Sonic Mania Plus SPOILER THREAD with UNMARKED spoilers!

Does anyone on here have access to the 1.04 patch? It would be amazing if someone could record the full Angel Island music track.

 

Gee, now it makes a whole lot of sense. We need to contact someone with the patch to preserve the Data.rdsk. It's literally a prototype (of a game that still not launched, so we should analyze after launch, but who knows what cool stuff lies in there!)

 

Another silver lining is now the devs know exactly how people were able to access the Encore mode zones just using the accidentally pushed 1.04 patch and prevent the same thing happening when 1.04 actually goes live on July 17th. Because that truly would be a major catastrophe if everyone that gets the 1.04 patch for free on July 17th could access/play all the Encore mode zones without actually paying the $5 for it.

The leak is actually gonna end up being a godsend, if the dev team wasn't aware how easily the Encore mode zones could be accessed with just the 1.04 patch via debug mode. Now they definitely know, and got time to fix it.

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2XFr82Li9xA

This dude is streaming encore mode

Spoiler

Not much new. Special stage rings are replaced by extra lives. Encore also has a new Mirage Saloon Act 1 which explains the lackluster transition I guess

Daytime Oil Ocean FTW

 

After several attempts I managed to debug into the Angel Island version for Mania Plus. I uploaded a video:

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I've also played through the entire Encore version of Green Hill (has some different enemy and object placement and some special stage rings are in different locations) but no matter what I try I always end up in normal Chemical Plant after I transition from Green Hill. That's frustrating!

If I enter a bonus stage (it doesn't have the new pinball bonus stage, just the normal blue sphere), once it finishes it just takes me back to the title screen.

Edit: I meant it "doesn't have"

 

Here's a recording of the full AIZ theme. It's beautiful.



EDIT: Holy shit the official Sonic account entered that leak streaming, and kindly asked to shut it down. https://twitter.com/Mlickles/status/997548006416072704

This is sad and hilarious at the same time.

 

Yay spoilers :v:

So that answers my question about Mirage Saloon 1. Looks like Mighty and Ray get their own stage, which looks really good.

Not 100% on the palette choices. The theme seems to be make everything orange, purple, and green with only a few exceptions (Oil Ocean mainly, which was already orange, purple, and green :v. It's fine I guess but it looks very samey. I'm sure the explanation is Phantom Ruby macguffin, but still. Lava Reef Act 2 looks nice though, it reminds me a lot of the early glitch palette that could be found in one of the Sonic 3C prototypes. Maybe it's a call back?

 

Christ almost everything about Plus is leaking. Don't mind to a certain extent since it's making me more hyped for the game. That music rendition of Angel Island Zone is just beautiful and all kinds of amazing. Also from these leaks it looks like Angel Island Zone is actually quite lengthy and extensive and almost an entire Act? And Mirage Saloon gets a new Act 1 and is therefore pretty much a new level? Fucking awesome.

So what's left that we've haven't seen at this point? Seems to be just the Pinball bonus stage and the changes in the zones for Encore Mode?

 

The fact that the other character turns into Heavy Magician when you pick your partner is a bit worrying. I really hope the plot wont wrap up with "Mighty and Ray were an illusion all along"

 

I've done a playthrough of Angel Island, Green Hill, Chemical Plant & Studiopolis in Encore mode:

 

We've seen everything now except for the pinball bonus stage, a finished/non-glitchy version of Angel Island, the second half of Lava Reef Zone Act 2, Metallic Madness Act 1 & 2, and Titanic Monarch Act 1 & 2.

I get why the official Sonic account came into that unlisted YT stream and kindly asked the streamer to stop, and nice of the streamer to comply, but there were dozens of people that streamed and made videos of the 1.04 changes to Mania mode and none of them have been taken down. The 1.04 patch accidentally getting pushed on just one platform in a specific region and only being live for a few hours means there's a limited number of people that have it (maybe a couple thousand--who knows), but that's still enough people that are very conscious of the fact that they have it that it seems impossible to prevent the rest of the footage getting out there.

As much as all this sucks for the devs, Sega, and even fans (since we've now seen nearly everything--though like I said for me it's making me more excited for July 17th), like I said earlier this all turned out to be a major blessing in disguise if the dev team was unaware that *all* the Encore zones could be accessed via the debug mode for people that only have the 1.04 patch and haven't yet made the transaction for the $5 DLC (which obviously isn't even possible for folks that have the patch early/now). If the final 1.04 patch had gone live on July 17th and shortly thereafter people discovered they could access all the Encore zones without making the $5 DLC transaction, that would have been a major catastrophe, because then you'd have news articles and headlines talking about it and a lot more people would have become aware that was possible to do. Now the dev team has time to make sure Encore/Plus material can't be accessed from the final 1.04 build until the $5 DLC transaction has been made. (Of course none of this affects the physical copies--they could not bother including the fix with those versions if they can't have it ready by the time those discs and carts are being manufactured, which should be very soon if not already. But yeah they obviously need to fix the digital versions of the 1.04 patch to not allow this to happen, if they weren't already aware about it--which they very well may have been; obviously this PS4 patch was not supposed to get pushed when it did and it's Sony's fault that it was.)

 

I doubt they'd be that tone-deaf. People were already furious when they jumped to conclusions about classic Sonic being an illusion in Forces. This is likely just a humorous way to get the plot going.

As for the palette swaps, they look kind of... dull? Like there's an overuse of brown and cold colors (even the title cards look less cheery). I think maybe things would look less off if this was limited to the backgrounds, but everything just looks kind of washed out or in need of illumination. This is the first time I'm disappointed with one of the game's artistic choices (I don't think the new palettes look terrible, but I can't say I'm a fan). Who knows, maybe they'll grow on me.

That Angel Island theme is great, though. I can't wait to hear the new Bonus Stage music.

 

^I've made some minor criticisms of some of the color palette choices, too, and yeah some of the new stuff we hadn't seen before is a mixed bag as well. But keep in mind we're making that judgment based on a low bitrate, low quality YT stream. "Sonic Mania" on PS4 Pro and PC looks way better than even the highest-quality encoded playthroughs on YT; 2D pixel art just looks way better natively than with any sort of video compression. But yeah, higher quality video uploads will come out of all this stuff and it'll be fair game to analyze and I do agree that my early impression is some zones just look too garish or similar to one another. (Of course the final build could have changes when it comes to the colors, as well, so improvements could have been made.)

All that said, was surprised at how much I liked how Oil Ocean looks in Encore mode. I've always liked it aesthetically even though it's one of my least favorite zones, and I still think changing the gold and green to different colors could do wonders for it/make it look even better, but even just changing the background worked well. Definitely one of my favorites in terms of the color changes. And the new transition between it and Lava Reef is probably the coolest in the game. Still not big on the Sandopolis gimmicks for Act 2 or the Act 2 boss, though...

I also thought the all-new Mirage Saloon Act 1 looked quite nice in terms of the colors, and the transition to night for Act 2 was great, though parts of Act 2 looked weird color-wise. Again, hard to say definitively based on a low quality YT stream--definitely looking forward to seeing it all natively on the PS4 and PC versions. (Switch looks good too and I like that version, especially portably, but yeah in terms of best visual quality PS4 Pro and PC take the cake.) I am hoping some improvements were made between what we've seen from the early PS4 1.04 patch and the final build when it comes to color choices in Encore. We'll see--even if none were made still very excited for it! Been replaying the game a bunch lately and definitely looking forward to experiencing how Mighty and Ray's abilities feel/integrate with the game.

 

IIRC this all happened very early in the day and fast the first time through, making many news sites very swiftly. Nobody is really covering this yet so they tried to squash it early before more info gets outside of the smaller Twitter circles. There's a point where the Streisand Effect kicks in and they're trying to not get to that point.

 

Fair point! But considering the changes in Encore are overall more substantial than to Mania mode, I have to imagine this will be an even bigger deal/even more people will post videos and talk about it. (Also it's a Friday--more people will probably be talking about this on Monday/next week.)

I wonder if there's ever an attempt for a make-good on the part of the console makers when they screw up and accidentally push these early builds, or if they just say sorry and leave it at that. Sony should put the "Plus" trailer in their E3 presser and push the game more than they otherwise would have in recompense for all this. (Yes, I know that's highly unlikely to happen.)

 

We don't know that it's Sony's fault. Someone at Sega could have accidentally pushed the patch too, it's not like they haven't made mistakes before.

They fucked the Yakuza 6 demo earlier this year too by accidentally pushing out the full game instead.

 

I ain't a gamedev and don't know much 'bout nothing in general and could be totally wrong, but always was under the impression that developers/publishers provide builds to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, they check 'em to make sure they pass their certification requirements, and then they (the console makers) push the builds to users when they are supposed to go live. I don't think developers or publishers have any ability whatsoever to push the builds themselves, except of course if they are first-party/part of the company that is the console maker. I mean yeah, obviously the developers/publishers set the release date and the console makers all have a certain time of day they make those builds go live, and when it comes to DLC they also have a set release date they communicate to the console makers, and I'm sure even for more general patches/updates they sometimes give a time window for when they'd like for it to go live, but they aren't the ones that actually push the build itself/have it go live. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo do that. I doubt that Sega told Sony "we want you to push the free 1.04 patch for 'Sonic Mania' several months in advance of the release date for 'Plus,' which it's supposed to coincide with, and only in one specific region for a few hours."

The "Yakuza 6" demo wasn't accidentally pushed--it went out when it was supposed to. The problem was that the dev team didn't realize there was a flaw in their demo build that allowed users to end up playing the entire game. (Kinda like how if the ability to play all these Encore mode zones with only 1.04 wasn't discovered and the dev team was unaware that it was possible to do so, and the final 1.04 patch went live on July 17th with the ability for people to play Encore zones without having made the $4.99 transaction for the DLC.) That's a totally separate issue from a build to a game being pushed days/weeks/or months (as is the case here) before it was supposed to.

(I do think the developers/publishers themselves have much greater control over pushing builds when it comes to Steam. I think Valve handles launch day, but when it comes to patching and updating your games after its initial release I think PC devs can pretty much do that whenever they want/have the build be pushed when they want, because I don't think Valve has a team of people checking every patch and making sure it passes their certification requirements like the console makers do. Because there's way too many games available on Steam for it to be viable for Valve to do that, and also Valve doesn't care as much if a patch breaks compatibility/has bugs as the console makers do because PC is an open environment with so many variable configurations that it's impossible for any game to universally work on any and every machine well in the first place so what do they care, whereas the consoles are a much more restricted platform with fairly fixed hardware, so the console makers know if they catch a major compatibility issue/bug that it's likely gonna affect *all* users on their platform, and that if it's fixed it should be fixed for *all* users on their platform.)

 

i know people have asked similar questions, but is it even possible to extract ps4 games? because i would love to compare this version of the game to the final, like everyone else here

 

Obviously the release process differs between companies, but the push to go live is not done by humans. Getting things out to all of the nodes of a content delivery network by hand would be an expensive process and a waste of time. They didn't tell someone at Sony to do anything. I'm not a registered PlayStation developer, but in my experience with another platform when you upload a new build you're given three options: release immediately (midnight on the day after the build is approved), hold until a specific date, or release later. I've never actually used the latter two options, but I was definitely able to schedule when a patch went out. We have seen this behavior with PlayStation games in the past - for some games like Final Fantasy XV they announce the release date of patches in advance, and for others the developer states they've submitted them and they drop live a few days later after being reviewed.

They definitely don't call someone up and say "release this patch on this day", the people running the system don't want to be responsible for a mistake of releasing something early. These things are automated as much as possible.

 

All fair points/good info to know! I definitely didn't think or say phone calls were in any way involved, but I certainly know of people like Shane Bettenhausen that work at Sony and interact with developers and communicate about testing for patches via email. Makes sense that it's almost entirely automated, and that's what I've heard the Valve system is like--almost every aspect of Steam seems automated.

But am I wrong in thinking that there's a certification process involved with patches for games on the three major console machines, and that a patch will not be pushed (by the company that makes the console, since the game resides on their servers) until the patch has passed their certification requirements? And if that's the case doesn't that inherently mean a human being--the person testing the new patched build of the game to make sure it passes their cert requirements--is involved in the process of it being pushed, because they don't allow for new patch builds to be pushed *until* it has passed cert? Sure, a human may not be making the build go live themselves, but they are preventing it from doing so until they have indicated to their system that it meets/has passed their cert requirements. And if all that is the case, then why would the "Sonic Mania" 1.04 patch have been approved/passed certification for Sony if they knew it wasn't supposed to be released until July 17th, and then *only* go live in one region. Genuinely looking for clarification on the matter/interested to know. Don't want to bog the thread down about it too much more, though--feel free to PM if you want.