Sonic Forces demo- Green Hill (Modern Sonic gameplay)

[Ultimate Victory 64]

Just now, Xenos said:

I'm honestly speechless. Modern Sonic game bosses have always been kind of a wash, but I didn't know they were susceptible to the jedi mind tricks Classic Sonic is portraying here.

Its like Classic Sonic has Fortune's from Metal Gear Solid 2 nanomachines so he can deflects the blasts

[Razule]

7 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

The loop in Green Hill is 100%.scripted and automatic, even though it has boosters in front of it.

You also cannot backtrack through it. An invisible wall stops you.

Just streamlining everything as much as possible, huh.. 

What's next? The level behind you or out of your imediate sight isn't even rendered? 

[Jar Jar Analysis 1138]

9 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

The loop in Green Hill is 100%.scripted and automatic, even though it has boosters in front of it.

You also cannot backtrack through it. An invisible wall stops you.

Crazy how Forces has now been deemed the most automated and linear sonic game to date. Colors had that spot for a while but this is so...Pointless...

[JezMM]

2 minutes ago, Razule said:

What's next? The level behind you or out of your imediate sight isn't even rendered? 

I mean this is actually something games often do to some degree or another for optimisation purposes and wouldn't affect player experience in any way lol.

I think it's a known fact of the three "Hedgehog Engine" games that points of no return are put in place to help the whole "loading a huge long level is difficult" thing.  But I don't see how that should apply to levels that are tinier than the ones in the Gamecube era Sonic games geez.

[Sonikko]

What I love the most about it is that the game is broken

If anything this will ensure the game bombs critically, if the low quality bar they've set for themselves wasn't enough already.

[Patron]

7 minutes ago, Razule said:

Just streamlining everything as much as possible, huh.. 

What's next? The level behind you or out of your imediate sight isn't even rendered? 

Wasn't this already a thing? I recall seeing videos of older Hedgehog Engine games where level chunks didn't load if you were too fast or skipped parts. The collision was present, but the assets were invisible.

[Jar Jar Analysis 1138]

1 minute ago, Patron said:

Wasn't this already a thing? I recall seeing videos of older Hedgehog Engine games where level chunks sometimes didn't load if you were too fast.

This was a little more apparent in Unleashed in some levels(PS3 version).

Colors and Generations got better with it.

[Badnik Mechanic]

6 minutes ago, Razule said:

Just streamlining everything as much as possible, huh.. 

What's next? The level behind you or out of your imediate sight isn't even rendered? 

To elaborate on what JezMM has said.

This isn't actually that uncommon in games. The original crash does this based on line of sight. It only renders the level based on what you see. References to objects in memory are called depending on the cameras view.

In Sonic, this was kinda the case in Sonic Heroes. The out of sight parts of the stage loaded based on proximity.

Buuuuut I get what you mean with this.

[JezMM]

4 minutes ago, Sonikko said:

What I love the most about it is that the game is broken

If anything this will ensure the game bombs critically, if the low quality bar they've set for themselves wasn't enough already.

Don't be so sure.  We're discovering all these things after playing the demo obsessively for an entire day squeezing anything we can out of it.  The average reviewer is not going to intentionally try to break the game like this.

When you play the game as the game encourages you to do, it's pretty tightly designed, gone are the days of slippery controls leading to pit deaths and glitchy collision detection etc.

But sadly the way they achieved that is by simplifying the game down to braindead levels of player input.

 

Of course, it's gonna vary from viewer to viewer whether they pick up on the fact that they're riding a roller coaster instead of driving a race car.

[Sega DogTagz]

Man the modern levels are so short. I think that's the biggest gut-punch out of all of this.

We've seen the avatar variants of both GHZ and PA and in each case there is simply much more packed into it. It takes longer to beat, that's apparently where the bulk of your game will be spent.

Nobody waited 4 years to play as the avatar. On top of taking the worst from Colors and Unleashed, I can now add the Werehog dichotomy. How much content are we going to have to burn through to get to the 60 seconds of gameplay that I actually brought the game for?

[GuyWithThePie]

Looking at the bright side... At least the graphics are better?

Left is from early July, right is from today.

[JezMM]

1 minute ago, GuyWithThePie said:

Looking at the bright side... At least the graphics are better?

Oh wow, I didn't think the improvements were that drastic.  Thank goodness.

[GuyWithThePie]

1 minute ago, JezMM said:

Oh wow, I didn't think the improvements were that drastic.  Thank goodness.

Yeah, I'm glad they at least managed to optimize it well enough. That doesn't excuse anything else, but at least the Switch version doesn't look like a PS2 game anymore.

[Sonikko]

1 minute ago, GuyWithThePie said:

Yeah, I'm glad they at least managed to optimize it well enough. That doesn't excuse anything else, but at least the Switch version doesn't look like a PS2 game anymore.

I'm sorry to prove you wrong

Switch

Other versions

[GuyWithThePie]

3 minutes ago, Sonikko said:

I'm sorry to prove you wrong

Switch

Other versions

Hmm, well that's not very good. I can sort of excuse the low-poly background, but what's with the lighting?

EDIT: Looking closer at the smaller details, the Switch version is definitely lacking in comparison. Small pipes are missing, the cool technological details are reduced to cardboard boxes with textures, and the gray ring surrounding the red pipe is a literal octagon. What happened here?

[UpCDownCLeftCRightC]

Is it possible that Sonic Team was given a lower budget to work with at the start of this project? There was a lot of fallout and meetings after Boom, I'm sure.

Regardless of the elements I may like or dislike, a lot of the game really looks hastily slapped together. Not in a completely broken, unfinished way like '06, but more like they didn't have total freedom in development resources and needed to reuse a lot of assets to get across the finish line.

I'm trying hard to understand what's happening. 

 

[Sonikko]

1 minute ago, GuyWithThePie said:

Hmm, well that's not very good. I can sort of excuse the low-poly background, but what's with the lighting?

What lighting?!

/jk

Actually, I can see why they toned down the lighting, the low-poly background is way more baffling to me.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

13 minutes ago, Mayor D said:

To elaborate on what JezMM has said.

This isn't actually that uncommon in games. The original crash does this based on line of sight. It only renders the level based on what you see. References to objects in memory are called depending on the cameras view.

In Sonic, this was kinda the case in Sonic Heroes. The out of sight parts of the stage loaded based on proximity.

Buuuuut I get what you mean with this.

If you want to get technical, Hedgehog Engine always did this, that's how the rendering works on it, as you complete one section of a level, it unrenders the last portion you can't return to, and renders the next section. That's why in Generations, there's glitches you can perform to skip triggers and cause only the collision to load in the level, as opposed to the graphics themselves.

[JezMM]

Oof that is a pretty major difference.  Well, I think the bottom line here is the Switch version still looks good and pleasing to the eye, just as long as you don't directly compare it lol.  I still felt Space Port had some nice atmosphere in motion, but this returns my desire to play the PC version first (after the demo I was thinking I didn't mind which one I played first).

[Gabz Girl]

52 minutes ago, Yeow said:

This demo has transformed into the gift that keeps on giving. DarkSpineSonic managed to beat the classic Sonic Green Hill boss fight level before the game ended.

Check this shit out at 0:25. Apparently you can only get hit by the Egg Dragoon machine gun if you've moving, because DSS/Classic Sonic stood in the same spot and took no damage from the Egg Dragoon's bullets.

You cannot make this up if you tried!

.......That is fucking awful. If this actually ends up being in the final product I...wow. There’s no defending this shit. You just can NOT defend this shit anymore.

Oh boy I can’t wait for next week when the game inevitably leaks online. I’m bringing out my popcorn, it’s gonna be a WILD ride! 

[Razule]

I think the levels are short because they're so big.

Five minutes to pass over the first.. five seconds of the level?

[GuyWithThePie]

7 minutes ago, Sonikko said:

What lighting?!

/jk

Actually, I can see why they toned down the lighting, the low-poly background is way more baffling to me.

Yeah, I just took a closer look and the difference is really jarring. It literally does look like something from a PS2 game. They couldn't even bother using the shiny metallic material used in other versions?

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

1 minute ago, Razule said:

I think the levels are short because they're so big.

I think I know what you're getting at. That's always been a problem with boost Sonic. Because he goes at insane speeds they have to make the levels so long which eats up their budget and in turn, produces what feel like shorter levels.

[Speedi]

3 minutes ago, Razule said:

I think the levels are short because they're so big.

Five minutes to pass over the first.. five seconds of the level?

Welcome to what is known as the biggest fundamental flaw of the boost formula.

[Whatever the WhoCares]

8 minutes ago, UpCDownCLeftCRightC said:

Is it possible that Sonic Team was given a lower budget to work with at the start of this project? There was a lot of fallout and meetings after Boom, I'm sure.

Regardless of the elements I may like or dislike, a lot of the game really looks hastily slapped together. Not in a completely broken, unfinished way like '06, but more like they didn't have total freedom in development resources and needed to reuse a lot of assets to get across the finish line.

I'm trying hard to understand what's happening. 

 

Either that or there's another game being developed consecutively. Hard to say at this point.