Thanks for the confirmation. I was wondering if the lack of reticle was because the HUD was off. I couldn’t imagine it getting scrapped so I figured that was the case.
Now I need to go back and see if I can hear that clicking sound when he *rolls* into the spring. If that sound is there then that would confirm that he’s homing into the spring and not spin dashing Edit: Shoot, I definitely heard the clicking sound as he walked up to the spring. It appears that Sonic can not roll or spindash... given the slopes in the levels this is very disappointing. Maybe boosting down slopes will be satisfying... time will tell but I’ve just become significantly less enthusiastic about Frontiers... oh well, there are more important things in life to spend my energy on
If the game comes out this November, that gives Sonic Team only 3–4 months before sending it off for certification, printing, and distribution. Considering the game has been in development for at least 3 years, I don't see them making any significant changes beyond polishing unless this footage is very old (which I think is unlikely).
The gameplay footage we saw was NOT recorded by IGN, like everyone thought. It was provided by SEGA. This leads me even more to believe that this footage is older than we think.
Jesus christ, why the hell would they advertise their game like that. I could understand if it was IGN playing but I'm just utterly dumbfounded. What a marvelous display of sheer incompetency.
Not just a poor demonstration of the game and especially their poorly planned "let's dripfeed this over the course of the month" strategy, but they're the ones sending choppy, jittery 30FPS footage despite it being 4K, and it's probably of a debug build that was tweaked for demo purposes. Just give me some raw gameplay for goodness sake. Doom 2016 was being considered slow and meek up until NVIDIA showed off some proper gameplay shortly before release, and suddenly everyone was on-board for it. But Sega probably won't hear or care for any of these concerns, they never do.
Then it makes me wonder why that gameplay was showed in first place...? Honestly, I'm gonna pretend I didn't saw anything and just wait for the combat gameplay. At least tomorrow we'll have Sonic Origins gameplay.
Somehow I'm only now realizing that some of the rail/spring stuff just launches Sonic at a heart pick-up or whatever that the player can't really see pre-emptively.. and then he drops like a rock from the air because the forward momentum stops after a second. Some of these crazy floaters air rails and spring setups only exist to have a tiny fancy setpiece before dropping you, because these kinds of things were programmed for forward progression in a linear level, not retuned for the open environments in any way.
Would be a neat surprise to learn that what we've seen is a test build from their initial 2020 reveal or something even if it lead to undue alarm, but I think even if it's current, the biggest tech problems can and should be fixed by release. Rise of Lyric had the excuse of being a cryengine game forced onto the Wii U in under a year, this game doesn't get that.
Has this really been the longest Sonic game in developing btw? If I'm remembering the leaks weren't they still throwing ideas in consumer tests in 2018, and Iizuka said they started development of the game during SXSW 2019. Going from that leak with the survey screenshots from November 2019 and someone reporting they played tested the game in February 2020, to me it sounds the game has been in development for 3 years instead of 5. From the GameInformer interview With the 2018 restructure Sega had, plus COVID blowing up everything in 2020 then I don't think this game had the longest dev cycle people think it had.
From what I’ve gathered, the process with Pontac and Graff was that Sonic Team made the basic story and cutscenes, they wrote the English script, then Sonic Team make the final cutscenes based on it and then write the Japanese localization. Though Forces might have been a bit different because there was an original Japanese scriptwriter too. No clue if that’s the process Ian’s following or if they gave him more creative control. Recently it sounds like he’s been involved in meetings helping to establish the current series canon so I wouldn’t be too surprised if he had a bigger role. At the end of the day though, the story is informed by the gameplay so it would make sense for Sega to have made the core story concepts.
It looks fine. The only thing that really rubs me the wrong way is how much of the platform sections shown here seem to rely on objects floating in the air. Reminds me when you'd find out of bounds objects in Sonic Adventure or when the level would unload in Generations. It just looks tacky. I see a some people mentioning how it looks like an Unreal Engine Fan Test Level... and I agree so far. Worth noting that we really don't know when this build is dated and so until we see more footage later in the month its hard to tell how close this is to the potential final product. For all we know some of the design here could indeed just be a test for demonstration purposes.
People always do this dunk and it always bothers me because it's factually incorrect. Forces was made by the Colors and Gens team. Just look up the credits. SEGA weren't lying. The only reason this view thar Forces was made by a different team developed was because of a desperate fan theory that Sonic Team had an A Team who made Gens and a B Team who made Colors and Lost World (the games they didn't like). The different directors probably urged them on a bit. But they kept hoping this made up A Team would suddenly unveil an awesome new Sonic game secretly in development for years. However this is completely wrong. Lost World had a huge team and Gens' lead level designer was even the system designer. Lost World team was made up of Colors and Gens staff because there was no A and B Team. There was just one Sonic Team. We have had a consistent Sonic Team since Lost World. The team who made Colors and Gens worked together on Lost World, Forces, and are now working on Frontiers. The only thing that really happened is that some talented Gens staff worked on other projects (Mario and Sonic) or left SEGA entirely. The really interesting development in the Team is that Lost World had a huge development team but Forces had a much smaller one. Could indicate downsizing but then Frontiers surely must have a large development team. To be honest I'm tempted to make a thread about this because people are always so wrong about it.
So this means SEGA sent IGN this footage that Sonic Team played THEMSELVES, and some higher-up at Sonic Team was like "make sure you show off those trick animations!", or "be sure to include footage of you failing to wall run!" It also explains the 4-frame cut you can see in the footage when Sonic gets off the hamster wheel, which appears to be a different build of the game (?) I'm holding out hope that the rough edges are either artifacts from an older build, or they're things the team is actively working on when they say they're polishing up game's quality. There seems to be a disparity between reactions to what we're seeing vs. whatever it is that insiders actually played, because current consensus seems to be that the game is disappointing... but we've consistently received reports that insiders thought it was really good. Even IGN seems to be alluding that SEGA isn't giving us the full picture in these 2 trailers.
Now that I've had more time to think about this and put the kneejerk reaction aside I have to say, I'm just not feeling this game at all so far. Somehow my kneejerk reaction was more positive than how I feel now lol - Sonic's basic movement looks so... boring. Any sense of real speed and momentum just does not seem to be there. He looks like he's just going to be tedious to move around. He looks like he controls like the horse from Elden Ring, which is fine for that game but I'm not sure if it's ideal for Sonic. - Animation quality looks to be of a really poor standard - The over-reliance of the magic grind rails in the sky feels like a crutch for the lack of usual Sonic elements in the natural environment. Like they were worried the map wasn't "Sonic-y" enough and added the grind rails as a precaution. - The combat (what little we've seen of it) doesn't look particularly fun or exciting. + The soundtrack is cool I guess, even if the general direction is a bit derivative I'm keeping my mind open because there are a lot of secrets we still don't really know about this game. It's just disappointing that Sonic's moveset still leans so heavily on the basic boost framework, when I was hoping for a complete revolution from the ground up. I like to think of myself as a somewhat positive person. I don't like to be cynical over viddy games, but if it continues to look bad then I'm just gonna straight up call it bad.
What? The whole scene re-renders with some nasty pop-in, but that's not a "different build of the game"?
The "different build" thing is a bit of a joke, but you can also clearly see objects don't just pop in, a group of foliage on the left side of the screen completely disappears - both behind and in front of the bridge - and a ground texture changes. If that's not a cut then I'm confused how this game looks that bad. Pop-in is one thing, objects teleporting between frames is another issue. Those 4 frames are also completely still. The animation resumes exactly on the 5th frame, including the inside of the wheel which was already in motion.
Really hope that the people who speculate that it's an earlier build are correct(Almost guaranteed). When Halo Infinite showed its gameplay, it was using a much rougher build than what the e3 trailer showed. Don't know if anyone has pointed it out but when Sonic is doing tricks, you can see particles moving towards the bottom right of the screen which is probably where the boost bar is? Not a huge deal but just something that caught my eye when rewatching the IGN footage. To avoid double posting, the Stomp behaves so strangely. Starts sluggish and then plummets downwards.
It's actually kinda funny how several months ago to last year, our major screenshots of the game world showed Sonic just staring at not-Breath of the Wild in a generic idle pose, and now that gameplay's being shown, there's suddenly floaty grind rails in the sky for miles on end everywhere. Makes it feel like most of the prototyping and game design was focused on the world geometry, probably a lot of dedicated work in actually crafting Starfall Island, and then some cheeky level designer slapped these things all over the skyline without an ounce of consideration for the art style or world design.
