Desert Ruins Act 2 shows minor visual differences between the Wii U and Windows versions, including increased fog density, longer draw distance, and enhanced depth of field.
Demo Video
Wii U
The Wii U version displays reduced depth of field and less visible geometry.
The Windows version matches the Wii U visually but lacks the depth of field effect.
The Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or SSAO option was originally planned for the video settings to allow toggling it on or off, but it was removed prior to release and cannot be enabled.
It is the only video option without text stroke effects, and its interface bubble has a hexagonal shape.
It can be displayed at the bottom of the screen using a widescreen code via Hedge Mod Manager.
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A video file named opening_trial remains from the Wii U demo. It contains two audio tracks with different music. Additionally, two pairs of unused video files, ev110/ev110_trial and ev120/ev120_trial, exist and are identical within each pair.
Watch on YouTubeThe Wii U version of Sonic Lost World had a multiplayer feature where two players could race each other. Despite it being dropped in the PC version, it can still be re-enabled by changing 0x50F86A to C7 45 D0 40 FB 90 00 in the main executable. It mostly works as intended, even the second player, though the Mii icons are missing.
Apart from revealing what the internal names of some of the levels were, it also shows us that the level order was quite different early in development via cross-checking with other internal files:
Windy Hills 2 and 3 (w1a02 and w1a03) were swapped from their positions, although Windy Hill 2's starting positions doesn't march up at all indicating a much different layout at this point.
Windy Hill 4 (w1a04) became Sky Road 1.
Windy Hill 5 (w1a05) became Silent Forest 4; while the starting positions are inconsistent, the Windy Hill 5 positions matches up with some unused objects far away from the stage.
Windy Hill 6 (w1c01) became Hidden World 1, and this time their starting positions are only slightly altered. It seems like "wXc" levels were meant to be challenge stages.
Desert Ruins 2 (w2a02) the Sky Chase level became Hidden World 2, while the beehive level took its place; the cut Sky Chase test level also references it by its former ID. This indicates the in-engine cutscenes were being produced when this level order was still in effect, given it otherwise is rather out of place in the final game.
w2a03 through w2a05 were completely expunged from the final release.
Desert Ruins 7 (w2c01) became Sky Road 4.
Tropical Coast 5 (w3a05) is not on the list, but the cut casino test stage states it was an early version of Frozen Factory 3.
Tropical Coast 7 (w3a07) was removed from the final. Its name suggests it was similar to Act 1 in terms of look.
Frozen Factory 2 (w4a02) became Silent Forest 3.
Frozen Factory 3 (w4a03) became Desert Ruins 3. Even stranger, the stage's configuration file states it was meant to be Desert Ruins 5, not 3.
Silent Forest has no further stages beyond the first in the file, but other files suggest Sky Roads 2 and 3 were meant to be Silent Forests 3 and 5.
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