I'm reading the '06-roasting here while coincidentally in the middle of my very first playthrough and having a legitimately fun time with it. Maybe I'm some kind of perverted freak or something.
@Zigetch Seems like your expectations are kept in check. Use it to your advantage. =P This happened to me as well. Thought it had some neat ideas.
@Zigetch Something similar happened to me. The 06 bashing inspired me to come back and replay some levels. If you like 06, you should get the hard & very hard mode DLCs. They're not perfect, but they change up the levels in a lot of interesting ways.
Speaking of 06, this has probably been mentioned here before but I think it's interesting how the seamless day-and-night cycle that was demonstrated in the TGS 2005 build of 06 finally made its way into a Sonic game with Frontiers, 17 years later: Spoiler: 06 day and night Spoiler: Frontiers day and night Makes you wonder if there's any other unused content from previous games that got recycled in Frontiers.
Yeah I've drawn comparisons between the two recently and even since Frontiers' announcement, especially their shared concepts of a Day/Night cycle. The similar aesthetics and melancholic vibe is something I really like about both games but I can understand being in the minority on that.
I mean it’s Adventure format. 06 does not have bad level design for a 3D Sonic game. The controls and animations are just very bad which distracts you from how good the level design is.
I dunno if I'd go that far. 06's levels have merit in their broadness and detail, but they still leave a lot to be desired in terms of actual Sonic gameplay. They're very flat and are absolutely not built with any kind of weight in mind to the character movement.
Tbh, I don't think there's any real connection between the two. I would imagine it's a feature in Frontiers because it helps to emphasize the open world aspect of the game (considering a day/night cycle is a common feature of open world games), not because Sonic Team wanted to make a callback to a feature cut from one of their least well received games.
Sorry, I thought the direct comparison between unused content in 06 and used content in Frontiers then this implied otherwise.
I wasn't saying it was an intentional callback to 06. Just that an unused concept from an old game got used in a new one. It's not uncommon for Japanese game developers to revisit scrapped concepts from prior games when making new ones. (Hell, just look at Sonic 3.)
This. The concept of a day and night cycle is par for the course when taking about open world games. I doubt it was a reused idea from '06 and more likely just an obvious choice that came up early in development. We'd have seen the cycle in Frontiers even if it had never existed in the early days of 06.
An additional real-world example, Pokemon is famous for this at this point. It is nuts seeing concepts in the demos making their way to official games years if not decades later (Leafeon, Tangrowth, Iron Jugulus being a callback to Hydreigon originally being a dragon-tank, Iron Bundle having Delibird's beta typing), as well as attempts to bring back scrapped things only to scrap them again (Meowth's pre-evolution & the Raitora line being originally slated for Red & Green, showing up again in Pokemon 2 Spaceworld Demo only to not make it again in the final Gold & Silver).
https://x.com/proto_arts/status/1729573204140642323?s=46&t=MHTgOqh_ka45HS8oxL2mzw here's a cool mod that allows Sonic to gain speed naturally. this is more of what I'd like to see in the next game, with world design that encourages you to interact with the terrain in creative ways to gain speed. would be a cool way to bring the mach state from Advance 2 into 3D.
Re: 06 I really appreciate 06's level design for going back to the "every playable character plays the same levels which are built to support all of them" style. Now if only 06 did that well (I really would like to see a 3D game try that again, but if Frontiers' style is going to be the future paradigm that's not really going to happen)
But it didn't do that. It changed each level's design to be shaped around the specific characters that play them. Silver's Tropical Jungle doesn't support Sonic's gameplay any more than Crazy Gadget supports the Egg Walker. The only levels that are actually built to support everyone the same are in the 2D games.
While this is true, I do feel like 06 had the better idea for the alternate characters in terms of making them feel similar to Sonic , just with their own unique moves rather than feel like totally different styles as the Adventures games did a bit. Knuckles and Rouge did play fairly similar to Sonic in SA1/2 but they had a totally different gameplay objective which gave their gameplay a totally different feel.
That's essentially what Heroes, Forces and Frontiers did though. Though, admittedly, I did forget that the sole 3D game to ever adopt the classic style use of multiple playable characters was...Sonic and the Black Knight.
