A quicker way to restart a stage would be fantastic. The current method is a little annoying to be honest since there's a slight inout delay entering the menu and navigating to retry. My impatience sometimes lead to selecting the wrong option when trying to perfect a run.
I don't wanna be "that guy" but... Is it just me or does this patch really only bring the game up to barely 'standard expectations?' By this I mean, how were most if not all these features not already in the base game? Toggle off slot machine - the damn thing obscures even mini bosses and is a massive distraction for a side activity, no way this got missed in any player testing. Koko upgrade - do I even need to say it. Boss rush - A game which sold itself on the giant titans. Why has it taken 4 minths to give us the means to replay them? Even Sonic Adventure had this on release. Photo mode: It's built right into the dev tools. So many games have this out of the box and the marketing also heavilly pushed beauty shots, why didn't this get in there day 1? I look at the basic features and QOL improvements and I'm just baffled as to how Sonic Team missed including these in from the start? But the other thing I'm wondering... Outside of the fandom... this game apparently sold sort of well... does this patch... really encourage people to reply it? Pretend this patch list wasn't for a Sonic game. Would you really come back to it 4 months later for... the most basic minimum of standard features?
This video completely changed how I look at any decisions made by SEGA regarding Sonic: Clearly they ran out of development time. Tons of stuff seems to have been cut from the main campaign. Going off that video, it's very likely Sammy's fault for not giving their developers enough time, and not Sonic Team being incompetent. I agree this first round of features aren't enticing for non-Sonic fans who already played the game, but these features were likely intended to be in the original game but were cut due to time. As a fan who intends to replay it someday, I'd glad they're improving the game. Better late than never. Looks like the final DLC (which I'm guessing is already in development and will be released Q4 this year?) is moreso designed to bring people back to the game, and the first two DLCs are extra content/convenience for those players to experience at that time.
The vast majority of updates for every game I've ever owned have been things I had wished were in the game by default, and even most big high-quality DLCs never made me replay an entire game all on the face of it, unless they massively modified the main campaign or something (which would probably mean it was flawed to begin with). Yes, they've probably spread the content a bit thin with all the really cool stuff at the end of the year (not holding my breath about the vagueness of the birthday and Koco updates), but so be it, they're nice little additions to a game I already like for nothing extra. We all already agree the game needed more time in the oven, what is even the debate here?
People act like Sega is the outlier compared to Nintendo's norm, but that's actually not at all the case. The truth is, when it comes to IP protection, Nintendo is abnormally restrictive compared to other gaming companies. People concentrate on Sega, but what Sega does is actually normal for many video game companies. Examples: Microsoft grants a limited license to homebrew and hobbyists for all their IPs, including Master Chief and Gears of War: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/rules Other major companies which grant a similar limited license include Capcom, Konami, and Ubisoft. Among western publishers/developers, you'll find this gets pushed even further, to the point where you can monetize your creations. Paradox interactive grants use of the Vampire: The masquerade IP for fangames which can be sold on itch.io. You can also do similar with Five Nights at Freddy's. The absolute gold standard for this is, of course, Valve. Valve *encourages* fans to use their IPs for fan games. I worked on a major Half Life 2 VR mod back around 2014, and Valve actually flew me out to Washington to talk with their VR team on best use tips to improve the mod. And to make it more incredible: Valve themselves were creating a rival Half Life 2 VR update internally at the same time, so there was actually a conflict of interest, and they *still* gave us their go-ahead and blessing. There are numerous fan games using valve's IP which are sold on steam. Examples: Portal Stories, Half Life 2 VR, Gary's Mod, and the best known example, Black Mesa. Valve even gave *TWO* lectures to hundreds of gaming studios at their Developer-only invite conference specifically on embracing user generated content (the corporate term for homebrew and fangames): The gist of their lectures was: "Homebrew games/tools/movies/artwork/whatever are the purest form of free advertising, from the tip top most passionate fans of your base, who themselves are often community opinion leaders with clout and sway that you can't possibly buy. They will develop better tools than you will, for free, because they can work on your product and ip for you indefinitely, at zero cost to your company. Plus, they self-select the best-of-the-best employees for hire, allowing your internal development teams to hand pluck the best future team members and see them in real-world development scenarios on your very IPs." That lecture was specifically for companies like Capcom, Konami, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, Epic Games, Ubisoft, EA, TakeTwo, Activision, Apple, etc. who were in attendance. Epic Games similarly grants quite a bit of leeway with use of their IPs, albeit without the ability to monetize your creations. Even going back historically, when Hasbro bought Atari, the first thing they did was release all licensing restrictions on everything related to the Atari Jaguar, declaring it an open platform. This is precisely why so many homebrew games have been made and sold for the Jaguar going back to 1997. And Id, of course, historically has been very hobbyist-friendly with it's IdTech IP. It's not that Sega is something unique in this regard. The opposite. It's that Nintendo is unusually restrictive. The summation of that Lawyer video is silly. They base a lot of their claims on monetary value of the IP, as though traditional investors are the only way to gain value, and you need to appease investors to be successful. Let's get this out of the way: Valve is worth twice as much as SegaSammy according to market evaluation, without traditional investors, and they gained their popularity explicitly through courting homebrew and hobbyists.
It's not so much "stuff I wish the game had" it's more... how did this even get past the initial design. Like the koko upgrade. Utterly nobody liked it. There's a few pre-existing examples of how that upgrade system already exists and how its not fun. How did that not get designed to let the user specify how much they wanted to upgrade?
Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a game much more polished and put together than Sonic Frontiers, has a mechanic where you cook meals for buffs and benefits. Here's the thing: it didn't work. You did not get the buffs from eating the food. People didn't notice this for a while because we placebo'd ourselves into thinking it did. But it had no benefit whatsoever. And you could make these meals with incredibly valuable and rare collectibles that can be used for mechanics that do work. This problem wasn't fixed until 3 months after release. Turns out these weren't insignificant buffs either. Similarly, the buffs you get from using a character's special, souped-up move also straight up didn't work, and that wasn't fixed until almost half a year later. The lesson here is that shit happens. If a game like XBC3 can have these problems, then a game made on even stricter time and budget can too. The Elder Koco increases Sonic's speed and rings, that mechanic works as intended. No, Sonic Team didn't make it so it's convenient and doesn't take 5 hours to get to level 99, they needed to make sure that Sonic doesn't clip through the floor. The vast majority of these problems are things the QA noticed, that Sonic Team is aware of, that they didn't have the time and resources to fix by the release date. We're fortunate that we even get big, free updates with content because 90% of the time, Sonic games don't even get updated because Sonic Team is off to immediately make another game they're going to be rushed to make. I for one can't see myself complaining about free things. "It should have been at launch," well, it wasn't, but it's here now. Better late than never. Kirby Star Allies is a game that's so much better post-launch than it was at release date because of all the cool free updates it got. Sonic Frontiers is the Kirby Star Allies of Sonic.
https://twitter.com/OnTheDownLoTho/status/1638002772128808960?s=20 It appears that the update will also add an "EXTREME" difficulty mode hmmmm...even more reasons and excuses to replay the game
If there's anything that needs to be able to be disabled, it's the seeds and items granted by the pre-order bonus. I can't be entirely sure that deleting the "dlc" won't break anything, even though the way it applies makes it seem like it wouldn't matter, but if we really are getting another difficulty, then it'd be nice to actually keep it challenging by not being forced to be ahead of the more natural difficulty, while still being able to grow. The idea is more to give these updates alongside a bit more of an advertising push to keep sales going through the year. Just yesterday, even, I got an ad for Sonic Frontiers. Giving it this extended support might even be the reason these changes are possible. Even if some of these secondary changes probably could have been pushed sooner, it won't change someone's experience when they buy it later this year. It's just going to be part of it for them, like someone who buys Sonic Mania after Plus was released will never know they never had level transitions for half the levels or a different Metal Sonic boss or no continues, or the reversal, day one buyers never knowing that stuff was added after they played for a week and never again. If this update isn't worth a revisit for you or other players who already got what they wanted out the game, then that's fine. Even the later updates might not be enough for some people. That's also fine. But these are opportunities to expand on the game without dropping a "Sonic Frontiers Plus" a year after it was originally released, ones that returning and future players will be able to appreciate the presence of.
I think I'm more stoked about this Extreme Difficulty than anything else. A maxed out Sonic trivialises everything in the game. Power boost in Cyberspace also sounds cool, but I'm curious how it will work.
One problem I had with Sonic Frontiers is that when boosting, I never felt like I was going fast, even with everything maxed out. The boost often felt like I was slowing down. Compared to previous games where using the boost was like strapping a rocket to your ass, I would find myself basically continuously tapping the boost button to try and wring out speed, even if doing so did nothing. They could go a long way tweaking their shaders to make the boost look and feel more like you're going much faster.
Worst part of the game for me and a terrible design decision in any title. Any time a menu pops up in this game, a dull UI animation has to play first before you can move the cursor or make a selection. It seems minor at a glance, but that shit adds up over time, and is largely why the Elder Koco is such a huge problem to begin with. I cannot stand when games do this. Let me press a button to advance through menus and totals screens (why does it take so long for the Retry and Leave Cyberspace prompts to appear after you beat a Cyberspace stage?). Don't make me wait on a UI that was apparently designed by someone who's never played a videogame.
@synchronizer It takes quite a long time to upgrade Rings and Speed with the Elder Koco because they're both tied to one collectible instead of two (like Attack and Defense are), so you have to select what you're going to spend Kocos on for each level you gain. All the way from level 1 to 99 for both Rings and Speed, you have to sit through an animation, select what you want to upgrade, and then sit through another animation before you can make another selection. There's a mod that bypasses the character and UI animations so you can make a new selection faster, but the way to avoid this would have been to introduce another collectible, so that Rings and Speed increased the same way as Attack and Defense. Everyone has a different patience threshold for this kind of stuff though, so it may not bother everyone.
To add on to this, I think someone clocked it at around 33 minutes of animations to fully upgrade those 2 stats in the game. It's wild!
Extreme difficulty huh? *sigh guess I have to play frontiers through a 5th time No but seriously I love an official even harder mode. Loved what the mods tried to do with combat but they never found a balance. Either it became too quick or too grindy. I hope this find that proper balance. That being said not looking forward to every mod basically being guaranteed to not work, but those’ll prob return soon enough (although they’re prob set to break two more times at least). What are the chances there’s a new final boss but only on extreme lol
I do wonder if the presence of power boost in cyber levels means they've adjusted the control for those stages at all, since they're definitely aware of people's complaints and hopefully how simply that control was improved with mods within weeks of release. Though I suppose we're not seeing whatever Kishi is cooking with rolling physics until update 3, so maybe it'll only happen then if at all.
Only the extra challenges and difficulty seem like they should have been there from the start to me. Cause they’re typical modes. The music and photo mode seem like actual new features and the cyberspace boost. Whatever it is. Again to me anyway. I don’t see these as originally planned to be there on release. Especially not the cyberspace boost. I could be wrong though.
