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

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by MykonosFan, May 27, 2021.

  1. Simon A.C. Martin

    Simon A.C. Martin

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    So I've played the Demo for Sonic Frontiers.

    Maybe I'm getting old, set in my ways, but I really, really, really dislike the direction this game has the series going in. Sonic felt clunky after half an hour's gameplay, and the constant tips/pop ups/etc between each bit I was playing through was exasperating.

    I guess my love of the old 2D games, which comparatively are simple to pick up and tricky to master by comparison, is probably blinding me a bit to this game's better features: but where are they? Can someone explain to me how constant rails/springs/homing attack/automated sections is fun?

    I feel like I've been saying the same thing since Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Episode 1, with only Sonic Mania making up for it in the meantime.

    Is it me? Am I the problem? Has the franchise moved on that much from the core gameplay that felt - I don't know - polished and playable?

    I found the Frontiers demo on the switch to be utterly underwhelming and tbh I just stopped caring after the demo ended.

    Sorry to have a moan - is anyone else feeling like me? Is there something I'm missing? Should I be approaching this differently? Answers on a postcard please...
     
  2. Sneasy

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    Without anything more than "it's not like the Genesis games", I can't say much to your concerns besides "it isn't clunky" (which I can't help you with if you feel it is) and "yes, the game gets better after 30 minutes".
     
  3. Wraith

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    The short answer is that it isn't all that fun and the lack of control/challenge you're feeling is intentional. The only way to wring something expressive out of this game's level design is to take advantage of rail jumping and even then that has limited application.

    And the tempo is at at the start is largely what it keeps to until the end. Most of the islands after the first one are worse in terms of design and structure even. The only compliment I'd give the late game is that the last island's cyberspace levels try some pretty interesting things but it takes too long to get to that point.

    If you can get behind the new combat system or wringing fun out of the Cyberspace Time Trials there's some extra meat there, but imo neither holds up compared to the game's contemporaries. A lot of the emotional pay-off from this game comes from how invested you are in the story and the cinematic Super Sonic sections. If neither of those things sound interesting to you I'd skip it.
     
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  4. Deep Dive Devin

    Deep Dive Devin

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    I wouldn't say any island is worse than Kronos other than Chaos island. Also, when we say "the tempo" of the first half hour, are we talking about all the tutorial shit? Because that definitely doesn't continue through the whole game.
     
  5. Laura

    Laura

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    I really do think a lot of Sonic fans only care about the series having a serious dark story, having Sonic's friends play a big role narratively, and having wide open 3D spaces. All they wanted after that point was Sonic's friends being playable, which will be added as DLC. So Frontiers is a very important game for people symbolically, simply because of what it represents for the franchise going forwards. And I don't even dislike these ideas, I just dislike how they've been handled.

    I have a lot of very valid and in depth criticisms of this game (poor controls, poor level design, poor storytelling) and I was constantly shouted down for being negative despite the fact it was socially acceptable and even encouraged for people to clown on Sonic 4 in very repetitive ways over and over again. People want this game to succeed because of what it represents, in the same way that they hate Colors for what it represents. So the fanbase at large currently aggressively defend this game and equally aggressively promote it. It's why I don't even bother to express my feelings on this game at the moment, because people are too emotionally attached to it. I'll wait several years when people distance themselves from it.

    At the core there is something of a good game here, but people just aren't ready to deal with the fact it's extremely poorly executed compared to competing open world games and action games.
     
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  6. Zephyr

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    A few things.

    1. Go into the options and move all the sliders for Sonic's movement to the right. Game feels much better this way. Laura will point out that it should be the devs' job to make Sonic feel good to control, not the player, etc etc. And she's right! But having to do this is very extremely not the end of the world, and you'll be happy you did it.

    2. I put about 26 hours into the PC version of the game initially. Then I gave the Switch demo a try after not playing the game for a few weeks, and it just felt awful to play, I hated it. After the new update dropped I booted up the PC version again, and it felt perfectly fine playing it. The Switch doesn't do this game any favors.

    3. Yeah, the "spring into rail into homing attack chain into air boost etc." thing that we've had since Unleashed. Quoting myself from earlier in the thread:
    "Each of these things are individually more automatic than, say, trying to time and land a jump from one platform to another, but there's not a complete absence of player agency or input. To keep progressing through the setpiece, you have to press the right buttons, at the right times, in the right sequence, almost like a rhythm game."

    Any fun people get from playing these sections as intended is probably the "rhythm platforming" that they offer. It's not my preferred style, but it is what it is. I'm primarily a fan of the original 2D games and Mania, and that's mostly because of the way Sonic's movement physics interact with the terrain to give the player a high degree of creativity when it comes to navigation. My favorite 3D Sonic games are the Adventure games because of the degree of this gameplay that they manage to retain (ie: being able to Spindash at the foot of a slope or ramp and jump at its peak to gain massive air and take shortcuts).

    After 32 hours in Frontiers, I can say that it's the closest an official 3D Sonic game has come to scratching that itch since 2001. Boost-jumping off of diagonal rails and boosting off of diagonal rocks and structures can give you insane air and horizontal momentum. In my pursuit of every memory token, even Chaos Island has become sort of fun with how many of the Automated™ 2D sections I can just skip around. You can launch yourself close to one, and the homing attack indicator will pop up on an enemy or a spring; if you use the homing attack in that instance you'll cut into the middle of the sequence, sometimes right to the end of it. You can even sometimes end up in sequence meant for the 2D perspective, but the camera stays behind your back. Very satisfying being able to abuse the game's mechanics like this. These two videos do a pretty good job of showing what I'm trying to describe.

    This all doesn't mean you're guaranteed to have as much fun with the game as I am. But if you're specifically hungry for something at least vaguely resembling the mechanics of the original Sonic games, this is where I think you're most likely to find it.
     
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  7. hiadlzupfer

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    That's the thing i never got - that the fans care about the series "having a dark story, playable friends and wide open 3d spaces", but none of these attributes are what makes a good Sonic game to me:

    A dark story?? It's a game about a blue hedgehog blazing through colourful levels - I couldn't care less about the story (go watch a movie, i wanna PLAY a game!), and it being DARK doesn't make ANY sense (this isn't The Matrix)

    Playable friends? Why would you need 4 characters, when they can't even handle a single character properly? The makers of Mario64 made sure he controlled perfectly before they even thought about making levels.

    And: Wide open 3D spaces: Why? it is a pretty linear platformer (with exceptions), wide open 3D spaces look bland and empty, and it shows in Forces that they just don't know what to put on those spaces...!

    Just the wrong direction for the series, I have to agree with my previous Frontiers-nonaccepters - 3D Sonic just lost it after SA2....
     
  8. Sneasy

    Sneasy

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    edit: I'm editing this to be less ironically abrasive.

    People who like Frontiers in spite of its flaws are not shallow as you describe them and they do know what a good game looks like.

    I read your critiques and none of them are particularly unique or volatile. But if you feel like you're getting negative responses, it's because (to me at least) you sound incredibly condescending and dismissive who disagree with you.

    There's not going to be a point in time where "Frontiers' level design is bad, but y'all are not willing to accept it because you guys only care about open 3D spaces" will get you praise.

    Who are these Sonic fans who hate Colors but want Frontiers to succeed "because of what they represent"? I don't think those circles overlap.

    I for one love Colors and Frontiers. In my experience, people who dislike Colors also tend to not like Frontiers either.
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2023
  9. Ura

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    I have many problems with arguments like this.

    Video games have served a narrative purpose for decades at this point, it's more than natural for consumers to expect something in the background that explains why they have to fight giant robots or what the location of the levels is supposed to be in-universe. Sonic has set a precedent of trying to have stories that take itself somewhat seriously, and while some people might not like it, it is part of the series identity now, and there's no going back.

    I also don't think wanting more good content is a bad thing at all. While I feel some people care too much about the story aspects of the series over the game aspects, I also don't understand why some people are bothered so much by the idea, at best you have a good game and a good story, at worst you have a bad story that you can easily ignore if you don't care about it. A writer usually doesn't have a lot of influence in the game itself anyway, so I really don't see why people treat it as if you had to choose between good games and good stories. We can (and in a lot of cases, SHOULD) expect to have both.

    Last but not least, it's very easy to make any franchise look too stupid to take serious if you want to, so I don't get the "It's a series about a cartoon hedgehog who cares about the story?". I mean, Batman is a comic book about a rich guy who dresses himself in a bat suit to beat weirdos like a clown that makes people laugh using gas, yet people still enjoy the darker and more serious stories of the character. Yes, Batman started in a narrative medium while Sonic began as a game, but my point still stands. The Sonic series always tried to have an interesting world and characters, it has almost always wanted to have fun and serious stories, so I really don't think it should be any surprise that people do, in fact, want fun and serious stories to accompany their game
     
  10. Snowbound

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    Their absolutely will be a point in the future where a loud group of people say that Frontiers has bad level design. When ever you satisfy one part of the fandom, another part is disappointed. As time goes on and more things don’t go their way they get louder. Conversely, flames of passion can dim over time. A decade from now if Frontiers has a better sequel people may not look back at Frontiers as fondly. Whether or not Laura is right is irrelevant to this.

    That said it absolutely is condescending to start a conversation by explaining how other people (you disagree with) feel. The conversation can’t go anywhere if you’ve already decided why people feel differently than you. It’s also true that there are Sonic fans who are overly defending frontiers to a toxic degree. It seems to me that this is largely happening outside of this community tho
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2023
  11. Sneasy

    Sneasy

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    This place is definitely miles away from the worst of it, I agree.

    Unless anyone wants to speak up about the death threats they've received here?
     
  12. Laura

    Laura

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    I pay everyone the compliment of assuming no one here is unhinged.
     
  13. shilz

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    The thing is that in 3d the analogue control doesn't actually give you much more depth in movement choices than the 2d games had, you're still just waiting for Sonic to reach his max speed or hit a dash panel, the thing that will help give him max speed, so then the solution is to make it so nether of those are the max speed, only finer tools in the player's (analogue control) or designer's (dash panels) arsenals to adjust according to their current needs. It's a third degree of control making sure that the player is in the most control of their situation at all times.
    A spindash alone just doesn't make sense if they intend to expand on and refine the combat going forward, because then Sonic would almost never be fast enough to just run out of the way
    Not to get lost on some other tangent but I would like to point out that it's not really ever a "darker story" that people are wanting, like the story can go to dark places yes, but it's more like people wanting to feel something more than "haha silly hedgehog". Adventure to Black Knight often tried to give you a story that felt like it actually meant something because it was about something, like how destructive the relationship between sadness and anger can be, or the choice to do good despite the bad you've experienced, or the hardest choices between sacrificing people or even your experiences with them for what is right... There's even a story about an abusive relationship in there somewhere. And all that same time you had stuff like Heroes showing you the real superpower of teamwork or Shadow just being a cool action movie about aliens or Riders being a silly but equally cool feeling adventure about genie birds on hoverboards.

    It's never what Sonic is "expected" to be but I don't like the idea of Sonic being what it is "expected" to be at every given moment. That's what made the Pontaff writing era so jarring to people. The two expected to just be writing silly little hedgehog stories and so that's what they did and no matter how they tried to compensate for it, even by writing "darker" in Lost World, they just didn't get it and by Forces it was just so clear that when Sonic Team wanted to inject themes of literally overcoming fear they just weren't giving it a satisfying implementation to the point that even when Sonic had its "darkest" story yet nobody gave a shit about it, because it was never about being "dark", it was about letting moments play out realistically for the characters, even when they might just feel dark.
     
  14. Antheraea

    Antheraea

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    I keep seeing the constant tool-tips/pointers/etc being a criticism that pops up, but mind you those can be turned off in the options under "Notifications".

    Tips in the loading screen though have been standard in video games for decades now. Combat practice as the level loads has also been a staple of character action games for a long while too (for instance, the first Bayonetta has it and that came out over a decade ago).
     
  15. Sneasy

    Sneasy

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    Unfortunately, the tutorial messages in the beginning in the game can't be turned off no matter what, which is more often what people mention.

    Even on the damn Extreme Mode. It's crazy
     
  16. Chimpo

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    I'm going to be honest. I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
     
  17. Shade Vortex

    Shade Vortex

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    This is one thing I hope they change in the 2nd update, which is supposed to be making changes to the game based on player feedback. I can't think of much else they can/will change that won't heavily require redesigning sections of the game, other than maybe reducing the homing attack delay, making enemies not get detected too far away (so that you can save/travel/use map markers when you're clearly not in combat), and perhaps tweaking some physics stuff (like increasing momentum for rolling or stuff like that), and reducing the requirements/allowing skipping of the pinball game.
     
  18. synchronizer

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    I wish the single jump carried momentum and the second jump stopped momentum (as the first jump currently does) for precision. That’d possibly be a way to implement a user-decided trade-off between fast-but-more-difficult-to-control and slow-but-more-precise movement.
     
  19. Deep Dive Devin

    Deep Dive Devin

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    Okay I'm gonna be honest, I think this is like the third or fourth time I've seen you do this. Why keep up this "y'all just can't accept my based epic opinions" shtick while clearly not being willing to engage with what other people like about the game? I honestly truly don't think there's been a huge struggle criticizing Frontiers here. The control discussion has been a constant since long before the game even came out, I have no idea where this idea that it can't be criticized comes from...other than you getting shit for a post calling people who disagreed pathetic. Similarly, you're claiming you aren't being taken seriously, but also saying things like "people only like this game because it has a dark story" about a game that doesn't have a dark story. Not as juvenile maybe, but literally nothing here is unfitting for your a standard cartoon network show, and Adventure Time routinely got way more fucked-up than most things in Sonic. If we want a conversation about how these things should work and what Frontiers misses, that conversation has happened and should continue happening, but the attempts at rationing people you disagree with into easy categories of behavior like this is downright conceited. Doesn't give an impression of being "shouted down for negativity" to me. This thread is full of negativity, often justified negativity! I'm looking back at earlier parts of the thread and nearly everything I see responding to you is about your attitude and presentation, not the opinions themselves. Overwhelmingly I don't get the sense that elaborate criticism is really being suppressed here. Kinda just sounds like people aren't negative enough for your personal preference.
     
  20. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    I like a lot of poorly executed games. I'm 110% ready to talk about how poorly executed some of my favorites are.

    Dunno where this notion of "people aren't ready to admit a game I don't like is actually shit" comes from, but it sure has a tendency to gum up threads wherever it pops up.
     
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