Dear Reader:
RUMOR - NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams was once a 360/PS3 title?
In particular, it reveals an internal strife between Sonic Team and Sega of Japan, highlighted by the fact that NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams was originally developed as an Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 title - going so far as to say he (Ben Andac) played an Xbox 360 build of NiGHTS at one point. Upon witnessing the overnight success of the Wii, Sega of Japan apparently forced Sonic Team to retool the game for Nintendo’s lower-spec platform, something its producer (Takashi Iizuka) was not happy about. Despite the shift in platform, the game’s fast-approaching release date and limited development budget remained firmly unchanged, giving Sonic Team roughly one year to rebuild NiGHTS exclusively for the Wii (when most games typically take two years or more to develop). - tssznews.com
I can definitely see the story as plausible. NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams wasn’t exactly a AAA quality game. It wasn’t the horrible mess that some claimed it to be, but it could have been much better. The explanation above would point to why the quality was lower than what most were hoping for.
The rest of the article goes on to discuss the serious issues that Sonic Team has with game development, how they’ve lost their passion for creating games, and how they’ve run the Sonic series into the ground…a topic I am sure that many of you are very familiar with.