As for why that cost is important, flight is the safest ability in the game; it should not be the fastest. A core part of making time attack interesting is the element of risk. Riskier strategies like the thok being generally more effective makes things both more interesting to play and to watch. That doesn't mean that there won't be occasional maps where the shortcuts Tails has access to still make him the fastest; it just means that Tails shouldn't be the obvious go-to best answer for almost every map.
For starters, I think basing any character design nerfs on "the speedrun meta" is going to accomplish nothing but pissing off a section of the community that's been proving instrumental for getting the game some outside exposure. (SRB2 has been on the Games Done Quick stream twice this month!) Any changes made to Tails should be based on making him more interesting, not just stopping him from flying through levels as quickly.
Tails has always been the easiest character in SRB2. That's by design, as the design is taken directly from S3K. The problem is that our flight setup is currently built with the assumption that Tails's stats suck like they always did. Hell, his original max speed was 24. Now that Tails has good stats, the flight setup desperately needs to be looked at again to properly gimp his speed when flying up, like how it works in S3K. The duration is actually as it was in S3K, which let you trivialize a lot of obstacles with it just like you can here. The cost from S3K, slowing you down, is what's missing.
As for why that cost is important, flight is the safest ability in the game; it should not be the fastest. A core part of making time attack interesting is the element of risk. Riskier strategies like the thok being generally more effective makes things both more interesting to play and to watch. That doesn't mean that there won't be occasional maps where the shortcuts Tails has access to still make him the fastest; it just means that Tails shouldn't be the obvious go-to best answer for almost every map.
I actually had a roughly equal distribution of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles in terms of which characters I first used to earn record attack emblems. I've done record attack plenty since then just for fun, but I tend to stray from Tails because his flight sort of takes away the enjoyment from the rest. Speedrunning as Tails isn't so much about strategy as it is about freely skipping parts of levels and I'd appreciate it a lot if that was changed—I've even restrained myself from letting Tails take over so many records because it wouldn't be as much fun that way. All five other characters have plenty of strategy involved when speedrunning. Sonic and Metal are obvious, Knuckles has to be economic with time spent climbing and find the most efficient gliding paths, Amy has to find places where she can use jump height and spring hammering to her advantage, and Fang's bouncing needs to be timed appropriately.The reason why taking speedrunning into consideration is important is because time attack is embedded into our emblem system. I had brought this up in dev because I had learned while gauging the best times for record attack emblems that Tails was far and away the fastest character to use in most situations. This is a game balance issue that affects players attempting to 100% the game; because Tails is the easiest and most optimal strategy in almost all speedrunning situations, players have no incentive to experiment with speedrunning strategies for any other character.
I agree that we should make Tails more interesting, but what makes any character compelling is how their strengths and weaknesses impact a player's gameplay decisions. Record Attack viability factors into this.
I am in complete agreement with this. Sonic, idealistically, should be the fastest character in most, if not all levels. He's the hardest to use, but through mastering him you should master the levels. I'm not crazy into speedrunning levels as Tails because it just feels so barebones compared to doing so as Sonic. I was also hoping for an awesome Sonic speedrun from AGDQ but they chose Tails; and rightfully so, he's the fastest in the game!The reason why taking speedrunning into consideration is important is because time attack is embedded into our emblem system. I had brought this up in dev because I had learned while gauging the best times for record attack emblems that Tails was far and away the fastest character to use in most situations. This is a game balance issue that affects players attempting to 100% the game; because Tails is the easiest and most optimal strategy in almost all speedrunning situations, players have no incentive to experiment with speedrunning strategies for any other character.
I agree that we should make Tails more interesting, but what makes any character compelling is how their strengths and weaknesses impact a player's gameplay decisions. Record Attack viability factors into this.
Your explanation of each character's strengths makes it so apparent that Record Mode would really benefit from each character holding their own records. As it stands, I am not motivated to do many, if any levels as Sonic because he cannot get the best times. However, if everyone had their own identifiable records, I would be much more inclined to do so.I actually had a roughly equal distribution of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles in terms of which characters I first used to earn record attack emblems. I've done record attack plenty since then just for fun, but I tend to stray from Tails because his flight sort of takes away the enjoyment from the rest. Speedrunning as Tails isn't so much about strategy as it is about freely skipping parts of levels and I'd appreciate it a lot if that was changed—I've even restrained myself from letting Tails take over so many records because it wouldn't be as much fun that way. All five other characters have plenty of strategy involved when speedrunning. Sonic and Metal are obvious, Knuckles has to be economic with time spent climbing and find the most efficient gliding paths, Amy has to find places where she can use jump height and spring hammering to her advantage, and Fang's bouncing needs to be timed appropriately.
This is probably more of an issue with SRB2's weird air physics, though.
At this point, maybe we have a strong argument in favor of fixing the physics code before attempting any major character rebalancing, lmao
Tails has always been the easiest character in SRB2. That's by design, as the design is taken directly from S3K. The problem is that our flight setup is currently built with the assumption that Tails's stats suck like they always did. Hell, his original max speed was 24. Now that Tails has good stats, the flight setup desperately needs to be looked at again to properly gimp his speed when flying up, like how it works in S3K. The duration is actually as it was in S3K, which let you trivialize a lot of obstacles with it just like you can here. The cost from S3K, slowing you down, is what's missing.
As for why that cost is important, flight is the safest ability in the game; it should not be the fastest. A core part of making time attack interesting is the element of risk. Riskier strategies like the thok being generally more effective makes things both more interesting to play and to watch. That doesn't mean that there won't be occasional maps where the shortcuts Tails has access to still make him the fastest; it just means that Tails shouldn't be the obvious go-to best answer for almost every map.
I cannot dissagree, but I don't think nefring Tails is the solution. Changing a little bit his stats so he is not the fastest might be the correct thing to do. I just don't want to see Tails being ugly to control, clunky and unfun to play, that's all I'm trying to defend.
I want that so badly!!!!!!! I've kept a spreadsheet of per-character records because it's the fastest way I can check my record per character, not whichever one happens to have the fastest time. I wonder if there's a mod that changes how record time is displayed to a per-character basis that wouldn't block me off from doing Record Attack.Your explanation of each character's strengths makes it so apparent that Record Mode would really benefit from each character holding their own records. As it stands, I am not motivated to do many, if any levels as Sonic because he cannot get the best times. However, if everyone had their own identifiable records, I would be much more inclined to do so.
After having messed around with CobaltBW's Momentum Mod for a bit, I think that the best solution would be both S3-style flying and cutting flight time down to 6 seconds. It wouldn't put a stop to spinfly completely, just make it not nearly as insane, and 6 seconds is still plenty of time for beginners to gently hover over to the next platform.
Now that the level design is definitively more newcomer-friendly [...]