As part of the Sonic News Channel’s investigation on the community’s reaction of the development of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, editor Ryan Scarlett spoke with popular community personality BlueParadox and asked the following questions.
SEGA has pulled the Rise of Lyric reveal trailer on YouTube. What’s your reaction and what does it assume?
You know, it’s quite surprising that, after a video that explained what went wrong with Rise of Lyric, SEGA decides to cover the whole thing by making the reveal trailer private. This is just very sad. The game could have a big potential, but at the end of the day, people will still criticize.
Who do you think is at fault? SEGA or Big Red Button?
I think it’s SEGA’s fault. From what I’ve heard, SEGA picked an engine (CE3) that wasn’t compatible with the Wii U. The game was going be a multi-platform game, as far as I know; that why they chose that engine I guess. But then, all of the sudden SEGA decided to change their plans without warning to Big Red Button. (they warned them about this days later, which was too late) SEGA wanted to make the game exclusive to the Wii U due to the Nintendo deal that they made, without realizing that the CryEngine 3 wasn’t suitable for the Wii U. So yeah, I think it’s SEGA’s fault. SEGA was putting so much pressure to Big Red Button. This led to some of the employees to leave the company (Big Red Button) because they just couldn’t handle it.
What’s your reaction to SEGA alleged mismanagement with the game development?
BlueParadox: If the engine is not supported on the Wii U’s hardware then why did they continue with the development of the game? I think that they still had time to move all of the game’s assets/data to a new engine that supported the Wii U. But instead they just had to continue developing the game. It’s such a shame that a game like this had been developed for years and yet it’s was received badly by critics.
Any further comments?
I just hope that SEGA is really learning from their “big” mistake, because what they’ve done is really unacceptable, especially when a lot of time and effort was placed in the game’s development. Sanzaru Games did a great job with Shattered Crystal in my opinion. But the story was just awful. I hope the best for SEGA.
This article was originally published on 26 May 2015 by the Sonic News Channel, a former subsidiary of the Sonic News Network. Original content produced by the Sonic News Channel was inherited by Tails’ Channel as of 23 October 2017.
This article was revised for clarity, and is presented for educational and informational purposes.
