Sonic Frontiers Spoilers: Datamining Discovers Update 3 Character Animations and Assets in Update 2

More finds

Hmm…makes me wonder if they’re gonna stop the updates after this one or continue and add more to the game?

I'd be really shocked if they kept going after Update 3. The first two updates alone are already quite a significant amount of content.

14 minutes ago, CrownSlayer’s Shadow said:

Hmm…makes me wonder if they’re gonna stop the updates after this one or continue and add more to the game?

Depends on how much they want to use Frontiers to keep 3D players tied over until the next game.

There's more..

Also, looks like Tails, Knux, and Amy will each have their own skill tree..

Also, Apparently there are some story stuff for Update 3 going around, so be wary on Sonic Twitter

Amy attacks with Tarot cards? Seems more like attacking with Talismans, she's out here sealing away ghostly spirits that haunt the Starfall Islands.

These idle animations are really expressive, Sonic Team's animation has come a long away from where we used to be.

Where do you want me to gush? The value for money in this title continues to impress me.

Which is just as well considering I presently feel the opposite with my value spent on Origins - so at least I can end the day on a high note. 

43 minutes ago, 8ther said:

Also, Apparently there are some story stuff for Update 3 going around, so be wary on Sonic Twitter

So by story stuff, are we talking during the end game/final island? Or are talking about post-game? Not wanting to know anything else beyond that, at the the risk of being spoiled.

I don't know, i just heard that some story related stuff were being leak by some other dataminers, I honestly don't want to look into it out of risk of being spoiled myself

Edit: Last batch of leaks from Bluwolf, showing Knuckles' idle, climbing, glide, and attack animations

Amy's running animation is very lively.

Squash and Stretch (mostly just stretch) for in-game animation and looks much better than Sonic's base game animation.

50 minutes ago, Blueknight V2.0 said:

So by story stuff, are we talking during the end game/final island? Or are talking about post-game? Not wanting to know anything else beyond that, at the the risk of being spoiled.

I can't see any reason they would put in so much work to include extra playable characters if there wasn't a substantive story to play through with them, except for the heads of SEGA rushing it out early.  Granted, that's a big reason.

That we're getting this for free is so wild and not game company like, I have to wonder what the catch is.

Since characters are seemingly going to have Skill Trees as full as Sonic's, I think the initial worries/presumptions that they'd only be playable in limited zones can probably be put to rest.

1 hour ago, Chili Dawg said:

That we're getting this for free is so wild and not game company like, I have to wonder what the catch is.

I think the catch was that they delayed implementing things that, by some allegations, were supposed to be in the core game at release but did not get finished in time.  Of course, the particular allegations about Tails, Knuckles and Amy being playable have many skeptics, but when you consider what a bizarre and un-Sonic-like final boss we got, it does seem like at least some stuff in Frontiers just plain wasn't finished.

As to why they aren't charging extra for this, well, maybe they meant what they said about wanting this game to take them to the top of the industry.  Frontiers as released definitely comes off as the foundation of something potentially great but missing a lot of the "stuff" you'd expect for most open-world games, so maybe the free DLC is an attempt to gain on the competition.

53 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

I think the catch was that they delayed implementing things that, by some allegations, were supposed to be in the core game at release but did not get finished in time.  Of course, the particular allegations about Tails, Knuckles and Amy being playable have many skeptics, but when you consider what a bizarre and un-Sonic-like final boss we got, it does seem like at least some stuff in Frontiers just plain wasn't finished.

As to why they aren't charging extra for this, well, maybe they meant what they said about wanting this game to take them to the top of the industry.  Frontiers as released definitely comes off as the foundation of something potentially great but missing a lot of the "stuff" you'd expect for most open-world games, so maybe the free DLC is an attempt to gain on the competition.

That's also what I had heard. Probably threw a bunch of thingd out early in development. Iizuka has gone on the record saying that they had to redo the maps several times. Not to mention the unused Supreme Titan animations and that leaked snippet of game footage that was in higher quality compared to the final build.

When will Sonic Team learn to clean their files before giving the okay to release, haha.

Regardless, this is all really cool to see. Puts my biggest fear at ease (that these characters would be just small minigames and nothing more), if they have what seems to be full movement animations. Maybe each character has their own skill tree as "extensive" as Sonic's? That'd be neat, but I don't really know how you can extend Tails' combat to be that in-depth if he uses the cyblaster. But then again, I'm not against a Shadow The Hedgehog (game) but with Tails instead, could use different weapons/variants of the cyblaster maybe.

I see Amy's tarot card attack an immediately think Reimu Hakurei and her constant depictions of using cards as an attack as well. Can't wait for the mad rush to replace Amy's model with some Reimu model for that one attack alone.

If they have textures I'd like to see the models textured.

4 minutes ago, SolidSurgeTT said:

If they have textures I'd like to see the models textured.

It's likely these are the same character models already in-game.

Just now, GX -The Spindash- said:

It's likely these are the same character models already in-game.

Yeah but don't those have that Cyberspace filter over them? I figured these would be of the characters outside of Cyberspace (I hope--the DLC roadmap showed them as still being in Cyberspace).

1 minute ago, SolidSurgeTT said:

Yeah but don't those have that Cyberspace filter over them?

If you'd like them without, they've already been extracted.

https://www.models-resource.com/pc_computer/sonicfrontiers/

18 hours ago, Treacher said:

That's also what I had heard. Probably threw a bunch of thingd out early in development. Iizuka has gone on the record saying that they had to redo the maps several times. Not to mention the unused Supreme Titan animations and that leaked snippet of game footage that was in higher quality compared to the final build.

To the dataminers: According to the author of that "leak", Amy also does a bit of boxing in the game.  If you can find animations for that I'd call it as good as confirmed.

17 hours ago, LegoFedora said:

When will Sonic Team learn to clean their files before giving the okay to release, haha.

Part of me thinks they're doing this intentionally.  It's no secret that the majority of the buzz about Sonic the Hedgehog for most of a decade has been online.  On years where a major Sonic product isn't around to keep that interest up they can still count on people online to remind everyone else that Sonic exists, even if often that's in less than flattering terms.  Playing into the passions of Sonic fans and media archivists helps with that.

22 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Part of me thinks they're doing this intentionally.  It's no secret that the majority of the buzz about Sonic the Hedgehog for most of a decade has been online.  On years where a major Sonic product isn't around to keep that interest up they can still count on people online to remind everyone else that Sonic exists, even if often that's in less than flattering terms.  Playing into the passions of Sonic fans and media archivists helps with that.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. These data-mine hungry masses do provide free publicity and buzz. And on the other hand, you don't have to spend extra time and effort creating a new build that doesn't contain all this juicy data.

Its an argument that comes up all the time when demo's come out. In order to launch a demo that has nothing valuable to data mine, you'd have to devote a team to collecting the relevant assets from scratch from the ground up - so that the end result is "clean". And even then, a ton of stuff is interconnected, so you'd have to devote even more effort to quality control checking your maths. God help you if a texture shader file name hints at an unannounced ability. or a stray sound effect file confirms something you were trying to be sneaky about.  lol

I'm happy with a middle ground that leaves stuff for people to dig through and satiate that rabid itch - while not giving away the entire farm. And in this case, Frontiers is already out so the spoiler stakes are much lower. Not zero, thanks to the new story content, but it certainly does not need the protections a yet-to-be-released game needs.

On 6/24/2023 at 9:05 AM, LegoFedora said:

When will Sonic Team learn to clean their files before giving the okay to release, haha.

Honestly, many gamedevs I know are really bad at handling source revision and branches correctly, so I think that every "done" branch are dumped into the main branch, and that everything is built in one go xD

The leaked dialogue

Really wonder how this will be implemented into the game with all these substantial changes.