During the process of building Marathon Recompiled, we’ve ended up digging deep into many of Sonic 06’s core systems, including the rendering. The appearance of 06’s various areas varies from pretty good, like in Crisis City, to utterly flat and depressing in Castle Town.
It really makes you wonder what exactly went wrong? If you look at what limited footage we have of beta content, we can see many effects that aren’t present in the final game. Kingdom Valley had full bump maps, Castle Town had more complex geometry and plants, and New City’s collision implies a very different building layout at some point in development.
It turns out, much of the cut content is actually still in the game, but is simply not enabled for performance reasons in vanilla. Even with the cut-back visuals, the game struggles to reach target FPS on real hardware. It’s not surprising that given the crunch Sonic Team were under to get the game out the door, these features were among the first to go.
