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You'll Never Get A Photo-Real Sonic
SEGA doesn't believe Sonic will ever become photo-real as consoles become more and more powerful. Designer Takashi Iizuka said Sonic will always remain bright and colorful, but would not confirm a next-gen Sonic is actually in development.
"I don't think Sonic will ever become photo-real," Iizuka told Eurogamer
in an interview. "I think Sonic will always remain stylized and will have that bright, colorful world. What the high hardware spec will allow us to do is make that more convincing.
"For example, for Sonic Generations, in the Hedgehog Engine, we used Global Illumination - GI technology - for the lighting system. But increasing the hardware spec will allow us to have real-time lighting calculations, so dynamically changing lighting happening. That's just one example of where the hardware is limiting us in doing what we really could do. So by having higher end hardware spec, we'll be able to do, for example, the real-time lighting calculations. That will give more presence to Sonic.
"We're not after realism. We're after making it more convincing. So we're still going for that stylized, bright and colorful Sonic look. We're not going for photo-real."
Takashi also noted he'd like to rework the 3D Sonic games in the future.
"Sonic over its past 20 years has evolved a lot," Iizuka said. "In that, there are two distinct, different play
styles. There's the 2D side-scrolling platform action Sonic, and the
forward view 3D action platform action Sonic. With the Sonic 4 series
we've created that side-scrolling 2D platform action.
"But I'm also interested in the challenge of doing something completely
new with the 3D Sonic's forward view platform action, and bring
something new to the table with that as well."
[Source: Eurogamer]
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