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Sonic Mania Accidentally Patched With Improvements Early
Yesterday, owners of Sonic Mania on PlayStation 4 were surprised to find a patch downloading for last year's 2D Sonic revival, only for Sega to quickly pull the patch from the servers.
The update went live and the very active classic Sonic fanbase immediately started playing through the game to figure out the differences. With Sonic Mania Plus, a re-release of the game with a special encore mode and two new characters, still on the horizon, it was assumed that Sega was simply patching in a lot of the improvements into the base game. However, Sonic Mania Plus still had no specific release date, so the patch was decidedly confusing.
Among other things, players discovered that all levels now have transitions between each other, which was previously only the case between a few of them. In addition, one often criticized boss fight has had its final phase changed to a reference to Knuckles Chaotix, the 1995 32X game.
Some other small quality of life changes, like the option to remove time limits as a whole if you like, have also been added. It's unclear if this is the extent of the changes or merely a work-in-progress version accidentally uploaded to consumer servers. We contacted Sega today to get clarification about this patch, who only pointed us to this tweet by Sonic the Hedgehog social media and PR person Aaron Webber: "Hi all – you may have seen that we’re releasing a free update to Sonic Mania in the future, in addition to Sonic Mania Plus. Both are officially coming out in the summer, so please stay tuned and avoid any spoilers until then!"
Sonic Mania released last year, while the revamped Sonic Mania Plus releases, as the tweet says, sometime this summer.
Our Take
It's good to see that a lot of the changes are coming to the base game, as well. Though at this point I'm honestly more curious how this happened at all. I wonder if there are more changes that just have yet to be discovered.
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