I press the issue because I am genuinely looking for an answer that squares with the experience I've had with the game, and with what I continue to notice from other new players.
The homing attack in the Sonic Adventure games is designed with the ability to not require levels of precision accuracy to play. I'm willing to bet that's why it feels good. You get that satisfying feel of getting to bash the enemy you're targetting every time. You get a cool chase sequence and you get to dash out after a chain. You feel cool for having bashed a few enemies and can continue going forward at high speeds. It *feels* cool, it has a flow to it and the appeal is definitely there for it. I get that.
However, homing attack has two drawbacks, and they're very major and
conflict with our design philosophy. The first is that it absolutely trivializes enemies to the point where the only way to make them challenging is for them to actually become immune to you. The second thing that it does is make it so enemies can take the place of actual platforming mechanics, thus encouraging low-effort and lazy level design that feels good for a bit until you start looking for the meat and potatoes of an actual platforming game.
The best example of this happening is Final Egg in Sonic Adventure 1. Ignoring the enemies for a moment, you have a particularly easy level that has a few sections you literally can't beat because there's no way to get from point A to point B. There's not actually much there at all. The level doesn't provide much in the way of challenges. It's really bland. But adding the enemies back in doesn't really fix this. The enemies act as the bridge for those sections you can't get across I mentioned earlier (acting to replace what
should be proper platforming), and acting as a hazard by flickering on and off with their electricity, making it so you have to time your jumps. Now, that sounds neat in theory, but that actually just translates to you sitting and waiting for an enemy to become vulnerable, not doing anything in the meantime. This is not a good experience.
We don't design our levels
or our enemies this way. We want our enemies to be something you have to engage with, and figure out. Learn how they work and beat them with skill and thinking. Not with automated targetting. Same with level design. We want engaging levels where you have to figure out how to approach the stage and the hazards it presents. Most importantly, we want to do that
in tandem. The enemies and the stage should complement each other to make the game actually require skill and thought to beat. Homing Attack does
not accomplish this. It causes the opposite to happen.
We're also already stretched really thin with 6 different characters + abilities. We're trying to figure out how to handle thok, which makes us have to consider how to do
yet another ability. It does not make sense to try to make that ability be something that goes
against our design philosophies when we already have a few ideas floating around that work
within our current design philosophies. I want to be abundantly clear, I'm not saying homing attack can't be fun, but it is
not something we are interested in including in the game because we strongly believe it would be a detriment to everything we've done so far.