No bikes in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Steve Lycett explains why

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed‘s main addition to gameplay over it’s predecessor will be racing through the skies and over water using transforming vehicles, with each character’s vehicle being modified appropriately to allow for these transformations to occur. While this change to the vehicle design seems obvious, you’d be forgiven for overlooking the fact that no bikes of any sort have been shown in any footage of the game. That’s because there aren’t any.

Sumo Digital Executive Producer Steve Lycett, via posts on the Sonic Stadium forums, explained why:

Bikes are out for a couple of reasons. First to reduce the advantage they had last time of being able to squeeze through tight gaps and be hard to hit with non-homing weapons. This is especially important when it comes to the air sections as there is plenty of free space.  Second, the whole transformation aspect requires vehicles to have a certain volume, so we’ve got places to store and hide wings.

Lycett even went on to suggest that a last minute addition to all bikes’ boosting mechanics in the original Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing was in part to blame for what he considers to be an unbalanced aspect of gameplay:

Balancing a game is HARD. Especially when you’ve got multiple characters, varying sizes, stats that differ and more. Especially when the design team add wheelie boosts to bikes at the last minute and you don’t get time to tune them properly

[Source: TSSZNews]