There is no incentive to collect chaos emeralds unless you turn Super

[glaber]

You know, I have a quick dirty way to make the emeralds an incentive. Emerald lock the current final boss.

 

[Vash]

While that isn't entirely a bad idea, it's actually even less useful than anything, especially since there is no possible way to go super in that level, no matter how hard you try.

 

[clairebun]

While that isn't entirely a bad idea

On the contrary, I'd say it's a terrible idea.

It is a deliberate design choice that you can't go super as Tails and Knuckles. There even ARE super forms for them in the game accessible in match mode where it would be unfair if only Sonic could go super. There is a long, tedious as hell flamewar of a topic located here if you want to read up on more details as to why we are not adding super forms for characters other than Sonic in single player. We're not changing this, and we're not going through that flamewar yet again in this thread.

The main issue is that we still need an ending for our game; the good ending is what the intended "reward" for getting all emeralds as Tails/Knuckles is. Most of the old Sonic games used a good ending as the only reward for emerald collection. The only major exception was S&K and its lock-on variants. I'd also like to note that there wasn't a gameplay difference for the special stages by character in the classics, either. Sonic 2's special stages were nerfed if you played without Tails following and MORE nerfed as Knuckles, but the gameplay was the same. Sonic 3K's special stages were completely the same as each character, just with different sprites.

Actually, once the game gets loaded with Knuckles-specific sections, I think you should reconsider Knuckles' super form for SP and Coop.

 

[Monster Iestyn]

Only Knuckles's Super? At this point everyone's expecting either one or all of the main trio to turn super, if only because of S3&K.

 

[Metal Blake]

Only Knuckles's Super? At this point everyone's expecting either one or all of the main trio to turn super, if only because of S3&K.

Actually, I agree with him.

The thing was, in S3&K, Sonic and Knuckles could go super with only the chaos emeralds, whereas Tails needed the super emeralds. So, personally, I think Chuckles getting a super form, but not Tails, would make sense, even when going by S3&K's logic.

However, I am fine with how things are. Not only are there wads and lua scripts for super forms outside of Sonic, but there is always the ever-present idea of making it part of Pandora's Box.

 

[Pure-Fat Inc.]

I don't see the point of Tails and Knuckles being able to be super in singleplayer/coop. Unlike Sonic, Tails and Knux have their own abilities and beeing able to transform into super would make them too overpowered IMO. Sonic in the other hand only has the thok (which is a good ability) and when he's super, he can use the float to be as agile as Tails and Knuckles are.

Although, I'd like to see if someone did this, it would be hilarious:

Derp SRB2 birds, army of death...

 

[The Zero Team]

The thing was, in S3&K, Sonic and Knuckles could go super with only the chaos emeralds, whereas Tails needed the super emeralds.

Yeah, that's completely 100% true. Tails needed the Super Emeralds to go Super, as he would go Hyper with the Chaos Emeralds.

I'm probably wrong, though. I just remember Tails being able to transform Hyper (white-yellow-orange flashing with after-images) with the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic 3 & KnuckleHead, and Super (white-yellow-orange flashing without after-images) with the Super Emeralds. Can someone test this?

 

[Metal Blake]

Yeah, that's completely 100% true. Tails needed the Super Emeralds to go Super, as he would go Hyper with the Chaos Emeralds.

I'm probably wrong, though. I just remember Tails being able to transform Hyper (white-yellow-orange flashing with after-images) with the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic 3 & KnuckleHead, and Super (white-yellow-orange flashing without after-images) with the Super Emeralds. Can someone test this?

No, it was he was unable to transform with the chaos emeralds, but with the super emeralds he became super and gained his army of flickies. Sonic and Knux, on the other hand, had hyper forms more powerful than their super forms; Hyper Sonic was even faster, jumped even higher, had an, "Armageddon Double Jump", and flashed all colors of the rainbow, where as knux was faster, jumped higher, and clinging to a wall caused some earthquake effect that killed enemies or something.

 

[r543]

One way of fixing the "reward" would be to allow Tails and Knuckles to go super, I see no reason why this shouldn't happen but I can accept that the devs don't want that.(Sonic is the hardmode of the game, so he gets that reward, but that could be fixed by making some levels more sonic friendly because a lot of people are going to play the game as sonic, it's called sonic robo blast after all).
Different Special Stages for each characters would make it different, but that would need a lot of super sprites(so they can go super in special stages but not in the game ?) and custom characters would create a problem with this.

I'm not sure if "fixing" this would work, so I'd keep it like it is now.

 

[Unknownlight]

If you guys ever go to the effort of making character-specific NiGHTS sprites, please make them their normal forms, not their super forms. It doesn't really make sense that you're Super Sonic in special stages; the only reason it's like that is only Super Sonic has NiGHTS sprites.

 

[Monster Iestyn]

I think you're all forgetting one thing guys; characters already use all frames up to lowercase o since Super transformation was added. That gives any character only 15 more free frames before the extended ASCII frames (see here), which we DO NOT want to get to (see SRB2 Riders, which successfully shows why).

Normal NiGHTS Super Sonic flying alone uses up 18 frames on its own sprite (though really half of these are duplicates so lets call it 9), then drilling takes up another 36 sprites of its own sprite (4 drilling frames for each of 9 different angles). That's way more sprites than we have room for in a single sprite for a character. It's just too much to be practical.

Obviously one way around this would to seperate these into another sprite, but at this point something like this would have to wait for post-2.1 release if anyone will bother with this at all.

Still true for 2.1, except character frames go up to lowercase m now.

 

[Unknownlight]

...I'm not entirely sure how that's relevant.

Obviously one way around this would to seperate these into another sprite

You answered your own question. =/

 

[Monster Iestyn]

It's relevant because where else would normal Sonic/Tails/Knuckles sprites go? With the rest of their character wad sprites of course!

And *then* custom characters would be expected to be supported too, and then ...well. =V

 

[clairebun]

Only Knuckles's Super? At this point everyone's expecting either one or all of the main trio to turn super, if only because of S3&K.

That's not how S3&K works, and also it makes sense balance-wise, because once the game gets more Knuckles branches, the difficulty of completing the game as him becomes more legitimate. Mystic himself said he wants to better distinguish the differences between Knuckles and Tails, and this would be a step in that direction.

 

[Trolo Bobo]

The real problem is that the game rewards you with the super form because you choose sonic, and not because you completed 7 special stages which are now exactly the same for every character.Tails and Knuckles make the single player levels easier, but not the special stages and that means if you complete them with sonic you get super but if you do the same and Tails/Knuckles is the one who completes SP levels you get nothing. So there are 3 things left to do. One is changing the way how Tails/Knuckles plays the special stages but Mystic said that that's not going to happen. Another thing is to add a set of special stages for every character but that would cause problems for wads. The only thing that remains to do is to give Tails/Knuckles a reward, which will be an alternate ending. But that also means that the rest of the story has to be completed (BTW I suggest having cutscenes between zones).

And I also agree with Unknownlight that super form should be activated by jump+spin.

 

[Mystic]

I said we're not discussing Super Tails and Super Knuckles again after the previous train wreck of a thread, and yet the discussion continued, so I'm going to lock this thread. Sorry for those who were trying to make other points.