Taking a long view I can see where Iizuka's coming from, but I think it's the wrong premise to approach it from whether to use pixel art or not.
2D games in general reach a broader audience than 3D, and
Sonic specifically has to think about the 8-year-old that's never touched a console game before. While the last decade showed second graders are quite amenable to pixel art, Sega wants 2D
Sonic to be a $60 release--the bigger obstacle is convincing their
parents to buy it. Dad will put $10 down for
Undertale, but wait for a sale when he sees
Shovel Knight's $40 tag. He'll drop $20 on
Mania, but not three times that. Pixel art is still viable, but it's a different business model than what Sega wants
Sonic to be.
That doesn't automatically mean 3D is the most approachable or cost-effective way of doing 2D
Sonic. When fans bring up
Mania, my first thoughts actually go to the opening:
There would be a number of advantages to doing a hand-drawn
Sonic game, even for the sharks running finance. 2D animation is cheap, yet perceived as valuable because it's rare. Work is sparse in general 2D animation, so there's a lot of skilled animators that could be employed at what are low costs for the game industry but high wages for animators. High-res 2D assets have a faster turnaround than polygon models, and don't have to scale in strict integers like pixel art. So you get the advantages of 2D assets while being able to adjust for nonstandard aspect ratios on PC/Mac/mobile, the way you can with 3D.
The question of how difficult different types of 2D are to make comes up a lot. I would consider
what Naoto Oshima said of
Superstars' art style:
"If you think about the old Genesis games, everything's flat. So if you turned one of those 2D Sonic games on its side, it's just a line of pixels," says Oshima. "But when you're making a 2D game with 3D models, if you turn that sideways you're going to have this really wide area. And because we have four-player multiplayer, each of the characters need to be able to run side-by-side but not on top of each other – otherwise you're going to see arms poking out of other people's bodies"
"So even though you're seeing it all from a 2D perspective, we had to make the collision work for that 3D space… at the same time, it still has to look and feel like the 2D Sonic games while you're playing it. It was extremely difficult," says Oshima. "It's actually more difficult than just making a 3D game, where you can just look with a free camera, because it always has to act as if it's a 2D game."
The reality is, there's
no such thing as an easy game to make. Everything will be difficult in its own way--it comes down to time, labor, and tech. Working in pixel art, you have to define a virtual resolution and palette to work in, and anything like variable device resolutions or aspect ratios is a huge headache. Most people do not learn skills like
animating your anti-aliasing, but those that do are
really good at it.
Working in polygons, you have to consider lighting, shaders, draw distance, level-of-detail, the whole pipeline of diffuse/specular/normal/whatever maps, and tricks like
impostors. There is a wider talent pool available for this, but the ceiling is much higher which makes proficiency harder to achieve. The greater complexity of the pipeline makes each asset consume more man-hours.
What is right for Sonic specifically? What reaches the broadest audience, represents the characters faithfully, and is most legible to play, while still fitting in the $60 boxed-game-at-Christmas format? When I look at footage of
Superstars, I don't see the hook in the art style. It seems like a conservative guess of what audiences will buy, but it doesn't instantly grab me and make me think about it all the time like
Wonder. I may just be outside their target though.
If they wanted to stand out from other 2D platformers, there's very little competition in that high-res hand-drawn space. I can name
Cuphead,
The Dragon's Trap,
Hollow Knight, and some of the
Shantae games, which are a little more core-facing than
Sonic. If you get out of platformers and look at other genres, there's Vanillaware games and
Indivisible, but it's still a small pond.
Sonic could be a really big fish in it.
Is "pixel art" and "sprites" the same thing?
It's weird to consider Hollow Knight a pixel art game.
I've never been particularly fond of pixelated art styles, but, for 2D gameplay, will always prefer sprites over 3D models. I also don't think it's a turn off to a mass audience. I doubt many put too much thought into it.
Generally, "pixel art" today means you're painting at a lower resolution (virtual resolution) than the target resolution. For example,
Shovel Knight has a virtual resolution of 400x240 pixels, scaled up 4.5x to 1800x1080 for 1080p displays. Most pixel art games now use a virtual resolution of 320x180 because it can cleanly scale 6x to 1920x1080 for 1080p, or 12x to 3840x2160 for 4k monitors. These games also follow certain retro palette restrictions that make them feel more like NES or SNES games.
Hollow Knight's assets appear to be painted at a higher resolution and downscaled to 1080, which is how general digital artwork is made. So it's not a "pixel art" game, in the way that
Owlboy or
Sea of Stars is.
Many historic pixel art games were painted at their exact target resolution (320x240, 256x224, etc.) and there are a few pixel artists today that work at 1920x1080 directly. If memory serves,
Savant Ascent is one of those rare full-resolution pixel art games. In practical terms, these days pixel art is something made in Aseprite, GraphicsGale, ProMotion, or another specialized tool. The hand-drawn look is made in software that try to imitate analog media; PhotoShop, Clip Studio Paint, Rebelle, etc.
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