Sonic Frontiers Thread - PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC

Man... what can I say, I don't like this thing one bit. Physics are too "Rush-y", boosters everywhere to combat the lack of momentum, rails out of nowhere that don't fit the theme nor the visual aspect (come on they are floating), and a generic un-inspired Windows XP Wallpaper world with assets taken directly from forces (Bridges have forces recolored textures). At least they could have themed the rails like vines or something (Even SA2 did it better come on).

I seriously expect nothing at this point. It's like somebody played BOTW and started taking notes of everything that they saw without realizing what makes it good. Like, piano notes here and there? Check, big open nature world? Check. Puzzles here and there? Check.

Worst part is that fan games have been perfecting this game style for years and it doesn't "work" that well most of the time, unless it's hyper focused on a certain aspect, either exploration or traveling long distances with physics happening around you, loops and quarter pipes to launch you up. It also sucks that whoever played it tried to show it off and it just infuriates me on how "bad" the player is. Walks here and there like lost, rushes through a few places and goes for the most basic movement.

 

better plan: sell Sonic to Ubisoft so he stales even further and finally fucking dies

 

Sonic R

 

Thought I'd download all of the original IGN video files on the website to take a look at the metadata to see whether anything interesting is lurking. All the way from 360p to 2160p, I downloaded them all and took a look to see whether I can find anything (using MediaInfo). Unfortunately, there's not much to gleam. All I can see is that the "encoded date" is 22-05-31 20:29:20 (for 360p, which is the earliest encode), but unfortunately that's the encoding date from Zencoder Video Encoding System (the service that IGN seems to use for processing different video resolutions). So that doesn't allow us to gleam much information about when the build or footage might be from, but it does at least tell us that if Sonic Team wanted to give them better footage, then since it was all encoded on the 31st May, they 100% could have provided less terrible footage up until that date. So take that as you will.

 

My overall impression was:

It looks more of the same in terms of core gameplay. The boost features are still there, the game seems as if it fundamentally plays with the same physics nuts and bolts of recent games.

The big difference is the open world. I feel that whilst this is obviously a very early build, its almost too close to something like PSO2:NGS in aesthetic. I swear some of the textures could be direct rips. For me it doesn't feel like sonic. Gone are a lot of the cartoony quirks and light atmosphere/vibrancy I have come to love over the years.

It is very early days though.

(My first post here! Hello Everyone...)

 

I got a Sonic '06 vibe from watching the trailer. I dunno, I guess it's because the graphics look more realistic and resemble the style Sonic Team was going with in '06. I wasn't too blown away with the gameplay, but I also wasn't too disappointed. It was just kind of "meh" to me. I do hope we get better footage in the future, there's rumors going around that we're supposed to be getting more tomorrow.

 

Everyone keeps saying this is an early build. Has that actually been stated anywhere or is it just the assumption/wishful thinking? They're claiming a holiday 22 launch, that leaves them only a few more months before they go gold and this has, assumedly, been in active development since at least 2018. They could definitely still tweak a few things but like... I'm pretty sure a lot of what we see here is locked in.

 

Anyone saying it is an early build is in serious denial. Every time footage of a new game looks rough people make this claim and it is literally never true.

 

That's actually the reason I wanted to go into the metadata to check. I was hoping to see an earlier video encoding date, so that we'd have a bit of an idea as to when it was recorded, but alas they've done their due diligence and scrubbed the metadata this time haha. As far as I'm concerned though, this is either (a) an early build, but not much has changed in polish between now and then to warrant a new updated preview video or (b) it's a late build that is just janky. Either one is not a good look, unfortunately.

 

I feel like Sega may be developing a strategy where they set people’s expectations really low, and then reveal an improved build, so the juxtaposition creates positive momentum. I mean, look at the Sonic movie… Now, I’m not saying “ugly Sonic” was intentional, but I think the revision created a lot of goodwill that propelled the movie’s popularity.


When I look at this build of Frontiers, I feel like this must be old. I mean, if you were providing the footage of your game, and you know people are always very critical of you… why would you show a product with pop-in THAT bad? You literally have floor tiles popping in milliseconds before Sonic steps onto them. You have animations which appear entirely incomplete. You have the most basic of puzzles imaginable, when it’s supposed to be a critical new aspect of gameplay in this open world… Why would THIS be what you intentionally show off? I mean, they could have had this exact same build, and still chose to hide the obvious issues. They have done that in the past, so why not now?


I’m generally very critical of Sega because they deserve it, but at the moment I’m suspicious and hopeful we are going to see a markedly improved product soon. If they show off another product, which has resolved all these common complaints people are making, it will be like a social psychology affect where people see the end product in a better light than they otherwise would have, “Oh, they fixed all those problems!”

Sega knows people are going to be hard on them regardless, so maybe they are leaning into it and using it to their advantage...

 

I don't really look at Twitter, so very much appreciated for sharing with me! Always can count on this forum to put all the relevant information in one place (even if my attempt at datamining was poor haha).

It's pretty much what I expected then. It being less than a month old is not reassuring. Adding my information from when the video was uploaded to the information on when the footage was actually from... this means that nobody at SEGA decided that the footage shown not janky enough to replace before it went live. That either shows a lack of progress from then to now, or lack of common sense to know that this looks poor (especially as a first showing of the game(. Again, either way that's not a good look for the project.

 

This footage looks like the whole-game equivalent of an AI mashing two different pictures together, with no regard to what the result looks like to human eyes.

Technically, it all fits together, but nothing about it seems truly coherent or appealing.

 

Well, now that its been a day and the initial storm is out of the way I think I can share my thoughts now.
First I wanna start by saying I have from the start been skeptical about the very idea of an open world Sonic game as I am and have been of the belief it is something that simply does not work. Sonic games are about speedrunning through obstacle courses in a fluid manner, rather than about exploring an open area. The latter implies slow plotting about and accomplishing mundane tasks, which people often see as obtrusive to the core experience of playing Sonic.
Despite this I myself have never been against or shied away from other objectives in Sonic games so long as they can be done in a satisfying and fluid manner by players who get the grasp of the controls and design. Its just I don't think that works all that great in an open world setting.

With all that said, here are my honest thoughts.
I didn't hate what I saw.
Control-wise, I see a lot of people complaining that it "looks like Forces controls", but I struggle greatly in seeing that outside of Sonic's model and animations looking similar. The kind of movement and turns Sonic is doing here just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would be possible in Forces at all.
I'm happy to see that traditional elements such as springs and dash pads are incorporated into the environment. I wont lie. It did a decent job of making the world feel more Sonic'y. It also gives me hope that exploration won't be dull. These elements add a decent element of speed and pacing interacting with certain sections of the environment in this way. I only worry about there being too many instances of running into a pad you didn't see or hitting a spring you didn't want to or notice, and being sent flying into a speed section you didn't want to.
The Boost feature seems to be replaced with this dash feature, which If I had to bet, acts as a sprint similar to how the stamina wheel works on BotW. It looked like Sonic's turnspeed isn't completely turned off by using it either, so that's interesting.

Sonic's overall speed in this feels toned down from the boost games but with better 360 movement, which I think is to be expected in an open environment like this. Both because you want control precision and because you don't want the player trivializing the environment by just flying off a single hill into any point of the map.
On that note...

I am not seeing many people comment on this one enemy

@3:08

Notice after Sonic passes it, it lunges at him just offscreen from out vision.
It made me think about how historically open areas have made enemies kind of a joke for Sonic to interact since he can speed past them all and effectively pretend they don't exist.

The puzzles were something to be expected, but they didn't seem overly long to do, which I see as a plus. Semi frequent quick to do puzzles means you can be engaged with the game at a leisure without the pace coming to a complete halt. At least ideally.

As we thought, the weird Blue ground seems to be dedicated to sections that allow Sonic to interact with it for parkour progression of varying degrees.
Sonic seemed to, albeit slowly, be able to climb on these areas for a bit or run up them. I would imagine whatever stamina system is in place is involved but I would guess this climb thing is for the sake of precision when trying to get to specific areas whereas you will be running on them and jumping off them in most cases.


In the game we saw weird purple coins. People are pointing out how the coins have a tear drop engraving on em. A lot of people are suspecting its tied to Chao. Could be but I wont get my hopes up just yet. That said, I do think this game having a Chao garden would make a lot of sense from a design standpoint. As well as the fact that, to my understanding, the person in charge is the same one who headed the Chao Gardens and Nightopians to begin with. (Someone correct me on this if I got the details wrong)

We saw a few collectables like a Heart, and what appeared to be a tear drop blue crystal or fruit and a spiky fruit of some kind?
Some are suspecting it is Chao garden related, But I think its likely something else.
I've seen people suggest it might be tied to Sonic's friends but I think I that might be jumping the gun as well, but more likely.

I like how we are seeing more rails incorporated into the structure of the environment as opposed to strictly being 3 floating lanes until you get to the next stretch of ground. Not that I think air rails are strictly bad.

I've seen a lot of complaining about rails in the sky looking weird. Personally I don't have a problem with it inherently. its a cyberspace world so its fine. I just hope there is some kind of animation for them appearing r something, like maybe they digitize into view when you get close or something.

Another thing I see NO ONE talking about is how it seems the homing attack can be initiated from the ground. Suggesting its on its own button.

@3:53
That has a lot of control scheme implications. Is it something you toggle? Is it something that's just permanently on its own button?

I like that the Spin Cycle move seems to be hammering in Sonic's affinity for the Wind.

its something I like that is being applied cleverly with it blowing out the fire in those torches. Dunno how extensive the plication will be but its neat I guess.


Also there is the ol' Steel Containers that have been in the series since SA2 just randomly out in the environment.

Usually these are reserved to being destroyed by a more powerful attack or upgrade of some kind. These are gonna be recurring around the map and give us some implications to work with. We see Sonic break em just fine with a punch. Was this his base level power or did you need to level up first to do so?

Also we found a loop!

Its high up in the sky next to this weirdly shaped structure, which I guess makes sense since loops just kind of don't serve any purpose in an open 3D environment. Having em in the sky is something I didn't consider. At least we know they appear in the game in some fashion as opposed to just rail loops.

On the technical end, something need clean up for sure. People have pointed out texture pop-in, level geometry pop-in, etc.
These are fair critiques but I am not a fan of how these quite frankly surface layer things are dominating the discussion rather than talking about the actual game part of the game. Yea those elements need work. Its not like that kind of thing isn't above the realms of being optimized in the coming months or whatever.
Its the actual world design and core gameplay we should be concerned about.

On that same note, I have seen a lot of people making a fuzz about Sonic not rolling at the press of a button and I find this complaint also rather shortsighted. It isn't like this single thing decides the game is good or bad or even whether its presence would magically make it amazing everything else being the same. Or at least it shouldn't.
Besides, whose to say it isn't something you get as an unlock?

Overall the 7 minutes of footage really didn't show us THAT much in depth. No combat (they literally avoid the one enemy we see) no interesting execution of movement, mostly just roaming around. No "cyberspace levels" which seem to be the core "levels" of the game, no HUDs or menus, etc.
This matters since those seem like major aspects of the game's core. I guess the idea was just to show what moving around the environment at a baseline was, but if that's the case I think we shouldn't be jumping to conclusions just yet about the game.

I'm still not super excited or anything. More miffed at how I've seen more complaints about what the game either isn't or how it it isn't "flashy enough to impress people that aren't even gonna play it", as if we are more interested in "showing up the general gaming community" than discussing whether the game will actually be fun or interesting. I'm not a fan of this attitude.

Certainly there is room for criticism. Rails seem to still be largely automatic for example, which is lame, but hardly something that makes the call that the game is a dumpster fire.

 

The artist/designer behind the Chao is a producer. The actual programmer and A-Life concept creator is not. Not sure how much influence she has over the game considering she’s not the director.

 

That gameplay trailer is sitting at a 2:1 like/dislike ratio. That seems pretty bad (and I see it from a browser extension).

I'm looking at the footage of those coins (around 1:18), and they're definitely not hooks. The engraved shape goes all around and it looks like a water droplet (which may or may not suggest Chao). Although maybe you're just kidding to a degree.

 

Maybe it delivers on the content front then?

What a wild ride!

 

How are you able to see the dislike count?

 

Iizuka saying the team wants "high review scores" is really going to kick him in the arse this go around.

 

If you're using google chrome, you can get an extension that lets you see the dislike count again.