an in-office process to a work-from-home environment.

“It was an incredible challenge,” Calvin recounts [*regarding game development]. Even simple things, like being able to connect with a colleague sitting next to you, can make all the difference in moving a project forward, but “all of that was totally taken for granted, and when the quarantine hit we had to still make a game and figure out how to do some of these essential functions. We had to have a lot more meeting and much more regimented agendas and schedules as to when we could actually get together to talk about stuff. Almost everybody on the team are like live-streamers now! I actually started SEGA the day quarantine started, so I’ve seen maybe five to eight people that I work with in person. Everyone else has been a screen or a microphone icon.”

Blind Squirrel Games ended having to uproot their entire studio hardware — from build stations to servers and more — to home offices, and despite the communications between the developer and SEGA had been continuous in order to make sure work on Sonic Colours Ultimate didn't go too far astray. Sonic Team Takashi Lizuka and the Sonic Pillar team were still playing builds every week and providing feedback to make sure the game ended up true to the original.
 

It’s a testament to the hard work and graft that remaster studio Blind Squirrel Games has put into the project, according to Calvin. “Blind Squirrel has been an incredibly professional, flexible and collaborative team as we’ve been working through this project. They’ve really shown their experience in working with remasters, using old tech and bringing it all up to modern standards. And they’ve been really good with their iterative process working with us… they’ve been an absolute pleasure and I’m really happy with the quality of the game coming out.”

 

All of these challenges and hard work overcome, just for little old Sonic Colours. It does beg the question, why choose this title for a remaster opportunity? There are many Sonic titles from the blue blur’s legacy that are locked to older hardware, so why this quirky Sonic Space Opera?

Takashi Iizuka recently said in an interview that Sonic Colours Ultimate might just represent the best introduction to 3D Sonic for new players entirely. Aaron believes the reason for this is because the Wii classic not only managed to refine gameplay mechanics introduced in previous games, but it did so while offering a unique standalone experience not found elsewhere in the Sonic franchise. Calvin adds that the narrative allows for a self-contained Sonic-focused story that is easy to follow for new players, while providing long-terms fans a no-frills blue blur-heavy action ride.

 

“I guess you could ask, ‘why Sonic Colours’? Why start with this game, and remaster it? It’s kind of a fan favourite game, that was only available on one platform when it released in 2010,” Aaron explained. “The fans really liked it, but it had limited availability. So what we wanted to do was take that game and bring it to a wider audience. And it’s worthy of this. It introduces new characters, new features that are now prevalent in a modern Sonic game. It just felt like this was a really good launchpad to start from.”

 

Of course, with talk like that we asked the obvious question about whether other past Sonic titles are being considered for a similar remaster treatment. We got a firm ‘no comment’! “We are constantly thinking about it, but there’s nothing we can talk about at the moment,” Calvin said. Worth a shot!

 

Even if Sonic Colours is the only title to see a remaster, SEGA’s picked a mighty fine candidate. Asked about what their hopes are for fan reactions to Sonic Colours Ultimate, Aaron said that the explosion of franchise interest since the Paramount Hollywood movie will hopefully lead to a growth of Sonic game fans too. “We’re hoping that fans will enjoy this game, but also that we get new fans interested. It’s been a while since we released a Sonic game, and we really want to make sure we appease the core audience and at the same time bring in new players so they can get excited for future Sonic titles.”

Full, original article

 

Edited September 7, 2021 by EcoShifter