Agreed. The issue is quality control from the top; and since iizuka is still in charge I don't have much hope moving forward. That being said, it has always been abundantly clear that they rush these games out for the holiday. 4 years of "development" time usually means 3 years of building a test level and 1 year of serious nose to the grindstone development. That really needs to stop.
Are you saying SEGA acts different from other developers? We know that 3 years is plenty of time when the industry norm is 2 years. Mario Galaxy was developed in the same amount of time with around the similar sized team as Sonic Generation. The problem isn't time or man size, it's about what people at the top think is a good idea. Nothing wrong with sticking to a release date you just have to make sure you have the management that can deliver it.
Also with the Yakuza games, they certainly don't reinvent the wheel with each new entry, but instead build on a solid foundation. It's the lack of that foundation that is absolutely strangling Sonic.
Binary Domain was built within 2 years, ditto Yakuza 5 which between the taxi gameplay, Saejima's hunting sections and Haruka's dance battles, might as well be a reinvention of the of the wheel.
Generations didn't have enough stuff in it to justify the price tag, half the levels in Colours are filler, Unleashed made the game longer with pointless medal collecting, Sonic and the Secret Rings was filled with filler missions and Black Knight had rushed stage designs. In the case of Colours, Generations and Lost World at least it was clear that Sonic Team wanted to put more stuff in but couldn't due to time constraints. With each game they tried to make the game longer with levels or missions cobbled together out of stuff from already existing levels, with the exception of Generations where most of those missions were optional.
This doesn't really mean they're rushing it, just that they need to add better filler to the game. Looking back at the original games, Sonic was a short title compared to the likes of Monster World or Mario, nor was it hard enough like the Shinobi series that forced people to overcome multiple game overs. Back then multilayered levels, collecting the Chaos Emeralds, multiple character types, multiplayer etc all added to the replayable nature of the game and I think they need to go back to that.
I don't think it would be a good idea making a Sonic game with 40+ levels, but something close to 20 core levels with 8 bosses plus a couple of secret levels and bosses with multiplayer would be more than enough.
We know for a fact there was a lot of extra content that was made for Sonic Unleashed during development. The DLC levels for the most part (I believe?) layout are all accessible in the game so I don't think a shortage of manpower or development team was at fault but SEGA wanted to have some form of DLC available for the game.
The small development times with Yakuza work because with that they don't try to make an entirely different game with each game and usually build on top of pre-existing engines and such. Also in Sonic there are big levels with varied designs, which take more time to make.
That is true, the length of the stages are incredibly long. But then this a fault of the people at the top who think long stretch of meaningless boosting is a good idea.
EDIT: Actually, your point about Yakuza games not taking so long also goes back to Jim Sterling's point. A big part of why Sonic games need to have longer development times is because they always try something new. If they just built on to the modern Sonic gameplay of Generations, Colours and Unleashed they could make a great game.
See the second quote I replied to with Radrappy.
