My immediate answer - Sonic fans.
I don’t really know what Sega and the Sonic Team can do anymore to make these fans happy. They’ve revisited the classic formula a few times, they tried going modern routes, they tried 2-D sprites in some entries, they try going full 3D and whatever. Nothing ever seems to be enough and that’s even when they’ve tried listening to the fanbase a few times.
Nothing seems to matter, regardless. The fans will find something to be upset about with Sonic. Anything.
It’s not perfect nor will it ever be perfect, but they are on to something with Sonic Frontiers.
There can only be one answer.
ALL OF THEM
I swear to fuck all fandoms love to do is bitch about the content they “love”.
The main way they do the bitching is by constantly “moving the goal posts”.
Baltimore Ravens fans have one of the most entertaining and dynamic quarterbacks to ever play football but he sucks because never won the Super Bowl.
Star Trek Fans, the new trek sucks because it violates that single line of diaalogue that Harry Mudd said in that one episode……
IPA wackos, I can’t stand this places IPAs because they don’t put a whole roasted chicken in the cup with the beer.
IPA wackos, I can’t stand this places IPAs because they don’t put a whole roasted chicken in the cup with the beer.
… yea okay, that’s fair.
Still though, IPAs run a huge gamut for some reason. I feel like the degree of variety you find in the IPA category is really strangely big. Like, if I order a stout or a porter I know about what I’m going to get, flavor-wise. But with an IPA it can run from fairly mild to way-past-grapefruit-juice.
hey man… You do You.
I am a Whiskey and Coke guy so everything to do with IPAs is lost on me.
Just imagine if you ordered a jack and coke, and you had no way of knowing if they’re actually going to give you watered-down diet coke and the mildest single malt scotch they could find, or cherry coke and a really intense rye, or anything in between. And at every new place, it’s just a gamble what you’ll get.
That’s kinda what its like.
A bit of a hot take… bigger communities tend to get harder to please, regardless of anything else
I saw a few gacha game communities (please don’t judge me lol) grow in real time, because gacha games need as large as a player base as possible for their business strategy (which is a separate topic)… Saw the level of toxicity rises in real time as my main game’s community get bigger. Like the community literally went from being okay with just about anything to arguing over the weirdest details on character designs and complaining about every live-service event. And then there’s all the rumor about communities of Hoyoverse games… including once when someone almost murdered the company CEO over a bunny girl event (I’m not making this up)
Among similar sized ones I’m not entirely sure
Hardcore Sonic fan here: It’s not that Sonic fans are hard to please, it’s that it’s a fandom that doesn’t have as strong a sense of consensus as a lot of other fandoms. There’s a few obvious favorites in the series (S3K and SA2 mostly) but even then not to the point where people get to thinking not liking them is objectively wrong (vs., say, Kirby, as someone who likes most of the series but thinks Kirby Super Star is an awful game.) There isn’t really one thing that “every” Sonic fan really wants.
This results in outsider commentary from people who are used to fandoms with strong consensus invoking the Goomba Fallacy all the time.
Hell, I’ll also note that I sometimes see people say that Sonic fans are too easy to please because a lot of us liked something like Frontiers in spite of it’s miryad of flaws.
lemmy
Mentions anything…. Switch to Linux!
Switch to Linux… Switch to Arch!
Every time i see a sonic new sonic game, metroid or now mega man game i wonder why?i liked all of these games like 30 years ago. I don’t see any reason to buy a new one now, except it’s somehow an absolute banger. I played these games because they were fun, not because they had my favourite guy in it. Is the Megaman man lore so deep that it needs expanding? Can no one make a game with a robot guy that can steal other robots powers, that plays really well?
I mean it makes sense that it’s hard to please Sonic fans. It wasn’t ever a good game, and so it literally exists solely due to nostalgia. Therefore if the base concept sucks they’re never gonna be able to make something fans like.
Then why do the fan game developers consistently nail what everyone wants? Christian Whitehead made a career out of it. Sonic Mania was the fruit of that labor. There is the modernization of Sonic Adventure 2 project that rebuilds the game on UE5 I think that everyone was universally floored by.
It isn’t that Sega has an impossible task to please Sonic fans, it’s that either their corpo overlords dont let them do what is needed to pull it off, or their egos are too large to allow them to listen to their fanbase. Sonic Team was internally pissed that Sonic Mania was more popular than the project they had worked on at the same time (I believe it was Sonic Forces), and then later the new 2.5d Sonic game didn’t do so well which rubbed them raw even more.
Sonic fans dont shy away from communicating what it is that they want, you know this to be true.
Sport clubs fans.
You cant get more tribal than that.
But easiest fans to please: Team Fortress 2 (they would be happy with only acknowledgement by valve) And Toby Fox Fans
Star Wars
(“Honourable” mention: Star Trek fans. The blind nuTrek hate is something else.) Edit: The expected downvotes may as well be upvotes for purposes of this comment lol. See everyone? Case in point.Nah. Mando, Rogue One, Lower Decks, and New Worlds wouldn’t have all been received well if they were difficult to please. It just takes doing more than the absolute bare minimum of shitting out slop and expecting the deluge of garbage to somehow please people that have already received far, far better in the past.
Both IPs have their expected tropes and ‘feel’ already established, for better or worse. It shouldn’t surprise people that massive deviations in uncreative directions weren’t well received.
When peoples’ well liked IPs turn out to be nothing more than a coat of paint on Generic SciFi Script #350386, OFC fans won’t respond well.
Both of them would be rather easy to please if companies would put in a minimal amount of effort.
Dont mess up story telling and established characters an they’ll be happy Dont mess too much with the established lore, that is like bringing a sand storm to the desert. Yes it will sturr up some sand but eventuelly it will settle when people think about it. Mediclorians for example. Huge uproar but if you start thinking about it, it doesnt contradict established lore and even makes sense that a futuristic civilisation with some discovered energie would find a way to detect this energie connection to a person
I wholeheartedly disagree, lol.
I love the idea of Star Wars, but every movie since Empire has been a toy advert.
I feel it only really gets a chance to shine when you pull out out of its comfort zone of the Skywalker family. Rogue One, Andor, most of The Mandalorian.
I cannot speak for all Sonic fans, but the only time I have ever been completely disappointed by an official Sonic game is definitely the 3DS Sonic Boom game. I tried. A single level in and I wasn’t a fan. That, and of course that one runner game that gets constantly recycled through every single IP under the sun. You know the mobile game.
The only other time I’ve been disappointed is the latest Sonic Transformed because they’re going the route of having too many non-Sega characters in a Sonic racing game. Similar reasoning as to why I hate all Mario & Sonic Olympics titles. Cut the Big N and I’d probably still not like them because they ain’t my cup of tea, but at least I wouldn’t hate them.
I’m the easy type of Sonic fan to please, for the most part¹. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a game that starts slow paced like Sonic and the 7 Rings or something as buggy as Sonic '06, I’m here for a good time, not a long time. As long as the game is completable and isn’t the transformed racing series ( Riders was 1000x better ), I’m down to try it.
¹ As an arachnophobe, we do NOT bring up the Sonic Boom cartoon episode where Styx gets cursed. Nor do we bring up the fact I’m sore about not being good at Spinball on Genesis/Mega Drive.
