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

Right now, I feel like people are overreacting, though their complaints are valid. Sometimes they make Sonic look like a bad Mario knock off. Almost as if they just don't know their own source material. But my personal problem with Frontiers is that Sonic Team STILL doesn't seem to understand how much people hate Forces. It comes off as if they're telling themselves that it couldn't be that bad.

GAAAAH! I was looking forward to this month.

 

Yeah, about 3:30 in the video Sonic runs up a normal cliffside, before reaching some purple wall, after which he puts his arm on it while running (looking similar to parkouring in Lost World). I'm curious how flexible that is. Like, can you run on any wall if you're fast enough, but on purple walls you don't need any speed to stick to them? That's what I'm most eager to see more of.

 

Overall so far I've actually liked what I've seen. I just want to run around as Sonic and discover cool things.
I like the music and the visuals. If the cyberspace levels are more traditional Sonic levels, that sounds good to me (as long as they have good level design).

My gripes are:
1. I hate the boost engine. It's super stiff and awkward at slow speeds, which seems like it's necessary for this game. I was hoping for a new physics engine in the vein of SA1/2.
2. What are the Korok-like things and if they are Koroks why aren't they just Chao? There's a thousand different variation of Chao and finding them all would be a really fun side-quest.

...Actually I just want an open-world chao garden

 

in some ways it looked interesting.

in other ways it reminded me of bubsy 3D

 

I'm waiting to see what those levels are like too, but I wish they were actually seamlessly woven into the world and not just instanced areas completely disconnected from it.

 

I can't even call it a "new iteration / path for Sonic" when it just looks like a Forces mod with improved controls.

 

I think Sonic Team should have released a proper trailer before showing today's gameplay, I dunno. I can't wait to see the combat gameplay though.

 

I was calling them lazy for:

1. Reusing assets like Sonic's model and animations (and in one instance the incorrect animation was used while switching rails).
2. Some animations look bad like the tornado and the trick system.
3. Throwing random rails and springs in the sky, which looks awful.
4. Still relying on automation with boost pads and springs even in an open-world setting.

I personally don't care if Sonic Team worked hard on it, because the result isn't impressive. There are plenty of other developers with lower budgets that have managed to make more impressive games, while Sonic Team is still fumbling around and basically just made Forces again but with bigger maps. I don't want to feel empathy for Sonic Team, this is the longest development cycle for a Sonic game in history, they should have zero excuses and deliver a quality product already. It has been over 10 years since the last good 3D Sonic game.

 

That sombre melody that plays in the overworld is pretty nice, though I wonder if it will get grating to hear the same piece for extended periods of time.

At least there'll be a cool soundtrack to look forwards to. I wonder who did it? It sounds like a Tomoya Ohtani composition

 

It’s not the most dazzling footage but they’re building up to it. It’s obviously a small sample to wet your appetite...an open world with mysterious tasks.

What bothers me is those doing the heavy complaining know they’re exaggerating on purpose but try to portray it’s some well thought out opinion.

It’s the equivalent of SA only showing station square and people complaining all Sonic does is ride some “janky” train to the mountains.

 

My disappointment of the game stems mainly from the “interactions” with the world…It looks quite generic, for lack of better words, Ubisoftesque. I also am not a fan of the physics, how sonic seems to control and his interactions with the environment. It just looked very awkward and uncomfortable. I was incredibly excited for the game but now I just feel disappointed. I have no problem with floating rails, but it didn’t have any cohesive level design to it either. Just random floating platforms like they went into Halo 3’s forge mode and placed a bunch of stuff. Graphically I’m not hard to impress, the game looked good. Just hope there is some crush 40 and rock for the actual stages…


On the other hand, this is probably the starting area of the game but I feel it would’ve benefited if there was a voice over explaining what was going on and this is just the beginning of sonics journey in the game so we weren’t just given out of context gameplay.

 

It will absolutely cause another split in the fanbase, another division. But honestly, who cares and why?

I know I don't. I don't really see how that matters as long as the game has a large enough audience who'd appreciate it, former Sonic fan or otherwise.

My views on the boost mechanics appear to be slightly different from many here. I don't think they are ALL bad, though some of them are. Like the quickstep and slide have never been interesting, but the air boost and stomp do at times give something to do while falling or racing forward through the air respectively. Something to time when you reach a certain point in the y or x/z axis respectively. Fun moves to chain together, and I do think they have their place in an open world environment as a means to explore.

As far as those, my only issue with those mechanics in themselves being here is that they don't appear to be being used that way, or really in any interesting way at all. Movement here doesn't appear to require any sort of precision.

It's been too long since I'd had access to and played Unleashed SD, so I might not any longer feel this way. But I remember going from Unleashed PS2 to Generations, one of the things I missed was the boost system. How the mechanic felt to use, activating in short but sharp burst. was just simply better.

I doubt that's what Frontiers is doing, but if it is I am 100% for it.

 

....I'm placing my bets now. The game is going not going to change much in its final release, its just gonna be just as boring as it looks now.

However, the story will be decent and therefore, Sonic fans will call the game a masterpiece and sing its praises and talk about how non-fans cannot appreciate the artistic qualities of the writing.

 

We know that there are other biomes--I mean, there's gotta be--but I can't even get the slightest inkling of them from the video. Since the setting is specifically the plural "Starfall Islands", I'm wondering if each biome is just a separate island which would be...well, a bit lame.

I think my biggest problem with this right now is that there seems to be no overarching goal. There's no indication of seeing cool things and wanting to go to them. It was such a bad idea to have the first showing of this game be a completely descriptionless 7 minutes of a dude bumbling around doing effectively nothing. He's collecting stuff and we don't know why. We don't even know what the UI looks like.

It's like they expected us to just go "woah, open world Sonic!" and be blown away by that alone. I need to know what I'm doing on this island. It's not like there's a line of previous open world Sonic games that fills in the blanks for this game.

 

We've seen this kind of open-world-Sonic-attempt many times - Sonic GDK, Unity, Unreal 4 games...

I'm still not impressed. As I am sure I've said before - would you rather drive around a desert, or a racetrack?

 

What's wrong with the quickstep and slide? I like how they give you something to do while running, as opposed to simply boosting through every enemy and obstacle in a straight line. The wall-running quickstep sections in Unleashed and Gens were particularly cool.

I'd rather have a big open area to explore, rather than a corridor or path with nothing to the sides.

 

Thoughts so far:

- Movement so far looks.. eh? It's better than LW or Forces, it seems, but not by much. Sonic accelerates properly unlike those games, but he collides with the environment in weird ways. The new top running speed and boost are things I welcome, actually. I also see there's some form of climbing or parkour involved, but it's hard to make out how it works since we have no view of the HUD to tell what's going on here. Boost bar? Stamina bar? Who knows until later, I guess.

- The objects scattered across non-Sonicy worlds definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but I honestly don't think it's worst thing in the world. Rails and springs and even a few dash-pads I still expected to exist in this game (it is a 3D Sonic game we're talking about), but they stick out like a sore thumb when the environments seem to have no larger slopes or loops. Feels really off. I don't hate it, though. Surprisingly.

- Visuals for the environment are pretty. The performance however is not. At ALL, holy shit. Framerate drops, pop in everywhere, some EXTREMELY clunky and unrefined animations. That walking animation playing at that speed is maybe the worst offender; christ almighty. Overall the presentation is failing this game severely in it's first showing. Pathetic first impressions there.

- The "empty" quality to the game feels like it could either be a first area (note the ? signs), or alternatively just has it's story/content context taken out for demo purposes. That's me giving it the benefit of the doubt. Let's hope that's the case.

- Maybe the most damning and scary bit of the video is any time Sonic uses his new uh... punch move. Guess we're going to see Friday just how invasive Sonic's new abilities are to the gameplay! Woo!

Overall this is about what I expected considering what we'd been shown and leaked prior to us. I shockingly don't loathe this, but I don't particularly like it either. We'll see how it fares as we go along. Probably not well, but yeah.

 

Quickstep I think makes sense. Sliding makes none because rolling... like literally rolling got you under gaps back in the day what's the point?

Glad to see easy wall running return though, and also I'm glad there were no 2D sections in sight