Why would any game mechanic have a "skip gameplay" button? RPG puzzles are actually part of the game. Not being required to do them is one thing, but being to push a button and have them do themselves is completely different.
You're missing what I am saying. Look at the level design and what's in it. There's a clear focus on really specific tropes of the Sonic gameplay we've been complaining about for years. That's what made me think of Sonic 4 - there's clear elements of that design ethos there. And no - I don't think that's a good thing.
Insomniac's games have done it for the past few years, so there is a precedent. Ratchet & Clank and Spider-Man do let players who don't want to / can't on account of disability skip certain puzzle minigames and segments.
I was thinking of Ubisoft and Naughty Dog's recent games, which will have a puzzle required to progress the story, but if you spend too much time on it or whatever, you'll be allowed to simply skip the thing. I wouldn't expect them to do this for content that's truly optional, but if puzzles are required for progression in any way, it's possible. EDIT: Ninja'd.
I had no idea skip buttons for regular puzzles was so commonplace in games. The only time I knew about before was it getting patched into Hiveswap.
There's a lot of quality factors that make Sonic 4 distinctively bad as a 2D title, such as the graphics, the control scheme, and the level philosophy. Gotta agree with Dark Sonic; Forces hits closer to them a lot closer than Frontiers does. Most of the homing attack chains and routes we've seen in Frontiers gameplay so far isn't really that far off from any other 3D Sonic outing since Unleashed, with the only distinction being that it's out in an open field now. Frontiers is clearly a more combat-heavy game as well, so combined with the kind of gameplay its following from as-is, I wouldn't expect "momentum" style gameplay we've seen in many 3D fan game tech demos; it's clearly not a priority of Sonic Team.
Also, Forces used those chemicals plant speed boosters everywhere like Sonic 4 did. This is the 1st game to return to the Generations style dash panels since... well Generations. Those Chemical Plant boosters are easier to see in 2D but they looked dumb in Forces and Lost World
Seeing the translation of Kishimoto's words and how he insists on "open zone" in singular, it makes it feel like even if there's multiple biomes to end up exploring, it may all be one "zone", so maybe a rough estimate of 28 action stages may not be quite right. It really does sound like a mix of Banjo-Tooie and other hub-based collectathons, really; explore and get stuff in a hub to get the means to access the more tightly-designed stages. It's just this hub is the real meat of the game rather than merely the transfer between the stages.
Japanese doesn’t really have plurals in the way English does and saying open-zones loses the open-world parallelism. I wouldn’t read into it.
Also, bear in mind a few things. The likes of Mario Odyssey and Mario 64 are still called “sandbox games” despite there being multiple sandboxes. It’s just the naming convention of game genres, see also puzzle games. Furthermore, we’re not meant to know about the other islands yet. As far as I’m aware, we’ve only heard about them via the leaks.
Yeah I wouldn't read into that, we have confirmation that there will be multiple islands and some islands will have different themes.
There have definitely been impressions referring to the officially-released videos as being "the first of the islands", if that counts. Even from the leaks we've had very little description of the other environments themselves. God, I really hope there is seven of them. I feel like a Sonic game with 49 acts would have to have some really cool ones just by law of probability.
I always thought it was funny that those ones were designed to look like the spinning wheels on a baseball launching machine Spoiler: images I like to imagine that they just break every single bone in Sonic's body when he gets launched from one lol
in case you have missed the "leaks", this is the clearest look we have yet to the cyperspace level https://twitter.com/saihati72/status/1537737758474702849?s=20&t=5f4OeMyPPWOcvj6PvQYdPw
Both Iizuka and Kishimoto feel genuinely proud and invested in what they've done this time, like they finally got enough room to breathe and enough freedom to be creative. I think the success of mania along the good enough results of forces put the team in a good position to be more in control and get a bigger budget to follow up (and, of course, the movies as they mention them). Overall, seeing game devs experiencing the joy of creating a new game at its full it's really nice, it's like, despite their many failures, they finally got it, they finally did what they really wanted in a way they really like and it really works. The game may not be what everyone wants or likes, but I think it will be a much more respectable work than usual. That said, Kishimoto threw in a couple of sentences that were worst for marketing this game to me than anything prior, the usual stuff about "sense of speed" as if it was the only important thing in the games and "raising the difficulty can get into the way of it" which is something similar to what they said about Forces' design. Thinking "photorealistic" is necessary to give it a serious tone is something else I don't buy, but I also agree their usual non-photorealistic takes (Colours, Lost World) have pointed to the opposite, like them or not. Back to the topic on the cyberspace levels, I don't mind if they repeat old levels as long as they do better than ever, at least with the levels we've seen the most, because I'd accept without issues never revisited stuff like Marble Zone. If they're gonna be the new special stages, though, I'd like them to be totally surrealistic areas, and, if they're rehashed levels, make surreal versions of them too similar to how levels of SCD change from one future to the other.
If we’re gonna reuse level tropes, can we at least use ones that haven’t already been given the HD treatment? Mystic Cave, Final Egg, Green forest, Egg Fleet? I guess that pivots a little too far away from the whole “reuse whatever we can” mentality huh? And no, I’m not talking about reusing the same bridge textures in the open world. Who cares. Im talking about ripping entire stages and their assets from Sonic Generations…again.
