Adressing the concerns with the quality of Sonic:Frontiers(Via NintendoLife), IGN's senior editorial producer Mitchell Saltzman elaborated saying that the gameplay footage from the game seen at the IGN World First are from an early build:
Later on, in the same preview, Saltzman confirmed the footage is from an "early build" while at the same time admitting there's a bit of a clash between objects (including how they just "pop in") and the very naturalistic art style - with hopes it can be improved in the final version of the game and "beyond":
[...] "it's worth emphasising that this gameplay and the version that I played were from an early build."
Following up;
Ultimately, my time with this early build answered the one question I had on my mind - will Sonic's one-of-a-kind gameplay translate into open-world? The answer is a resounding absolutely.
In a
tweet, Saltzman also clarified a few things - explaining how IGN wasn't provided footage for certain parts of the game, and going on to highlight a point from his own
written preview about how much the gameplay structure in Frontiers "excites" him:
Sonic must hunt down and defeat these bosses in order to collect portal gears, which open up portals that lead to bite-sized linear stages, done in the style of previous Sonic games, giving Sonic Frontiers a nice mix of both old and new styles. These classic levels each come with a handful of optional goals, like beating the level under a certain time, collecting all the red rings, and so on, with each goal rewarding you with a vault key, which are needed to unlock the coveted Chaos Emeralds.
Click to shrink...
And in some follow-up tweets, he further details the flow of the game:
The flow of the game is basically: Explore open world > solve puzzles to open up map > find collectibles to improve stats > fight world bosses to earn portal gears > use portal gears to unlock linear Sonic levels > complete linear Sonic levels to unlock chaos emeralds - "From what I've played so far, it's a very solid gameplay loop. There's obviously a lot of work to be done, as I talk about in the preview, but I think structure-wise, Sonic Team has something with Frontiers. It just needs a lot of polishing up.