Speedrunners Have Completely DESTROYED Sonic Frontiers 

Memberships on RU-vid are also coming soon, they're focused around the live streams and I'll be sure to announce them when I set them live.

W

if the developers intentionally left this in the game, why is it a "conspiracy"?

If I subscribe will you stop over-enunciating? I'll do it two-day. I know you know how to talk normally.

@@Abyssoftw2wwwwwwwi2 you are you and your family lol

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Death Egg, Inc approves

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..."

I'm waiting for them to manipulate the inventory to spell "RUN END"

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.

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.

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.

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