Something has been bothering me about the combat recently, and I think I'm finally able to explain it. A good chunk of the skills you receive appear to be "cutscene attacks". By "cutscene attack", I mean a longer, drawn-out attack that requires little more than a button press, with no more input from the player during the attack. Let's take a few attacks, the Wild Rush, Quick Cyloop, Sonic Boom, and the Spin Slash. The Wild Rush requires a two-button input to activate, and plays a small animation that takes one second at most. That's fine. The Quick Cyloop requires a single-button input to activate, but also requires the Cyloop meter to be maxed out, and it takes like two milliseconds to play out. Great. The Sonic Boom simply requires you to hold down the trigger while in mid-air, and Sonic automagically targets enemies in range. There's not much input from the player here, but you DO have to hold the trigger down to sustain the attack. The Spin Slash requires a single button input in the middle of a combo, where Sonic automatically targets the enemy, and enters a nearly 7 second attack animation that requires absolutely no extra input from the player. Something similar can be said for the whirlwind attack, the Loop Kick, and even the mega stomp attack. You just press a button or button combo and watch Sonic do the same attack animation from the same angle every time, with no extra input required from the player. Maybe one way to improve the combat experience is to add interactive elements to each attack animation. Maybe with the Sonic Boom you'd have to mash the triggers repeatedly to create more and more projectiles before the timer runs out. With the Wild Rush, you could press the attack button in time with your direction changes to build up more momentum and deal more damage. With the mega stomp or Loop Kick, you'd press the attack button as soon as you collide with the enemy, like the Paper Mario games, to deal more damage. Just some thoughts of how I'd personally improve the combat to be more engaging. It still looks like fun regardless.
I would hope if they did some extra LOD magic they would have prioritized that before the game went gold. Might just be bug fixes? Yes, absolutely. This is how I kind of feel, like even the Loop Kick plays a cutscene-like animation. I'm still excited for the combat because the way you can get in, dodge, parry, tech knockdowns, etc before dealing all the damage looks really fun. But as soon as you get your opening, the optimal way to defeat big enemies seems to be chaining all your skill tree attacks together and then activating Phantom Rush as soon as the meter fills. Particularly with the Fortress fight (I think that's what the thing is called) and some of the other enemies that kinda just let you wail on them, it looks almost pathetically easy to just hit the buttons and watch them die. I get the feeling that we're gonna wanna keep leveling up Sonic's attack stat so we don't have to spend as much time watching move animations. Some of the mini bosses seem to die pretty quickly and the player in some of the IGN videos was only level 30-ish.
Yeah, I can complain and moan about Cyberspace but optional or not (it's an integral game feature, so even if I can skip them most people probably aren't going to), it's not going to be as in your face throughout the entire game as that combat system is. And it looks really unsatisfying until you get later moves, particularly to cut down the cutscene tier crap. People out there want to call it Devil May Cry, it's the farthest thing out there from it and just seems like it wants to look cool. If I really wanted a lot of combat with my Sonic, I'd go play Spark 3, because at least then I'm almost always in full control of my actions instead of auto-combo cutscene moves.
The cutscene combat moves at least are quick though. I don’t think any of them are much longer than the heroes Whirlwind attack or some of the Werehogs longer battle animations (and Team Blasts from Heroes were much like these but felt less integrated into what was actually happening). Ever since I saw that combat clip with Sonic dodging with air tricks and drop dashes, then running up the enemy to get air and stomp, I’m sold, like that is exactly how I picture Sonic fighting I can’t wait to pull off that kinda nonsense. But if it’s not your cup of tea can’t really change that, we know what this game is now. No Sonic game has ever satisfied every Sonic fan, I think literally ever, especially if you take into account retroactive game opinions (like a Gen Z’ers thoughts on Sonic 2)
So I've been looking at the skill tree, I'm trying to find the "auto-combo cutscene" move where Sonic uses the trick system to dodge an attack and then immediately go into a Drop Dash, and the one where he chained four different moves, two that requires you reacting to the enemy's attacks and the other two relying on a meter you build by dealing damage, but I couldn't find them. Those seem very much like player-controlled actions, but I guess we'll see? Yeah, but really, even the fact that fighting the Ninja and the Tower required two entirely different strategies and how using the same attacks resulted in entirely different outcomes calls to the surprising depth of the game's combat. For example, the Quick Cyloop was a launcher on the Ninja, but it destroyed all of the parts of the Tower. The tornado move (the name escapes me) helped the player dodge the Ninja's attack, but it screwed over the player on the Tower because it ran into its bumper (which is why the player dodge-canceled the move the first time).
I have pre ordered the deluxe edition of Frontiers. I'm officially a sucker, guys. Can't wait to play it.
They never said it was running at 60fps on PS4, not sure where that guy got that from. PS5 : 1080p 60FPS Performance Mode/4k 30fps Quality Mode (I assume it's the same for Series X) PS4 : 1080P 30FPS Switch : 720P 30FPS docked No news on the Series S version but I assume from other games that I played before on the system before I upgraded to a PS5 and X that it's going to run at 1440p 30fps and have an unlocked 1080p mode that will target 60 but be closer to 40 to 50 during intense parts of the game.
https://sonic-city.net/2022/10/26/f...t-erases-the-bitterness-of-open-world-gaming/ Translation of Famitsu's preview of the game They claim it's the best game of 2022, that's a....big statement, to say the least
At some point in the future this game will just show up in my Steam games list and I won't remember how. It happened with Forces.
The ShackNews interview with Iizuka gave me an interesting thing to think about. The familiar, reused level design in Cyberspace is an "easter egg". That made me wonder. Does the Japanese Sonic community actually *like* the reuse of locations? Maybe that's why it just keeps happening. Idk just a random thought
Listen. I just don't think it's right to give the player zero rings for two difficult final bosses. Famitsu is always nice to Sonic. I'm pretty sure they gave 06 a perfect score or something like that. I feel like there are solid walls between Japanese Sonic fans and like, the entire rest of the world. If you go on a Brazilian Sonic forum you can find a lot of similar arguments to us, but I have literally no idea how JP Sonic fans view the series, even after reading tons of their social media posts. Either way, it's not an "Easter egg" if it's the majority of the levels, Mr. Iizuka.
The loop kick plays a 2-second animation before Sonic lands the kick, the Homing Shot plays a 2-3 second animation as he throws the spheres, the projectile rush attack requires you to press a button and then watch as Sonic hurls projectiles for 2-3 seconds depending on how much you've charged. The zig-zag homing attack move (can't remember the name) cuts the camera sharply out of frame and shows Sonic bursting back and forth through the air for a second or two. Nobody is arguing that the player isn't "controlling" the character, that's a bit of a strawman of our criticism. We're saying most of these special moves involve you locking onto the enemy (via homing attack) and then pressing a combination of buttons to do skill tree moves. Yes, the player in that clip does a cool dropdash and other stuff like that, but if you have looked at the skill tree, you'll see a lot of the moves with longer animations just require you to press a button and then watch the animation. Yes, as someone said, it could be a LOT longer, but it also could be a bit shorter as well. I'm happy with the way they've polished up the animations, I just think they're a bit lengthy. Comments and criticisms like "why does the camera awkwardly cut away for Sonic to do that long zig zag attack?" have been here since day 1 of the IGN combat footage. If you watch the Strider or Fortress battle when you catch up to the boss, the player chains together skill tree moves and just wails on the boss. For sure some of the smaller mini-bosses and basic enemies look like they have creative ways to defeat them, but for some of these big battles I'm legit seeing people just chaining together several of their strongest skill tree moves and finishing it off with Phantom Rush. I'm not saying this kind of combat CANT be satisfying, I'm a PSO2:NGS player lol and I love landing big finishers in that game and ending the fight with a Burst. I just hope there is more of the Tower-type stuff because that's what I think works best with Sonic's movement, the cool fast-paced combat that has a little bit of depth to it. But also, these are just impressions from watching and maybe I won't care while playing. Maybe the player here isn't sequencing their moves optimally, maybe there are faster ways to get it over with etc. We'll have to find out for ourselves
Actually your comment was fine, lol. It was the other one I was addressing. I don't disagree that the individual moves could have more involvement.
Oh believe me, Sonic 2 took me 9 years to beat, Death Egg’s a bitch. Of course it was the 1st game I ever played when I was 4 so it took a few years just to get there. and I just picked that as an example I’m sure many Gen Z Sonic fans like Sonic 2 but I have to imagine some of them think it’s archaic or boring or too hard.
I got Sonic 1 and 2 for Christmas when I was 5. The first time I beat sonic 2 (in one sitting) was in high school.
The first time I beat Sonic 2 without savestate scumming was in my Origins story mode run on launch day, lmfao. Death Egg is a bitch, okay?
Sonic 2 & Knuckles on that DS Classics Collection, in high school when I owned the game since childhood and on the Mega Collection. I didn't even know how much Knuckles was gimped in his jumps until I got stuck on Death Egg and exhausted a couple continues plus 20+ lives, heck I never even saw Death Egg prior to Mega Collection and level select cheats since I never played those games through. Dumb kid me never even got to Carnival Night in S3 from always restarting saves. In terms of the Combat subject again I mostly just wish the timing was closer to character action games. If they want a wind bullet attack, give it individual shots via one attack button, or perhaps you hold it down and unleash a flurry from a charge. Make the whirlwind less about watching Sonic go for a couple seconds, etc. People have been complaining about the automation in the 3D games for years, but it kinda feels off to have the argument turn around and shrug off long attack animations. I get why this is all like this, it's basically streamlined and simplified so any average gamer can press a couple buttons and Sonic does cool things. I just hope/wish the developer's philosophy for gradually mastering Sonic's speed reached across the rest of the game. And that idea is still there in combat with some of the more advanced tactics you can pull, but only one video has really demonstrated that.
