Sonic Origins co-developer is ‘very dissatisfied’ with its status
Fans are very excited about the prospect of Headcannon, the developer of one of the best Sonic games in recent years (opens in new tab), participates in the Sonic Origins collection, which includes remasters of Sonic The Hedgehog 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles and Sonic CD.Unfortunately, forums and social media have seen a wave of videos showing the game since its release last week mistake (opens in new tab)glitches and general confusion.
This reception is clearly reflected in user reviews, although there is some crossover to the negative impact of gaming microtransactions (which, to be fair, does lock some weird stuff behind paywalls).
“New game with bugs” isn’t the most shocking story, but oddly enough, this must be the most frequently re-released game of all time. Like, you’d think Team Sonic would handle things after all these years.
Or maybe not. Developer Simon ‘Stealth’ Thomley, founder of Headcannon and programmer at Sonic Mania, is responsible for the Sonic 3 & Knuckles portion of Origins. A number of issues have been identified, including a skipping level glitch, and Thomley took to social media to express his frustration with the conditions in which Sonic Origins was developed.
“It’s frustrating,” Tomley wrote. “I’m not going to lie and say that what we gave Sega was fine, but the stuff in Origins wasn’t what we turned in either. The integration introduced some crazy bugs that conventional logic would consider it our responsibility – a lot of it wasn’t. “
Thomley continued: “We knew there was going to be a major time crunch going in, and we worked hard to deal with it so it could even be produced and released.”
It’s frustrating. I’m not going to lie and say that what we gave Sega was fine, but the stuff in Origins wasn’t what we turned in either. Integration introduces some common mistakes that traditional logic would consider our responsibility – a lot of them aren’t.June 24, 2022
He went on to admit that the build submitted by Headcannon included “some actual bugs, some omissions, some rushjobs, some things we noticed but were not allowed to correct near the end. It was definitely not perfect, some of it came from us. It was complicated.”
However, Thomley claimed that Sega introduced more bugs that weren’t present in Headcannon’s build, and did not allow Headcannon to make “significant fixes” as the game got closer to release. It wants to solve the problems people find, but it doesn’t yet know if it can.
“Each of us is very unhappy with the state of the Origins and even Sonic 3 components,” Thomley wrote. “We’re also not very excited about its pre-submission state, but a lot of things are beyond our control.”
The developer went on to admit that talking about things like this in public could “be considered ‘unprofessional’ and could damage our relationship with Sega, which means no Origins updates and no more 2D Pixel Sonic from us. game [but] There is too much scrutiny on things that are relevant and irrelevant to us, and I don’t want to be silent when people ask why and how things happened to the product they put so much hope and money into. “
The thread ends by repeating Headcannon’s desire to solve the game’s problems and commitment to Sonic. Tomley also repeatedly stressed What a complicated job developing a game, he’s not fighting Sega, no I didn’t cut Sega […] I’m willing to do more work under the right conditions; whether they want to work with me again is a whole different matter. “
I saw some Sonic Origins leaks over the weekend and was only vaguely amused by them, not overly annoyed. But it’s clear that this is a fanbase with high expectations, and it’s fair to say that the re-release pack should be easy to come by.
As for Headcannon and Sega, as Thomley said, if you want to develop a Sonic game again, calling Sega might not be the smartest move. But the reason he and others are so focused on these projects is that they are clearly big fans themselves. That’s pretty cool, and arguably why something like Sonic Mania is so good. But you do wonder if it also makes Mole Mountain look like a mountain at times.