It seemed to be underground caverns/mines that share a style with Park Avenue, hard to tell from what little footage there was.
Whoops nope, https://youtu.be/8JwnP9eFo-c?t=2m30s it's park avenue. FUCK THIS MARKETING WHY CAN THEY NOT SHOW OTHER LEVELS
Maybe we're just overly antsy for new info and grasping at anything that can make the game look better than what little they've shown so far, but then putting your information in a chokehold doesn't help. Lost World was pretty liberal about showing its zones and even putting the "twist" of the Deadly Six betrayal right out there for all to see, while SEGA's attempting some weird lockdown effect with Forces and trying to make sure to reveal as little as possible if they can get away with it, as if they really want us to care about the story and it has some big ass twists or something.
It's even more concerning when stacked next to what Nintendo's been showing off with Mario Odyssey - very confident with showing us so many worlds and is happy to tell us "There's so much fucking stuff in here you won't believe, we ain't even started yet". I'm not getting the same vibe from Forces at all and I hope that's just me reading into it a little too much.
I'm just so tired of Green Hill and Chemical Plant to be honest (who isn't?) If they're gonna do old zones, why do they barely touch anything from 3? Hell, the only other iteration we've seen of a Sonic 3 zone is Hydrocity in Mania. Where's Marble Garden? Where's IceCap? Hell, replace Green Hill with Angel Island; it's got a better song anyways imo. Gonna have to go with this. This isn't the first time they've had to rush something out of the door because SEGA doesn't want to delay anything.
If it is rushed, it wouldn't be a surprise since they were still polishing and actually making the backgrounds for Classic GHZ several months ago between the Nintendo Direct reveal of it and the actual gameplay.
The only thing I've got to say about Forces now is: Where's the microtransactions? The game is $40 and they are giving it the same treatment as Sonic Boom. I don't think the question of microtransactions is out of line at this point.
I'm aware of that. That why's I'm referring specifically to that group responsible for the games --the people who identify as "Sonic Team"-- rather than just CS2 R&D as a whole. (Also, it's CS1 R&D who works on the Yakuza games, not CS2.) That and I don't think Sonic Team/CS2 working on other projects is a valid reason for Forces to look so last-minute thrown together--which was my main point of contention. I'm not assuming Forces' development team/Sonic Team/CS2 have literally just been twiddling their thumbs this entire time; I just think that Forces gives off such an impression, based on what we know about it as of this writing. On a similar note, the Switch version of the game, according to this recent preview, is also still suffering from performance problems. If they don't get it fixed by the game's release, we could be looking at a PS2 Heroes/Shadow situation.
So with that they finally unveiled a little more of the story. Gotta wait for english unless people are willing to translate the text and dialogue real fast. Still strictly adhering to showing little of new levels beyond a brief snippet of Modern GHZ and sneak peeks at a couple areas in cutscenes. Also jesus christ, the generic animals/citizens look like they have the body shape of random Sonic Boom citizens. I can see what they mean by being darker this time, but we need to see more of the cutscenes to know how well they're gonna look or play out, hopefully being a little more dynamic than the pantomiming of Colors through Lost World.
I hope I'm not the only one here thinking the presentation with these cutscenes looks...rather sloppy? The environment textures look unpolished (especially the ground texture in the first pic), the lighting looks really basic (why does the lighting in the second pic super bright for what's supposed to be a dark, cloudy location?), and the camera framing and positioning is really sterile, none of the shots look dynamic in any way (which especially looks bad here since they're going for a more story-driven and serious tone). Everything just has this raw, "unrendered" look to it, which is really baffling given the game is not only running on eight-gen hardware, but is also said to have an upgraded Hedgehog Engine on top of it. For a game coming out in two months...this just looks shockingly rough. (The silly text captions are YouTube autocorrect screen captures, for those wondering.)
So not only the Switch version still stutters like crap but manages to look worse than Generations. Wow, Sega. wow.
The scene where Sonic's falling into the weird technopit thing looks Unleashed quality. Everything else looks about as far as you can get from that, besides some of the more dynamic cutscene animations (like the QTE giant enemy crab with Avatar GHZ). Like, good god don't even try to look at the army behind Espio on the right of the cast shot, and the generic OCs near Tails look positively bland. The bear especially - I should've known better than to expect a different bodytype but they look like a stringbean sibling of Comedy Chimp, not a Bear.
That spells not-great news for me. I don't think my PC is good enough to run this thing, and I don't have any of the other 8th (9th? 8-and-a-half-th?) generation consoles this game is for.
Even though I have no intention of ever playing this game, I will say this positive thing: it sure is nice to see the rest of the Sonic cast again in a mainline Sonic game actually talking to each other and feeling relevant. I like the early 2000's vibes I'm getting.
I have always thought Modern Knuckles' proportions were a bit off, but this seems particularly bad - his thumbs are almost the same length as his legs. Has it always been this extreme? All I can think of is that Lobster Hand kid from American Horror Story... I agree that the cutscenes look rough around the edges and somehow worse than Unleashed/Colours/Generations but it was pretty nice to see some new content, mainly because there was something other than Green Hill/Park Avenue. I still don't understand their secrecy on showing us gameplay/stages. Honestly, even a few five second clips of different environments would be refreshing, we don't need to see everything just something other than the two environments we have been seeing on repeat for months.
