I don't see how you can design a Sonic game to be a free-roaming, nonlinear game with Mario 64 elements.
What are you meant to collect? What are they for? What are the limitations?
I'm curious as to how the levels and map are going to be designed. Since this is Sonic, how can you design something like Mario 64 in this?
I guess this is a "wait and see" kind of thing, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
First off, let's get some things straight.
In the third dimension, travel from Point A to Point B gets repetitive and boring extremely fast. In all honesty, the best 3D games of the past ten years have been the type that allow you to go anywhere and give you the freedom to choose missions at different times. Games like Prince of Persia, Infamous, and Spiderman 2. They have their plot to tie events in the story, but the character is given free reign to move around and get to a point under any circumstances.
An idea, that I pitched to Azu, was Warren Spector's Play Style. While, this was being too ambitious on my part, I wanted a Sonic game that let you not only run as Sonic, but BE SONIC and see the effects that you have on the world around you. Maybe a tree is between you and Robotnik. Here's just a few of the options I had in mind:
A. You simply ignore the tree, and you attempt to find the more elaborate way to Robotnik.
B. You run up the tree's side, you jump on to one of the few tree branches. Once you land, you use your spindash ability to boost your swing as you start catapulting yourself off into the path you choose. This will prove as an annoyance to the neighbors and family in the tree, but they'll never know it was you.
C. You don't freaking care. You just mow down that sucker and go meet up with Robotnik. Unfortunately, you just made a family of Rickys untrustworthy of your heroism.
This is just one of the many ideas I have to really develop this franchise into something TRULY great.
---------- Post added at 06:17 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:13 PM ----------
Well it definitely sounds like a very prestigious project and I honestly hope that it turns out to be a enjoyable fangame. Of course, we'll have to wait and see for ourselves, and I generally don't trust word of mouth from any dev team until I've seen how it plays, but good luck anyways.
Understandable seeing as SEGA has done so too many times in the past just top hype up their latest project.
But trust me when I say, We're working hard on this.