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Having boss triggers happen in certain locations or not actually requiring all the emeralds during the fight (because you're not supposed to access the fight without already having them) are to my knowledge fairly standard developments tricks.
I wouldn't call that development tricks, but just simple time managment. No need to program in the requirements if casual players are not supposed to get there anyways.
Agreed. As a hobbyist programmer myself, and having watched a frankly enormous amount of videos on video game design, I can say with quite a bit of confidence that this kind of event handling is pretty much industry standard.
@@whodistoodis I wonder how many Devs actually consider speedrunners nowadays. I know that some indie games (Celeste bring a great example) do. Granted, what they do when they "consider" speedrunners probably varies widely
Sonic is a game all about speed and precision, I would not be surprised if the hole was intentional. The boss trigger is an easy trick to simplify coding, as is the emerald trigger. Also reduces the chances of bugs. I am more surprised they didn’t fix the collision bugs that cause the run to be possible
Every little check you run demands a little bit more computational power, consuming a limited resource. It's probably not very much for one boss check, but it can seriously add up over the course of the game. There's no point putting a burden (even a small one) on performance to prevent something that 99% of players will never experience, and which doesn't ruin the game even if you do encounter it.
I think its kinda absurd that you suggest the developers specifically left in these spawn trigger spots for speedrunners. It is pretty clear that these trigger spots are just how the game knows when to spawn the boss because thats where sonic ends up after the cutscene. There would also be no reason to have an extra check for if the player has all the chaos emeralds because they can just assume that a player without the chaos emeralds would never be in the boss arena. The only part of this theory that might be true is that they purposely didn't patch out the skip to get into the boss arena on Kronos island despite knowing about it. The only thing this would accomplish is piss off speedrunners, so I see why they would decide to just leave it as is.
They left it as is because sonic games patching out speedrun tricks is unheard of, look at Colors Ultimate and how they still have the 3D in 2D exploits
@@trashman9282 frankly if I ever get around to making the game idea I have kicking around in my head, I'm going out of my way to use tricks like this that would make runs more interesting. I'm a particular fan of the quantum block that if you touch that before the cutscenes then you can break out of them.
Cutscene triggers are very common. There are plenty of games that is you don't do a cutscene trigger to will be soft locked. The fact that it's positional triggers and not story triggers is what he's trying to call out
3:34 Game developers tend to dislike putting in redundant checks (I'm assuming you can't even get into the arena without the other 6 emeralds, so why check that you have actually have all 7 when you collect the "last" one in the arena?), so it's not that unusual or uncommon. The most aggressive example is in Jak II; if you do a huge sequence break in Jak II, the game will actually GIVE you all of them items that you SHOULD have at that point in the game. I think it probably stems from a fear of potentially soft-locking innocent players.
That's maybe a big reason why they didn't wanted to make a truly open world, because those kind of story triggers works better on a semi-linear structure.
Jak 2 had a bigger reason to play it safe. Sony was strict on game QA and if a tester found a way into an area early and gets soft-locked, it can set back Jak 2's release. Ensuring the player always had the required items if they find a skip makes the tester think the devs knew the skip was possible and left in intentionally instead of reporting it as a major bug.
There's several games that "give" you items during cutscenes that you didn't collect. Usually this is because during the cutscenes your character / inventory is swapped out for a copy they have prepared on the side for said cutscene for whatever reason. Usually it's not just to prevent softlocking but also to prevent things like animation issues, inventory discrepancies, or various other things they didn't want to bother checking for which could cause things like the game crashing and whatnot. Famous example of this is the start menu glitch in ocarina of time wherein the start menu is actually a hidden save with certain items already collected you can access through a glitch.
That just sounds like lazy coding lol. Well this is buggy, this might softlock, fuck it instead of finding and fixing the broken parts, just give them free progress.
I think the Trigger for spawning bosses is just because it was more convinient for test, unstead of having to trigger all flags needed, you step on the trigger, it can even be because bosses fight were designed before the requirement to trigger them, and once you put everything in the game, just place sonic on the trigger when needed and call it a day.
Maybe they were affraid of softlocks so they made a failsafe metod... Seems reasonable to me. This kind of basic coding is a happy middle point where hardcore enjoy to break the game while casual plays how it was intended.
Yep, as a game developer I can attest to this. Anything to make my life easier. If a speedrunner can find a way to abuse it, I don't care. After years of working on a title, the priority is just shipping the damned game.
Also, by not having checks like for the emeralds you can have one programmer developing the boss trigger while another is coding the gems without worrying about having to go back over to make it compatible.
Conspiracy? Nah. It's perfectly normal sloppy coding to not bother to check prerequisites that are always fullfilled. Tons of games take shortcuts like this. There's also the fact that it's a lot easier to debug parts of the game if you can just do the minimum to satisfy triggers. Teleporting is easy. Fiddling with story flags is tedious and well, fiddly.
Hang on; as a rookie game designer; I know this basic info, it's not hard for them to add an invisible wall on top. When we, "forget" (don't care) about the players getting to it early, we do this; if we don't want a player getting into somewhere they're not supposed to be; we lazily add an invisible roof, it's not even as if a roof is that hard to add.
I think it's somewhere in the middle. All software, including games, has what's known as "illegal states" - states that are supposed to be impossible to occur through normal operation. For example, being in the boss arena without having all Chaos Emeralds is an illegal state. Depending on the circumstances, programmers might add checks to detect when such an illegal state occurs and change the code path in response, but often, they will just assume that the state is legal and never check all the variables - in this example, the code that handles the boss arena will just assume that you have all the Chaos emeralds, without ever checking. As the above commenters said, this is common practice, but I don't think it's without thought. I think they *know* that it's possible to reach an illegal state and they *deliberately decided* to go with the generous assumption. The other alternative is to just soft-lock the game... The thinking goes, since the player is ALREADY in the boss arena, the game will be less broken if they could just battle the boss. It doesn't even matter if the player is a speedrunner or a casual who found themself in an unlikely situation. Whichever damage was already done is done, the show must go on! As for the missing ceiling, the exact same logic applies, although it's a lot more loose. Having an invisible wall in mid-air doesn't look and feel too broken because there isn't much visually wrong happening - Sonic is just falling and the player's input is more or less ignored if it goes in the wall's direction. The only "wrong" thing is when fast movement suddenly stops when it hits the wall. But an invisible floor is a different story - when interacting with it you're necessarily walking on nothing. It's an impossibility through and through. So it makes sense to choose to NEVER use invisible floors/ceilings: if the player made it above the arena, the game feels more polished if we just let them fall down to the earth than if we make them walk on air. Again, the show must go on. I also think they definitely had speedrunners in mind when making these decisions. They knew glitch hunters would break the game one way or the other, they preferred that the game steamrolled through illegal states while still having sensible gameplay rather than becoming unplayable or more and more glitchy as the illegal states piled up on top of each other.
Not sloppy, just safe. If you already have a check for all emeralds on whatever lets you enter the boss arena, why check again later? All you get is a potential bug if the check goes wrong somehow. And as you said, makes for easier testing.
@@soundrogue4472 Bruh. making invisible roofs is not as normal as you think. So many games barriers can be skipped by getting high enough to the point it's the first thing people attempt when trying to skip barriers. That and getting fast enough to go through it before it can process you touching it.
Location triggers and not requiring the chaos emeralds is something to be expected since in a casual run you can't hit the trigger if the game doesn't place you there and there is never any scenario where you can grab the last emerald before super Sonic. But what is sus is adding a second invis wall that has a hole. It's literally easier to make it completely solid than to leave a hole
I love when acronyms are made for a speed run trick. You use the acronym and it sounds super smart and intelligent. "As you do the WJWNC you enter a state of PBNJ. And the momentum of the...."
It's just a simple way of making cutscenes and such trigger. These are typical methods of progression for development. That they're being left in without patch is likely intentional, but that they were found is unsurprising. Every program is at least a little bit spaghettified and forced together, and will typically use as simple of a way to get something to work as possible.
DSS is such a legend. So many tricks found over the years. I also loved seeing so much of my boy Emerldd's footage in this video lol. Very informational, great vid!
I'm glad that this game has a lot of attention towards the speedrunning community. Not only is Frontiers a good casual game, but it's an incredibly fun game to speedrun, especially when the nature of the game is a 3D sandbox collectathon, similar to a certain game called Super Mario 64.
It makes sense to me why devs might add these features. Casuals who accidentally skip sections aren't punished, if there is a glitch with story flags nobody notices, and speedrunners are happy. All three of these things are good. There is no reason to make people's lives harder for the sake of "doing it right." A smart dev will work with their community, not against it.
Friendly reminder the game has been out for 3 WEEKS and all of this has already been found. I keep saying it but I can't wait to see how far this speedrun goes!
This is already incredible! But how the hell did the speedrunners figure out that in order to skip pinball consistently you have to punch a very specific box
That's the thing I never understood with Speedrunners. They will find the *MOST* complex thing in the game and use it for their Speedrun. How did they find it? Who the heck knows. But it works.
Likely by going back over their recordings and seeing what actions they took which seemed to give consistent results then narrowing it down. People probably broke said box on accident. That being said, many (think original metroid) are notable for people using RNG manipulation wherein you do specific tasks so if you suspect it can be manipulated you can just test to see if anything works. I suspect the former as the game hasn't been out long enough to really test a whole bunch.
how speedrunners figured this out is probably related to why punching the box works. In this case, we know that, for some reason, punching that box sets the game so that you will face a specific direction, and that things that reset the direction you're facing undo this. Abyssoft also mentioned Maio PUs which to me says it's related to a float/int transition, or 2 variables being used to store your angle. I notice that when you break the box, the parts fall away from Sonic. From this, I'm guessing that what's actually happening, is that when you break the box, the game grabs Sonic's angle, and uses it to make the box parts fly away from sonic. The angle you punched the box is now stored in some "temporary angle" variable, which will be reset when you start grinding, or enter a 2D segment, or something like that, which forces sonic to face a certain direction. The state of this variable is used to determine what direction to spawn Sonic when you reload the game. So now, lets say someone saved the game while facing the doors to a boss room, reloaded the game, and was facing some other direction. That would be pretty noticeable. There are people who go out of their way to find glitches, and if one of those people noticed this, after a few runs, they might start experimenting. They know that it's consistent on a save, but inconsistent between saves, so something that's related to Sonic's angle, but isn't his angle, has to be getting read. Speedrunners would have been loudly complaining about how there wasn't a consistent setup, so this guy knew his info would be useful, and kept experimenting. How they figured out that boxes influenced this, I don't know, but I can't imagine it was that hard if the person was running around, doing things, saving, restarting, and seeing what direction it made him face. Of course, all of this is just a guess based on like, 30 seconds of footage, and if it's actually what happened, then call me Sherlock. But, I think it paints a decent picture of how things could have gone to figure that out.
actually about ses, lots of speedrunners (including me) are using ses in runs now because of a new route found that saves around 40 seconds if done optimally. great video btw!!
I think the reason they left a huge hole in the invisible ceiling above giganto's arena is that if they'd actually closed it up, it could interfere with the boss fight (specifically, cylooping him) But if that were the case, they could have just raised the ceiling...
If the engine of Sonic and PSO2NGS are the same (which it think it is), the cutscene scripts are the same, too. The cutscenes only appear to be able to move the actors, but you need triggers to spawn things. It makes more sense to complete the cutscene and then place a trigger at that location, where the cutscene ends and control is returned to the player. In debug mode, it very easy to get the current location XYZ after a cutscene and just plop those as the center of a -circular- cylindrical trigger on the ground. SInce the trigger is placed there, you don't need to watch the cutscenes and just spawn the boss to debug by stepping on the trigger, saving development time.
I think there are a lot of soft-lock protections in place that turn out to be useful when sequence-breaking. Jury's still out on wtf they were thinking with the second invisible wall that didn't actually stop the skip from happening.
Those triggers most likely aren't anything special which were left to help speedrunners. The player triggers the cutscene which teleports you to this exact location. As the developers now knew that every player would stand on this exact spot they placed yet another trigger right there which makes the boss appear. A simple failsave would be that the game only loads the boss trigger if the requirements are met and should this not be the case it instead places a trigger as big as the arena which teleports you right out of the arena as soon as you touch the ground. That way speedrunners wouldn't be able to skip the content while regular players who might end up entering the arena early by accident are still able to exit it without any deeper game knowledge. But most likely the developers were too lazy to add this - like a fair amount of developers of other games are. And this is just fine even if it doesn't sound like this would be the case - as long as the game is designed in a way which prevents you from executing the skip by accident.
I haven't played the game myself, but going super with the emeralds and the triggers being in the over world seem like pretty simple oversights. "There's no way to enter the boss fight without the other emeralds, so why bother checking for them?" "The cut scene places you here, and we want to make sure the boss spawns when the cut scene is over, so just put the trigger for the scene where Sonic ends up" The logic is pretty simple to see why it might have been designed that way. As for why the exploits are still allowed, it could simply be considered not worth the effort to fix, since it's not something that affects normal play
If the devs do intentionally keep these tricks in I respect it a lot. There's a middle ground when patching glitches between improving the casual experience and not breaking the top ranked experience that is hard to maintain, and if they are trying to balance that out for real then godspeed to them.
The recent patch actually improved the speedrun by fixing a deload bug that now makes it so we don't have to quit to title for WES (Wyvern Escape Skip). It is ultra rare that a patch IMPROVES the speedrun without patching anything out. So yeah if they are doing it intentionally bless their souls ^_^ Nintendo could learn a thing or two from them and stop fucking over Splatoon 3 speedrunners ;-;
I think the boss triggers being there in the first place wasn't meant for speedrunners and was just the most straight forward way to get the sequence to not trigger early and break or not trigger at all. That being said they definitely left it in after they patched it on purpose because unlike nintendo sega doesn't hate player generated fun
Im not really sure what the conspiracy is? that the developer isn't intentionally patching things speed runners are using? Why would that even be a problem? Speedrunnings a big thing, deciding to leave skips in rather than totally patching them out, ie the second wall having a hole in it, just seems like they are aware and don't want to ruin your fun while making it harder for normal players to break their games. The other stuff with the boss spawn triggers, maybe, but I'm not really sold that its specifically left there for speedrunners. and the chaos emeralds, what would you even want them to do after you get the last emerald, just have the game softlock? From a coding perspective its much better to have it continue normally than to leave the game running in a dead state
2:20 i script my own game. I know how doors and Keys work. It does not matter if you have all 6 emerlands or not -_- If the game detects you in the arena entramce (AKA boss arena door entrance) THEN the game assumes that you DID got all main quests done. And if you ask „well why devs scripted it like so?” Well its because its simpler to make and unnecessary to double check if you do have 6 emerlands or not. Invisible wall does a good enough protection… that is until some lucky speedrunner discovered HSP.
It sounds like they left a lot of back doors from testing. Normally in game development there’s documentation (usually a sticky note on someone’s desk) about the location of these back doors what they’re testing for. Sonic frontiers was one of those games that went through alot of testing to make sure it ran smoothly but had little cleanup after testing was done
It's weird you refer to the area bosses as 'final bosses', though yes, that's technically correct, it's the final boss of the area... that term is usually left for the 'actual' final boss of the game.
its been over a decade since I last followed DSS and he's still coming up with insane shit I honestly believe someone should make a video on all his work on the sonic speedrunning community, its one of a kind.
My brother told me about Magnet dash and HSP before my first playthrough and I ended up accidentally skipping to the wyvern fight after HSPing into that one crater mountain and just dropping into the area. Of course I wanted to play through the story so I had to find a way to get back, but it's crazy how easy it is to break this game. Also HSP is just so useful in general, for getting a view of the whole island, or getting high up tokens. Definitely made the experience a lot more enjoyable
It's extremely common to not check for something explicitly unless you have a reason to. There was already a check for the other chaos emeralds before the fight, checking again during the fight would just be a waste of processing time unless the developers actually had a reason to think players could get there without them. The boss spawn can also be explained as "lazy" programming, the cutscene to start the boss fight obviously moves sonic to that location so they just set up the boss to spawn whenever he was in place. Again, there was already a barrier to stop people getting in, so there wasn't necessarily any reason to add extra barriers to progression inside. The only times developers really go above and beyond is when they're actually paranoid about speed runners, but a lot of developers probably don't care too much as long as they think casual players won't be able to mess up the game progression too easily.
As a programmer, I think the devs left it there to deliberately prevent softlocking or a bug that could break the game. By placing the trigger where the player is placed, it could minimize the risk of a softlock if the cutscene trigger for it didn't trigger. (Which happened to quite a bit on many other games, not just in the sonic series. Example God Eater series, if you skip a cutscene it will not trigger the achievement... Good thing the gallery for that game exists) But yeah, this is definitely useful for speedruns.
What's that? The devs went ahead and ignored a glitch used by speedrunners that doesn't affect casual play in any way? Bruh, that's not a conspiracy. That's how all game developers should always handle similar situations.
There is no shot these skips are accidental. Even casual players ended up watching the hype surrounding Elden Ring speedruns, and from a business perspective it makes sense because this just creates more hype around the game itself. I think it's pretty obvious that they left them in on purpose considering they knew people could get into the 1st arena and instead of blocking it off properly, like you said they just added a second wall and even left in a way to trigger the boss. Realistically this just goes to prove how much they padded the gameplay, needing to get all those collectables to progress, unless you're a sweaty speedrunner? nah it just feels cheap af to me, not to mention how empty and dead and cold the world is. This honestly feels like a fanmade unreal engine 5 "game" not an official release. Maybe I need to watch some videos but it really felt like the sonic racing games had more world building than this junk. I don't even like what I'm looking at, just feels like someone modded sonic into an unrelated game.
The glitches where you can launch yourself high in the sky is okay because the only thing it really affects is traversal as opposed to objective goals, but I do think the Titan spawns/skips do need to be patched for the following reasons: 1. It makes a lot of the game pointless. Why spend your time getting the Emeralds and progressing through the objectives, when you can just hop over to the boss and spawn him in that way? 2. It can potentially break the game and lock players out of things. I found that, if you immediately go right to Giganto and then go back and free Amy after unlocking Ares, she will be inaccessible and lock players out of getting the achievements or finding the story. As for the whole "keeping people from getting stuck in Giganto's arena" thing, you can still get stuck if you already fought him and didn't unlock any of the warp points. What they could do to fix this, is add in another Hyperbounce platform to the arena that loads in only after the player completes Giganto the first time.
Most of the "coincidences" are fairly common game development tricks to save time. The donut wall might have been an intentional "fix for non-speedrunners" thing, though.
The grand conspiracy is that you don't understand how the game works. All of those aspects including the hole in the wall are required to progress the game as intended, because the sonic component model has no ability to teleport or otherwise respawn during cutscenes, death events, or fast travel. He just moves very fast off camera.
during my first playthrough in ares island, i got to the titan area early and was like "bet the boss happens here" and went back and finished the island lmao didnt know about the trigger though
@@notscorchingsands9718 it very much can be, cutscene heavy games with no skips, games where the majority is very tedious fetch quest stuff that, after being optimized, isnt that engaging
@@notscorchingsands9718 its a hell of a lot more fun to play, if you dont like that as a viewer dont watch, other people do like that. if you dont want someone to skip the game watch the 100% categories
The devs know that speedrunning is an amazing way to extend the life of a game, Metroid dread literally has skips built into it to get items earlier than expected and left in glitches that speedrunners use whole patching ones that can harm the play experience, bonus points for being a game designed originally around going fast and the skips avoiding stupid amounts of grinding and pinball
Sonic Developers have always had these strats in mind since Sonic Adventure when they saw how the Speed Dash could launch Sonic into places not intended, which is why they placed item boxes on top of buildings, because they knew someone would want to explore. I just wish there weren't so many invisible barriers/walls in Frontiers, or let us run on walls like we could in the past.
Bro I accidentally found how to skip to the Wyvern boss fight by myself on my first playthrough. I was trying to find the last puzzle to open up the map and had used a ancient rail to jump into the boss arena (which I didn't know was the boss arena at the time). I was running around for a while and couldn't seem to find the puzzle and eventually decided to head back. I went to find a spring and fell down into the area with the sprawlling hallways, and by complete luck, accidentally hit the trigger to spawn Wyvern. At the time I didnt even know what had happened and just thought that the springs unloaded. It wasn't until one of my friends told me that I was in the boss arena with the boss that I realised what happened. I still have the clip from when I spawned Wyvern. One of my funniest moments in the game. I reloaded my save afterwards and completed the map and got in the normal way.
It’s crazy people find all these glitches and tricks. I think the titles to spawn bosses were left in to make it easier for developers to trigger events when testing and making the game.
considering speed running is a great way to keep interest in the game, and keep the game relevant for longer, it's a fantastic reason to not patch out certain bugs and glitches.
For the boss spawning, I believe that it's a boss fight save spot for developers to test out the boss. Like (maybe, this is just speculation on my part) in the code it reads "when Sonic reaches [spot where boss fight starts], spawn the boss"; because the save spot is usually out of bounds for casual players, there is no need to remove it. This may come in before they incorporate the cutscenes in order to see if the game will load in the boss at the correct spot. As for not patching the glitches, well, would you rather patch something that causes speedrunners/glitch finders to try and find some other trick/glitch that could end up soft-lock/break the game; or, leave it alone because the game runs smoothly and the players are having a lot of fun? For me, I would go with it just works and there is no real damage to the game. I mean, as a player myself (more on the casual side of things), I would do these tricks just to do the boss fights again and again because I love fighting them. I didn't know about the boss skip until this video and maybe I might try it because I did wonder what would happed if I could reach the top. I know I have done the trick launch multiple times and it feels more natural in gameplay wise to me rather than having "one touch at all and you fall" kind of slopes (REALLY ANNOYING). Trick launches were very accidental at first for me until I realized what was happening; now, I am able to use them to help me go to the destination I want to more quickly. Well, that's my take on the glitches/tricks that are left in the game.
spawn triggers are extremely common in almost every game out there, its just to let the game know "hey, you need to do this now." theres always a way to activate these triggers normally, im not 100% sure about this since my knowledge of sonic frontiers isnt the best so im going to assume but since the cutscenes are happening in real time then it only makes sense for a trigger to actually be there, if theyre not done in real time then it still makes sense that the spawning point for sonic would bring out the boss, so the triggers are normal as said.
Triggers aren't always spatially present in games. You want an example? Pokemon Scarlet&Violet. These games are crappy, buggy, broken, crumbling in any player's hand... and yet *its events sequence can't be broken at all.* There is no point in space that triggers a final boss. There's no way to reach Area Zero before completing all missions. Triggers should never be present in space, period. An event should be unlocked by completing the previous event (so it should be a "time trigger": as soon as a certain cutscene is played, the game allows you to reach the following cutscene). That's why it's called an events _sequence._ In fact, spatial triggers are a tool for debugging. They should be wiped out of the game before it's published. The games that still have those triggers in are just not cleaned before their release.
@@Dante02d12 they aren’t always present you’re right, and you’ve given a very good example. But you can’t deny the fact that in a ton of games they’re still there, most games we’d play there’re triggers to start or stop something in some way, i disagree with the fact they should be wiped, they can be useful and prevent softlocking if the game gets confused and spawns you a bit off the mark or if the boss just doesn’t spawn
It's likely made that way to help developer who is doing testing. If you don't want to do a lot of extra debug commands and startup arguments, it is very convenient to just being able to play Test a boss by telwpoeting the player or just debug starting in the correct area. But it's impossible to know exactly why.
In Ares, once I completed the final puzzle, I decided to be a funny guy and went to the arena from over the cave I was surprised that the battle didn't trigger, and there were bumpers that helped you go back easily, I assume the devs left that on purpose, tho I didn't know you could trigger it that way anyway, I just went back to the cave and did the normal road
Is the hole in the top of the Giganto arena second wall/dome not because they need you to be able to launch him skywards with the Super Sonic cyloop and not bonk off a arena sky box?
It’s kinda dope that they left in “unintended” game breaks like this. It just makes the game more fun. Devs have gotten this idea that they need to “fix” anything that doesn’t work as intended when really they should just be fixing things that lead to a negative gameplay experience and leave things that are interesting
Oh gosh, I got into the wyvern boss arena in casual play before I even knew it was gonna be the boss arena, there's actually a few ways you can get in there I've found at least 3. I ran around and climbed to all the high points of the arena, if I just ran around randomly a bit more I would've summoned wyvern and freaked out
I'd love to think potential skips, like the boss triggers are intentional as part of a speed running plan. While it could limit some possible options for how runs can go it is great to see game devs including speedrunners as the target audience. Modders and Speedrunners help extend a game's lifespan with normally Mods adding into the more causual audience and Speed running into the more dedicated audience. Since there really isn't as much potential for Mods in Sonic Frontiers compared to games like Elderscrolls, Fallout, ect. the game devs setting up a specific "safe" speedrun route encourages more people to look into speedrunning their game and learning the unique tech involved.
As an (amateur) dev, I'll weigh in and say that it's very unlikely to be 'intentional' so much as it's just good game design. 1. If you have a debug command, you can have the debug command put you right on the boss trigger and start everything easily without putting you through the cutscene. 2. You probably want some back-up checks to make sure everything works, in the slight chance that something goes horribly wrong and the boss doesn't spawn when it should. 3. Editing in a second invisible wall shows that they had not planned for this (they did not get people to test speedrun skips, or didn't know of a way over the wall), the fact they still allow you to go in is because they don't want to alter the game for the speedrunners that clearly have a lot of investment in their game. As said in the video, it seems to be to keep casual players from finding it accidentally and ruining their experience. 4. If you're at the boss then you already have the emeralds if you're a casual player. There's no reason to check that they have it. Adding in extra checks means more chances of softlocks (or a completely unwinnable state) or more variables that a debug command is going to have to check just to let you debug the fight.
This game hasn't even been out for 30 days and we are already hitting sub 1:15 loadless times on PC and soon sub 1:20 RTA times on console. I remember when sub 2 was discussed as possible, and now sub 2 is literally free. I have never seen a speedrun develop this fast, and having been part of developing it together with the community makes me really proud :) I am sure this game will just keep getting crazier and crazier.
I'm not a speedrunner by any means, but as someone who was one of the original Sonic Adventure glitchers I went a bit nuts on Ares Island and actually discovered the boss arena skip. I would have been disappointed if I did actually manage to trigger the boss and skip all the middle bits though.
It is a sonic open world game. You have ways to lock on, dash, and just generally fast. These characteristics have broken other games before. Also I wrote this before watching the video
Some of the "conspiracy" things could have been intentionally left in by developers to help them more quickly test the game,. For example even though you could use internal tools to do things like give yourself chaos emeralds or move the story progression along, having a boss spawn when touching a trigger and then just teleporting Sonic there is a bit easier.
What I expect is something so ridiculous like mashing the konami code right at the start of the game, before you load in, being a straight to credits skip. essentially turning it into a sub 5 second speedrun
my guess is that this was also left in by devs so they didnt have to go through everything, they accidentaly left in the trigger/didnt disable it when not enough chaos emeralds
probably developer things for themselves more so for speedrunners. its similar as to why cheat codes even existed in the first place. developers need something for when testing as well as it wouldn't need an additional trigger because the assumption is that you played the game normally. conspiracy almost definitely not, more like common development stuff that players and speedrunners have abused since games of old.
This is just regular game development tricks and are used all over hundreds of games. Having useless and unnecessary checks for conditions that would not feasibly occur in regular gameplay is bad coding practice, so of course there's no checks for the diamonds. Why are there triggers to spawn the bosses? Because the player touches the trigger after the cutscene is over. That's it. Normally, there's no way for the player to touch the triggers manually, so why make things difficult with unnecessary checks and events?
I think the additional wall was purposeful, but I also think that some of Sonic Team know about speedrunning and intentionally allow the games to be speedrunnable. But the boss trigger and chaos emerald flags are common in many games that it wouldn't be at all indicative that it was with speed running in mind. If anything I'd argue that if you want a game where the developers were trying to hinder speedrunners, look at twilight princess.
5:01 YOU MEAN ME GETTING HERE EARLY ON MY FIRST PLAYTHROUGH WASN'T INTENTIONAL???????? I thought that area was always explorable and the boss just triggered once a flag was set...
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if the developers intentionally left this in the game, why is it a "conspiracy"?
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@@Abyssoftw2wwwwwwwi2 you are you and your family lol
Having boss triggers happen in certain locations or not actually requiring all the emeralds during the fight (because you're not supposed to access the fight without already having them) are to my knowledge fairly standard developments tricks.
I wouldn't call that development tricks, but just simple time managment. No need to program in the requirements if casual players are not supposed to get there anyways.
Agreed. As a hobbyist programmer myself, and having watched a frankly enormous amount of videos on video game design, I can say with quite a bit of confidence that this kind of event handling is pretty much industry standard.
@@whodistoodis I wonder how many Devs actually consider speedrunners nowadays. I know that some indie games (Celeste bring a great example) do. Granted, what they do when they "consider" speedrunners probably varies widely
Sonic is a game all about speed and precision, I would not be surprised if the hole was intentional. The boss trigger is an easy trick to simplify coding, as is the emerald trigger. Also reduces the chances of bugs. I am more surprised they didn’t fix the collision bugs that cause the run to be possible
Every little check you run demands a little bit more computational power, consuming a limited resource. It's probably not very much for one boss check, but it can seriously add up over the course of the game. There's no point putting a burden (even a small one) on performance to prevent something that 99% of players will never experience, and which doesn't ruin the game even if you do encounter it.
“But don’t you think it’s strange that a trigger to spawn the boss was left in and that there was a way to go Super Sonic without the Emeralds?”
No.
I think its kinda absurd that you suggest the developers specifically left in these spawn trigger spots for speedrunners. It is pretty clear that these trigger spots are just how the game knows when to spawn the boss because thats where sonic ends up after the cutscene. There would also be no reason to have an extra check for if the player has all the chaos emeralds because they can just assume that a player without the chaos emeralds would never be in the boss arena. The only part of this theory that might be true is that they purposely didn't patch out the skip to get into the boss arena on Kronos island despite knowing about it. The only thing this would accomplish is piss off speedrunners, so I see why they would decide to just leave it as is.
Well iizuka did said in interview that you can speedrun it so that's something (also long time no see)
They left it as is because sonic games patching out speedrun tricks is unheard of, look at Colors Ultimate and how they still have the 3D in 2D exploits
@@trashman9282 frankly if I ever get around to making the game idea I have kicking around in my head, I'm going out of my way to use tricks like this that would make runs more interesting. I'm a particular fan of the quantum block that if you touch that before the cutscenes then you can break out of them.
Wild BillehBawb W
Cutscene triggers are very common. There are plenty of games that is you don't do a cutscene trigger to will be soft locked. The fact that it's positional triggers and not story triggers is what he's trying to call out
3:34 Game developers tend to dislike putting in redundant checks (I'm assuming you can't even get into the arena without the other 6 emeralds, so why check that you have actually have all 7 when you collect the "last" one in the arena?), so it's not that unusual or uncommon. The most aggressive example is in Jak II; if you do a huge sequence break in Jak II, the game will actually GIVE you all of them items that you SHOULD have at that point in the game. I think it probably stems from a fear of potentially soft-locking innocent players.
correct assumption, through normal play you can only access the arena when you collected the 6 emeralds necessary
That's maybe a big reason why they didn't wanted to make a truly open world, because those kind of story triggers works better on a semi-linear structure.
Jak 2 had a bigger reason to play it safe. Sony was strict on game QA and if a tester found a way into an area early and gets soft-locked, it can set back Jak 2's release. Ensuring the player always had the required items if they find a skip makes the tester think the devs knew the skip was possible and left in intentionally instead of reporting it as a major bug.
There's several games that "give" you items during cutscenes that you didn't collect. Usually this is because during the cutscenes your character / inventory is swapped out for a copy they have prepared on the side for said cutscene for whatever reason. Usually it's not just to prevent softlocking but also to prevent things like animation issues, inventory discrepancies, or various other things they didn't want to bother checking for which could cause things like the game crashing and whatnot. Famous example of this is the start menu glitch in ocarina of time wherein the start menu is actually a hidden save with certain items already collected you can access through a glitch.
That just sounds like lazy coding lol.
Well this is buggy, this might softlock, fuck it instead of finding and fixing the broken parts, just give them free progress.
I think the Trigger for spawning bosses is just because it was more convinient for test, unstead of having to trigger all flags needed, you step on the trigger, it can even be because bosses fight were designed before the requirement to trigger them, and once you put everything in the game, just place sonic on the trigger when needed and call it a day.
Maybe they were affraid of softlocks so they made a failsafe metod... Seems reasonable to me. This kind of basic coding is a happy middle point where hardcore enjoy to break the game while casual plays how it was intended.
Yep, as a game developer I can attest to this. Anything to make my life easier. If a speedrunner can find a way to abuse it, I don't care. After years of working on a title, the priority is just shipping the damned game.
@@zcanann And that to not be a broken mess for the 99.9% of players, even if the 0.1% of hardcore fans break it.
Also, by not having checks like for the emeralds you can have one programmer developing the boss trigger while another is coding the gems without worrying about having to go back over to make it compatible.
Conspiracy? Nah. It's perfectly normal sloppy coding to not bother to check prerequisites that are always fullfilled. Tons of games take shortcuts like this. There's also the fact that it's a lot easier to debug parts of the game if you can just do the minimum to satisfy triggers. Teleporting is easy. Fiddling with story flags is tedious and well, fiddly.
Hang on; as a rookie game designer; I know this basic info, it's not hard for them to add an invisible wall on top. When we, "forget" (don't care) about the players getting to it early, we do this; if we don't want a player getting into somewhere they're not supposed to be; we lazily add an invisible roof, it's not even as if a roof is that hard to add.
I think it's somewhere in the middle. All software, including games, has what's known as "illegal states" - states that are supposed to be impossible to occur through normal operation. For example, being in the boss arena without having all Chaos Emeralds is an illegal state. Depending on the circumstances, programmers might add checks to detect when such an illegal state occurs and change the code path in response, but often, they will just assume that the state is legal and never check all the variables - in this example, the code that handles the boss arena will just assume that you have all the Chaos emeralds, without ever checking.
As the above commenters said, this is common practice, but I don't think it's without thought. I think they *know* that it's possible to reach an illegal state and they *deliberately decided* to go with the generous assumption. The other alternative is to just soft-lock the game... The thinking goes, since the player is ALREADY in the boss arena, the game will be less broken if they could just battle the boss. It doesn't even matter if the player is a speedrunner or a casual who found themself in an unlikely situation. Whichever damage was already done is done, the show must go on!
As for the missing ceiling, the exact same logic applies, although it's a lot more loose. Having an invisible wall in mid-air doesn't look and feel too broken because there isn't much visually wrong happening - Sonic is just falling and the player's input is more or less ignored if it goes in the wall's direction. The only "wrong" thing is when fast movement suddenly stops when it hits the wall. But an invisible floor is a different story - when interacting with it you're necessarily walking on nothing. It's an impossibility through and through. So it makes sense to choose to NEVER use invisible floors/ceilings: if the player made it above the arena, the game feels more polished if we just let them fall down to the earth than if we make them walk on air. Again, the show must go on.
I also think they definitely had speedrunners in mind when making these decisions. They knew glitch hunters would break the game one way or the other, they preferred that the game steamrolled through illegal states while still having sensible gameplay rather than becoming unplayable or more and more glitchy as the illegal states piled up on top of each other.
Not sloppy, just safe. If you already have a check for all emeralds on whatever lets you enter the boss arena, why check again later? All you get is a potential bug if the check goes wrong somehow.
And as you said, makes for easier testing.
@@moonsoon1038 my throat taste like hair
@@soundrogue4472 Bruh. making invisible roofs is not as normal as you think. So many games barriers can be skipped by getting high enough to the point it's the first thing people attempt when trying to skip barriers. That and getting fast enough to go through it before it can process you touching it.
Location triggers and not requiring the chaos emeralds is something to be expected since in a casual run you can't hit the trigger if the game doesn't place you there and there is never any scenario where you can grab the last emerald before super Sonic. But what is sus is adding a second invis wall that has a hole. It's literally easier to make it completely solid than to leave a hole
I love when acronyms are made for a speed run trick. You use the acronym and it sounds super smart and intelligent. "As you do the WJWNC you enter a state of PBNJ. And the momentum of the...."
and when you tell your friend that PBNJ stands for "Potatolord Boosted Norbert Jump" the look on their face is priceless
"Right here we do a HSP to gain an insane amount of height-"
"What does HSP stand for?"
"...Hedgehog Space Program..."
"Hedgehog Space Program" absolutely destroyed me lmao that's so funny
wait until you learn about OIL skip in Celeste.
Step 1. Cover yourself in oil.
@@curedollyarchive7797 amazing lmao
This is a sonic community. You don't get into sonic without enjoying humor.
Hedgehog Space Program? Looks like Team Sonic's blasting off again!
Death Egg, Inc approves
It's just a simple way of making cutscenes and such trigger. These are typical methods of progression for development. That they're being left in without patch is likely intentional, but that they were found is unsurprising. Every program is at least a little bit spaghettified and forced together, and will typically use as simple of a way to get something to work as possible.
DSS is such a legend. So many tricks found over the years.
I also loved seeing so much of my boy Emerldd's footage in this video lol. Very informational, great vid!
I'm glad that this game has a lot of attention towards the speedrunning community. Not only is Frontiers a good casual game, but it's an incredibly fun game to speedrun, especially when the nature of the game is a 3D sandbox collectathon, similar to a certain game called Super Mario 64.
every Sonic dev watching this right now: "Oh, that bug? You mean surprise feature!"
It makes sense to me why devs might add these features. Casuals who accidentally skip sections aren't punished, if there is a glitch with story flags nobody notices, and speedrunners are happy. All three of these things are good. There is no reason to make people's lives harder for the sake of "doing it right." A smart dev will work with their community, not against it.
Nintendo ruining backwards long jump speedruns to f*ck with SM64 fans, while Sonic Team are like: "Speedrunners are cool. Give'em da glitches".
Friendly reminder the game has been out for 3 WEEKS and all of this has already been found. I keep saying it but I can't wait to see how far this speedrun goes!
I'm waiting for them to manipulate the inventory to spell "RUN END"
Great video! Happy to have contributed a skip. Had no clue Onaku's recent WR used it, thats pretty awesome to see!
Love the fake out of the music picking up before “You can just jump over it”.
This is already incredible!
But how the hell did the speedrunners figure out that in order to skip pinball consistently you have to punch a very specific box
There's probably dozens of ways to solve this, they just found the first of them and stuck with it.
That's the thing I never understood with Speedrunners. They will find the *MOST* complex thing in the game and use it for their Speedrun. How did they find it? Who the heck knows. But it works.
Likely by going back over their recordings and seeing what actions they took which seemed to give consistent results then narrowing it down. People probably broke said box on accident. That being said, many (think original metroid) are notable for people using RNG manipulation wherein you do specific tasks so if you suspect it can be manipulated you can just test to see if anything works. I suspect the former as the game hasn't been out long enough to really test a whole bunch.
how speedrunners figured this out is probably related to why punching the box works.
In this case, we know that, for some reason, punching that box sets the game so that you will face a specific direction, and that things that reset the direction you're facing undo this. Abyssoft also mentioned Maio PUs which to me says it's related to a float/int transition, or 2 variables being used to store your angle.
I notice that when you break the box, the parts fall away from Sonic.
From this, I'm guessing that what's actually happening, is that when you break the box, the game grabs Sonic's angle, and uses it to make the box parts fly away from sonic. The angle you punched the box is now stored in some "temporary angle" variable, which will be reset when you start grinding, or enter a 2D segment, or something like that, which forces sonic to face a certain direction. The state of this variable is used to determine what direction to spawn Sonic when you reload the game.
So now, lets say someone saved the game while facing the doors to a boss room, reloaded the game, and was facing some other direction. That would be pretty noticeable. There are people who go out of their way to find glitches, and if one of those people noticed this, after a few runs, they might start experimenting. They know that it's consistent on a save, but inconsistent between saves, so something that's related to Sonic's angle, but isn't his angle, has to be getting read. Speedrunners would have been loudly complaining about how there wasn't a consistent setup, so this guy knew his info would be useful, and kept experimenting.
How they figured out that boxes influenced this, I don't know, but I can't imagine it was that hard if the person was running around, doing things, saving, restarting, and seeing what direction it made him face.
Of course, all of this is just a guess based on like, 30 seconds of footage, and if it's actually what happened, then call me Sherlock. But, I think it paints a decent picture of how things could have gone to figure that out.
actually about ses, lots of speedrunners (including me) are using ses in runs now because of a new route found that saves around 40 seconds if done optimally. great video btw!!
I think the reason they left a huge hole in the invisible ceiling above giganto's arena is that if they'd actually closed it up, it could interfere with the boss fight (specifically, cylooping him)
But if that were the case, they could have just raised the ceiling...
If the engine of Sonic and PSO2NGS are the same (which it think it is), the cutscene scripts are the same, too.
The cutscenes only appear to be able to move the actors, but you need triggers to spawn things.
It makes more sense to complete the cutscene and then place a trigger at that location, where the cutscene ends and control is returned to the player. In debug mode, it very easy to get the current location XYZ after a cutscene and just plop those as the center of a -circular- cylindrical trigger on the ground.
SInce the trigger is placed there, you don't need to watch the cutscenes and just spawn the boss to debug by stepping on the trigger, saving development time.
i get sm64 vibes from how speedruns are going with this game and i love it cant wait too see all the different % catagories
I think there are a lot of soft-lock protections in place that turn out to be useful when sequence-breaking. Jury's still out on wtf they were thinking with the second invisible wall that didn't actually stop the skip from happening.
I love that the name Magnet Dash sticked because it originated from 3D Spark the Electric Jester games which have exactly the same technique.
Those triggers most likely aren't anything special which were left to help speedrunners.
The player triggers the cutscene which teleports you to this exact location. As the developers now knew that every player would stand on this exact spot they placed yet another trigger right there which makes the boss appear. A simple failsave would be that the game only loads the boss trigger if the requirements are met and should this not be the case it instead places a trigger as big as the arena which teleports you right out of the arena as soon as you touch the ground.
That way speedrunners wouldn't be able to skip the content while regular players who might end up entering the arena early by accident are still able to exit it without any deeper game knowledge. But most likely the developers were too lazy to add this - like a fair amount of developers of other games are. And this is just fine even if it doesn't sound like this would be the case - as long as the game is designed in a way which prevents you from executing the skip by accident.
I haven't played the game myself, but going super with the emeralds and the triggers being in the over world seem like pretty simple oversights.
"There's no way to enter the boss fight without the other emeralds, so why bother checking for them?"
"The cut scene places you here, and we want to make sure the boss spawns when the cut scene is over, so just put the trigger for the scene where Sonic ends up"
The logic is pretty simple to see why it might have been designed that way. As for why the exploits are still allowed, it could simply be considered not worth the effort to fix, since it's not something that affects normal play
If the devs do intentionally keep these tricks in I respect it a lot. There's a middle ground when patching glitches between improving the casual experience and not breaking the top ranked experience that is hard to maintain, and if they are trying to balance that out for real then godspeed to them.
The recent patch actually improved the speedrun by fixing a deload bug that now makes it so we don't have to quit to title for WES (Wyvern Escape Skip). It is ultra rare that a patch IMPROVES the speedrun without patching anything out. So yeah if they are doing it intentionally bless their souls ^_^ Nintendo could learn a thing or two from them and stop fucking over Splatoon 3 speedrunners ;-;
this is 10000% not the case, this kid is just an idiot.
I think the boss triggers being there in the first place wasn't meant for speedrunners and was just the most straight forward way to get the sequence to not trigger early and break or not trigger at all. That being said they definitely left it in after they patched it on purpose because unlike nintendo sega doesn't hate player generated fun
It blows my mind how speedrunners find stuff like this so quickly, great video!
Im not really sure what the conspiracy is? that the developer isn't intentionally patching things speed runners are using? Why would that even be a problem? Speedrunnings a big thing, deciding to leave skips in rather than totally patching them out, ie the second wall having a hole in it, just seems like they are aware and don't want to ruin your fun while making it harder for normal players to break their games. The other stuff with the boss spawn triggers, maybe, but I'm not really sold that its specifically left there for speedrunners. and the chaos emeralds, what would you even want them to do after you get the last emerald, just have the game softlock? From a coding perspective its much better to have it continue normally than to leave the game running in a dead state
3D Sonic games: enough bugs to rival a forest
Sonic goes open world:
1:54 I prefer the term "Hedgehog Space Program".
Anyway, neat analysis video! Thanks for uploading!
2:20 i script my own game. I know how doors and Keys work. It does not matter if you have all 6 emerlands or not -_-
If the game detects you in the arena entramce (AKA boss arena door entrance) THEN the game assumes that you DID got all main quests done. And if you ask „well why devs scripted it like so?” Well its because its simpler to make and unnecessary to double check if you do have 6 emerlands or not. Invisible wall does a good enough protection… that is until some lucky speedrunner discovered HSP.
It sounds like they left a lot of back doors from testing. Normally in game development there’s documentation (usually a sticky note on someone’s desk) about the location of these back doors what they’re testing for. Sonic frontiers was one of those games that went through alot of testing to make sure it ran smoothly but had little cleanup after testing was done
Never surprised to see DSS discover crazy glitches. Dude is a legend in the sonic Speedruning community
It's weird you refer to the area bosses as 'final bosses', though yes, that's technically correct, it's the final boss of the area... that term is usually left for the 'actual' final boss of the game.
Absolutely creasing over "Hedgohog Space Program" 🤣 speed runners are pure genius
its been over a decade since I last followed DSS and he's still coming up with insane shit
I honestly believe someone should make a video on all his work on the sonic speedrunning community, its one of a kind.
Good to see developers support speed running glitches as long as the glitch isn't easily done through normal play.
If I were part of the Sonic games dev team, the "Grand Sonic Conspiracy" would be definitely something I'd see if we could take time to pull off.
My brother told me about Magnet dash and HSP before my first playthrough and I ended up accidentally skipping to the wyvern fight after HSPing into that one crater mountain and just dropping into the area. Of course I wanted to play through the story so I had to find a way to get back, but it's crazy how easy it is to break this game.
Also HSP is just so useful in general, for getting a view of the whole island, or getting high up tokens. Definitely made the experience a lot more enjoyable
It's extremely common to not check for something explicitly unless you have a reason to. There was already a check for the other chaos emeralds before the fight, checking again during the fight would just be a waste of processing time unless the developers actually had a reason to think players could get there without them.
The boss spawn can also be explained as "lazy" programming, the cutscene to start the boss fight obviously moves sonic to that location so they just set up the boss to spawn whenever he was in place. Again, there was already a barrier to stop people getting in, so there wasn't necessarily any reason to add extra barriers to progression inside.
The only times developers really go above and beyond is when they're actually paranoid about speed runners, but a lot of developers probably don't care too much as long as they think casual players won't be able to mess up the game progression too easily.
Hearing that part about breaking the pinball sequence had me shedding a tear
Glitched pinball is some creepypasta type stuff
As a programmer, I think the devs left it there to deliberately prevent softlocking or a bug that could break the game.
By placing the trigger where the player is placed, it could minimize the risk of a softlock if the cutscene trigger for it didn't trigger. (Which happened to quite a bit on many other games, not just in the sonic series. Example God Eater series, if you skip a cutscene it will not trigger the achievement... Good thing the gallery for that game exists)
But yeah, this is definitely useful for speedruns.
What's that? The devs went ahead and ignored a glitch used by speedrunners that doesn't affect casual play in any way?
Bruh, that's not a conspiracy. That's how all game developers should always handle similar situations.
Not always, some people want the thing they made perfect
The best part of this video is that speedrunners have broken the game even further and are skipping the tutorial bridge.
There is no shot these skips are accidental. Even casual players ended up watching the hype surrounding Elden Ring speedruns, and from a business perspective it makes sense because this just creates more hype around the game itself. I think it's pretty obvious that they left them in on purpose considering they knew people could get into the 1st arena and instead of blocking it off properly, like you said they just added a second wall and even left in a way to trigger the boss. Realistically this just goes to prove how much they padded the gameplay, needing to get all those collectables to progress, unless you're a sweaty speedrunner? nah it just feels cheap af to me, not to mention how empty and dead and cold the world is. This honestly feels like a fanmade unreal engine 5 "game" not an official release. Maybe I need to watch some videos but it really felt like the sonic racing games had more world building than this junk. I don't even like what I'm looking at, just feels like someone modded sonic into an unrelated game.
The glitches where you can launch yourself high in the sky is okay because the only thing it really affects is traversal as opposed to objective goals, but I do think the Titan spawns/skips do need to be patched for the following reasons:
1. It makes a lot of the game pointless. Why spend your time getting the Emeralds and progressing through the objectives, when you can just hop over to the boss and spawn him in that way?
2. It can potentially break the game and lock players out of things. I found that, if you immediately go right to Giganto and then go back and free Amy after unlocking Ares, she will be inaccessible and lock players out of getting the achievements or finding the story.
As for the whole "keeping people from getting stuck in Giganto's arena" thing, you can still get stuck if you already fought him and didn't unlock any of the warp points. What they could do to fix this, is add in another Hyperbounce platform to the arena that loads in only after the player completes Giganto the first time.
Most of the "coincidences" are fairly common game development tricks to save time. The donut wall might have been an intentional "fix for non-speedrunners" thing, though.
The grand conspiracy is that you don't understand how the game works. All of those aspects including the hole in the wall are required to progress the game as intended, because the sonic component model has no ability to teleport or otherwise respawn during cutscenes, death events, or fast travel. He just moves very fast off camera.
Some games are just not made for speedrunning.
I absolutely cannot get over the one trick being called Hedgehog Space Program
im cackling and crying
this has become a core memory
Nice video, you should maybe talk about Individual levels, those are kinda interesting as well
mah boy Bismuth got a shoutout towards the end. Nice!
during my first playthrough in ares island, i got to the titan area early and was like "bet the boss happens here" and went back and finished the island lmao
didnt know about the trigger though
I get the feeling that they didnt realize the trigger thing would be used, but since it is, they thought they'd leave it to not make speedruns painful
Because speedruning a game the way it was intended is painful?
@@notscorchingsands9718 it very much can be, cutscene heavy games with no skips, games where the majority is very tedious fetch quest stuff that, after being optimized, isnt that engaging
@@EmeraldEmsiron And skipping 90% isn't interesting to watch after the first time you see it.
@@notscorchingsands9718 its a hell of a lot more fun to play, if you dont like that as a viewer dont watch, other people do like that. if you dont want someone to skip the game watch the 100% categories
@@EmeraldEmsiron Ok...? I was just saying my piece chill.
The devs know that speedrunning is an amazing way to extend the life of a game, Metroid dread literally has skips built into it to get items earlier than expected and left in glitches that speedrunners use whole patching ones that can harm the play experience, bonus points for being a game designed originally around going fast and the skips avoiding stupid amounts of grinding and pinball
Given Sonic was born from the concept of speedrunning itself, I think leaving in the exploits was just a little "let's give speedrunners this one"
If I ever make a game, I’m not putting any safeguards against sequence breaks cause it’s fun to break a game
Sonic Developers have always had these strats in mind since Sonic Adventure when they saw how the Speed Dash could launch Sonic into places not intended, which is why they placed item boxes on top of buildings, because they knew someone would want to explore. I just wish there weren't so many invisible barriers/walls in Frontiers, or let us run on walls like we could in the past.
Bro I accidentally found how to skip to the Wyvern boss fight by myself on my first playthrough. I was trying to find the last puzzle to open up the map and had used a ancient rail to jump into the boss arena (which I didn't know was the boss arena at the time). I was running around for a while and couldn't seem to find the puzzle and eventually decided to head back. I went to find a spring and fell down into the area with the sprawlling hallways, and by complete luck, accidentally hit the trigger to spawn Wyvern. At the time I didnt even know what had happened and just thought that the springs unloaded. It wasn't until one of my friends told me that I was in the boss arena with the boss that I realised what happened. I still have the clip from when I spawned Wyvern. One of my funniest moments in the game. I reloaded my save afterwards and completed the map and got in the normal way.
It’s crazy people find all these glitches and tricks.
I think the titles to spawn bosses were left in to make it easier for developers to trigger events when testing and making the game.
considering speed running is a great way to keep interest in the game, and keep the game relevant for longer, it's a fantastic reason to not patch out certain bugs and glitches.
For the boss spawning, I believe that it's a boss fight save spot for developers to test out the boss. Like (maybe, this is just speculation on my part) in the code it reads "when Sonic reaches [spot where boss fight starts], spawn the boss"; because the save spot is usually out of bounds for casual players, there is no need to remove it. This may come in before they incorporate the cutscenes in order to see if the game will load in the boss at the correct spot.
As for not patching the glitches, well, would you rather patch something that causes speedrunners/glitch finders to try and find some other trick/glitch that could end up soft-lock/break the game; or, leave it alone because the game runs smoothly and the players are having a lot of fun? For me, I would go with it just works and there is no real damage to the game.
I mean, as a player myself (more on the casual side of things), I would do these tricks just to do the boss fights again and again because I love fighting them. I didn't know about the boss skip until this video and maybe I might try it because I did wonder what would happed if I could reach the top. I know I have done the trick launch multiple times and it feels more natural in gameplay wise to me rather than having "one touch at all and you fall" kind of slopes (REALLY ANNOYING). Trick launches were very accidental at first for me until I realized what was happening; now, I am able to use them to help me go to the destination I want to more quickly.
Well, that's my take on the glitches/tricks that are left in the game.
It probably isn’t a conspiracy, but I could reasonably see Sega going out of their way to make speedrunning possible in a Sonic game
Many of these even goes way back to the late 90s with dk64 and being able to skip and spawn bosses early
4:52 aww I thought I discovered it first,
Well good job for the guy, he has my respect.
spawn triggers are extremely common in almost every game out there, its just to let the game know "hey, you need to do this now." theres always a way to activate these triggers normally, im not 100% sure about this since my knowledge of sonic frontiers isnt the best so im going to assume but since the cutscenes are happening in real time then it only makes sense for a trigger to actually be there, if theyre not done in real time then it still makes sense that the spawning point for sonic would bring out the boss, so the triggers are normal as said.
Triggers aren't always spatially present in games. You want an example? Pokemon Scarlet&Violet. These games are crappy, buggy, broken, crumbling in any player's hand... and yet *its events sequence can't be broken at all.* There is no point in space that triggers a final boss. There's no way to reach Area Zero before completing all missions.
Triggers should never be present in space, period. An event should be unlocked by completing the previous event (so it should be a "time trigger": as soon as a certain cutscene is played, the game allows you to reach the following cutscene). That's why it's called an events _sequence._
In fact, spatial triggers are a tool for debugging. They should be wiped out of the game before it's published. The games that still have those triggers in are just not cleaned before their release.
@@Dante02d12 they aren’t always present you’re right, and you’ve given a very good example. But you can’t deny the fact that in a ton of games they’re still there, most games we’d play there’re triggers to start or stop something in some way, i disagree with the fact they should be wiped, they can be useful and prevent softlocking if the game gets confused and spawns you a bit off the mark or if the boss just doesn’t spawn
i feel like im listening to a robot
It's likely made that way to help developer who is doing testing. If you don't want to do a lot of extra debug commands and startup arguments, it is very convenient to just being able to play Test a boss by telwpoeting the player or just debug starting in the correct area.
But it's impossible to know exactly why.
In Ares, once I completed the final puzzle, I decided to be a funny guy and went to the arena from over the cave
I was surprised that the battle didn't trigger, and there were bumpers that helped you go back easily, I assume the devs left that on purpose, tho I didn't know you could trigger it that way anyway, I just went back to the cave and did the normal road
Is the hole in the top of the Giganto arena second wall/dome not because they need you to be able to launch him skywards with the Super Sonic cyloop and not bonk off a arena sky box?
It’s kinda dope that they left in “unintended” game breaks like this. It just makes the game more fun. Devs have gotten this idea that they need to “fix” anything that doesn’t work as intended when really they should just be fixing things that lead to a negative gameplay experience and leave things that are interesting
Oh gosh, I got into the wyvern boss arena in casual play before I even knew it was gonna be the boss arena, there's actually a few ways you can get in there I've found at least 3. I ran around and climbed to all the high points of the arena, if I just ran around randomly a bit more I would've summoned wyvern and freaked out
Developers are embracing speedrunners more than ever. The skips were not intentional, but not patching them was not a happy accident.
i love that magnet dashing made it to sparks series inspiration
I'd love to think potential skips, like the boss triggers are intentional as part of a speed running plan. While it could limit some possible options for how runs can go it is great to see game devs including speedrunners as the target audience. Modders and Speedrunners help extend a game's lifespan with normally Mods adding into the more causual audience and Speed running into the more dedicated audience. Since there really isn't as much potential for Mods in Sonic Frontiers compared to games like Elderscrolls, Fallout, ect. the game devs setting up a specific "safe" speedrun route encourages more people to look into speedrunning their game and learning the unique tech involved.
As an (amateur) dev, I'll weigh in and say that it's very unlikely to be 'intentional' so much as it's just good game design.
1. If you have a debug command, you can have the debug command put you right on the boss trigger and start everything easily without putting you through the cutscene.
2. You probably want some back-up checks to make sure everything works, in the slight chance that something goes horribly wrong and the boss doesn't spawn when it should.
3. Editing in a second invisible wall shows that they had not planned for this (they did not get people to test speedrun skips, or didn't know of a way over the wall), the fact they still allow you to go in is because they don't want to alter the game for the speedrunners that clearly have a lot of investment in their game. As said in the video, it seems to be to keep casual players from finding it accidentally and ruining their experience.
4. If you're at the boss then you already have the emeralds if you're a casual player. There's no reason to check that they have it. Adding in extra checks means more chances of softlocks (or a completely unwinnable state) or more variables that a debug command is going to have to check just to let you debug the fight.
The dev's wanna see speed runners go fast. Hell yeah
Gotta go fast!
Speedruns can bring a lot of attention and therefore popularity to a game, so these issues might actually help the game overall
This game hasn't even been out for 30 days and we are already hitting sub 1:15 loadless times on PC and soon sub 1:20 RTA times on console. I remember when sub 2 was discussed as possible, and now sub 2 is literally free. I have never seen a speedrun develop this fast, and having been part of developing it together with the community makes me really proud :) I am sure this game will just keep getting crazier and crazier.
I'm not a speedrunner by any means, but as someone who was one of the original Sonic Adventure glitchers I went a bit nuts on Ares Island and actually discovered the boss arena skip. I would have been disappointed if I did actually manage to trigger the boss and skip all the middle bits though.
Keep up the quality content, Abyss!
Doing my best 😅
@@Abyssoft good quality content? This goes into whacko conspiracy mode over basic coding practice... he's a moron.
It is a sonic open world game. You have ways to lock on, dash, and just generally fast. These characteristics have broken other games before. Also I wrote this before watching the video
I think the devs know of and appreciate the speedrun community. it's the ultimate form of gotta go fast
Some of the "conspiracy" things could have been intentionally left in by developers to help them more quickly test the game,. For example even though you could use internal tools to do things like give yourself chaos emeralds or move the story progression along, having a boss spawn when touching a trigger and then just teleporting Sonic there is a bit easier.
What I expect is something so ridiculous like mashing the konami code right at the start of the game, before you load in, being a straight to credits skip. essentially turning it into a sub 5 second speedrun
my guess is that this was also left in by devs so they didnt have to go through everything, they accidentaly left in the trigger/didnt disable it when not enough chaos emeralds
probably developer things for themselves more so for speedrunners. its similar as to why cheat codes even existed in the first place. developers need something for when testing as well as it wouldn't need an additional trigger because the assumption is that you played the game normally. conspiracy almost definitely not, more like common development stuff that players and speedrunners have abused since games of old.
This is just regular game development tricks and are used all over hundreds of games. Having useless and unnecessary checks for conditions that would not feasibly occur in regular gameplay is bad coding practice, so of course there's no checks for the diamonds.
Why are there triggers to spawn the bosses? Because the player touches the trigger after the cutscene is over. That's it. Normally, there's no way for the player to touch the triggers manually, so why make things difficult with unnecessary checks and events?
Did you know the name magnet dash was ripped straight out of spark the electric jester 2 and 3
For Ares Island there's a rail you can grind that'll launch you high enough to be on the arena level.
I think the additional wall was purposeful, but I also think that some of Sonic Team know about speedrunning and intentionally allow the games to be speedrunnable. But the boss trigger and chaos emerald flags are common in many games that it wouldn't be at all indicative that it was with speed running in mind.
If anything I'd argue that if you want a game where the developers were trying to hinder speedrunners, look at twilight princess.
Really good video and spectacular commentary, keep up the amazing content man.
5:01 YOU MEAN ME GETTING HERE EARLY ON MY FIRST PLAYTHROUGH WASN'T INTENTIONAL???????? I thought that area was always explorable and the boss just triggered once a flag was set...
5:14 sonic staring into your soul 😭
I don't know how, but I skipped the end boss fight with out realizing it and it just goes straight to the end cut sene. I still can fight it 💀