I've probably said this before in this thread and I'll keep saying it, the biggest reason why Sonic feels awful to control in Frontiers is the lack of 360° mid-air turning. Modern platformers like Crash 4 and Super Mario Odyssey have full mid-air turning: https://imgur.io/PWvITpk what makes this frustrating is that as far as I'm aware, Sonic Team practically invented this sort of 3D movement: They had some really forwards thinking design and were ahead of the curve at one point and now it feels like they're desperately catching up. I'm at the tower section in update 3 and honestly don't know if I can be bothered to finish this. Cyberspace levels have some cool design but are let down by awful controls. Everything else is just plain boring. overall my thoughts on Frontiers keep swinging between "this is kinda cool" to "this is the most frustrating garbage I've ever played" and I'm not kidding. I've tried so hard to be nice to this game :/
We now know what the ZAP symbol means. They use it for extremely on-the-nose sequel bait. Spoiler It is the symbol of a god the Ancients worshipped. It's explaned in a side story:
My current consensus is that the DLC doesn't fix any of Frontiers' underlying issues and makes a very bad first impression but is overall enjoyable and makes for a far more interesting endgame than was present in the base game. It definitely feels ballsy in a way Sonic Team usually isn't.
Ok, I haven't played this game since last year, so I haven't touched ANY of the updates. Holy fucking shit does turning the deceleration down to 0 and using the Spin Dash turn this into an entirely different game in Cyberspace. Why couldn't the entire game be like this.
I think a lot of the backlash this update is receiving is due to it completely messing with people's pre-release expectations. Everyone was expecting something more along the lines of the base game, with new elements thrown in. You know, a replacement for the endgame - possibly something a little more difficult, but something you could reasonably see fitting neatly into the main experience. However, this is CLEARLY not supposed to be that. It is much more different than anyone expected. The entire gameplay loop is completely different. It seems it was always intended to be extra-hard post-game content, designed for people who are already familiar with the game's mechanics and want a good challenge. It doesn't even seem to have solid canon - Sonic literally walks into a diegetic portal and appears in another world, leaving its canon ambiguous. This feels a lot more like paid DLC than just another free update, and I think that is the big disconnect people are feeling. I think their strategy of "reveal nothing until the day it's released" heavily backfired here. You really need to set the proper expectations for something like this. If this were marketed more like separate DLC, where it is clearly stated to be a much more difficult experience mostly divorced from the rest of the game, people would've been more graceful.
I'm getting really sick of seeing people acting like the complaints about the difficulty are just "haha skill issue" when more likely than not its extra hard because people are fighting a godawful camera that feels fresh out of 1998 and playing challenges that obviously weren't designed around the fact that controls are customizable. Add in the fact that the base game is intentionally designed to let players skip whatever they don't want to deal with and is it really any surprise that people aren't cool with an update that goes against the game's own design choices? I'm pretty disappointed because update 2 really had me thinking Sonic Team was onto something with how the new Koco challenges were designed, but if this is going to be the future of Sonic they need to polish the fuck out of this engine because its really just a rough draft. Still baffled how we got to this point, I know Sonic Team has a rep for making unpolished games but most of their games after 06 were fairly polished. Its like the Boom disaster brought back all the jank
Well... at some point, it is a skill issue. You need a higher-than-average amount of skill to complete this DLC, that's just how it is. There's a lot of technical platforming and such. However, a noticeable amount of this DLC's difficulty is just classic Sonic Team jank and weird design decisions. It expects you to know this game's (extremely finicky) mechanics inside and out, which the vast majority of people simply don't. I've noticed many of the same people ranting about "skill issue" tend to have a ton of experience with the game, so movement is just second nature. Speaking from my personal experience, I have 250 hours logged in this game, which makes it really, REALLY hard to look at this DLC from a casual perspective. I'm just so acutely familiar with how the game works, I've almost forgotten what it was like when I wasn't familiar with how the game works. It's rough, and makes this DLC pretty much unapproachable for anyone who isn't already a Sonic fan.
Yes, there are genuinely weird design decisions and jank that makes these challenges more frustrating than they're supposed to be, and the Master King Trial is complete bullshit even if you know exactly what to do. But there is also a degree in which people are more frustrated by the fact that the game asks so much in the first place. As someone who knows a lot about the game and how to play it, nothing became too difficult or frustrating, not to the levels that I see people exclaim. It's not just not hard to me, I can actually see what the developers wanted to happen (though it definitely doesn't make that clear). Yes, there is jank. But there is also people not being willing, for whatever reason, to engage with the game. And I absolutely do feel like people are quick to blame "jank" or "bad design" before really accessing whether it's precisely that. It being a Sonic game doesn't help that perception. Well, that and it actually being janky. The biggest issue, however, is that the DLC is not marketed nor does it make clear that it is this difficult. Even if absolutely everything was "fair", it would still frustrate people when the game is so easy and simple otherwise. @jubbalub is right, this is not very approachable for non-Sonic fans. Especially since many people playing the update are people who already beat the game months ago, so they're already very rusty. I wonder what entirely new players, who had to work up the game before then, think of the update. In other news, I finally found out what the Flickies are in the new Cyberspace levels: you find them, Sonic picks them up, and you have to take them to a location, but you can only jump. I... like this. But why is this a Cyberspace gimmick instead of the Open Zone? Also, the Flickies are way too hard to find.
We're gonna get some quality ass memes due to this update, I can tell you that much. https://x.com/Tracker_TD/status/1563634813130743808?s=20
You're really putting too much trust in this interpretation. The new ending is in a different diegetic portal because they didn't know how else to connect it- same way the Egg Memos are in the fish encyclopedia because they didn't know where else to put it. They went out of their way to use this to explain more of the story, to write a final confrontation they think would be more satisfying, and even to use it to better set up Sage returning than the original ending did. This isn't an "alternate canon", this is the canon ending to the game from now on. Which is why it's a problem that, in a game where the story was a selling point, you're being forced to play what amounts to a hardcore mode free dlc only for the small amount of players who've become super hardcore into the game's mechanics in order to consume the new canon story, something that most players interested in will exactly be the other opposite- the ones that were in it for story, not gameplay. Going "oh this is just a nice little extra bonus for the experienced players" doesn't save this DLC from being stupid, because it's very clearly not intended to be that. It's going "here's the new canon story, here's the other characters you've wanted to play as", and then jumpscaring you with what should've been optional extra difficulty. tldr- the new ending is the obvious canon going forwards, they're trying to sell this to two different audiences at once despite the fact that selling it to audience B is actively detrimental to selling it to audience A
Do you mean this thing at the start of the video? Spoiler: spoilering to be safe Pretty sure i got this cutscene, unless it's also an attack
I don't see how you could simultaneously claim it can't be ambiguous canon for the reasons you described, and then use the same reasons to determine that it must be canon?
Their point is that because the new scenario introduces more lore and has a more involved plot and interactions between characters, it is more "canon" than the main game. Which I don't agree with, mainly because in function, both endings are the same: Sonic defeats the End, Sage and Eggman are together. The only major difference is that Sage doesn't die in the new ending, but the old ending had her resurrected anyway. The new story doesn't offer new development for the characters, it simply makes the events towards the same ending more exciting. In terms of the lore, the new ending doesn't contradict the old, so it's not really relevant. The new lore applies to the base game as well. That's like saying that all the Side Stories and their lore are non-canon because they're optional and you could miss it. They are both equally "canon", which is one of the many reasons why the new content does not overwrite the old. If they wanted to that, they would have easily. It has nothing to do with "they don't know how else to do it". They could've made it a menu option, even, since the story is self-contained and Battle Rush already has you choose the save file you want for Sonic's stats and progress.
Day 2 of playing the Final Horizon update. Still on Amy's section. It would have been cool, if Sage provided Amy, Tails and Knuckles with Sonic's map, so that exploring the island feels less chaotic. Also, I would have wanted a bit more context regarding the towers, new Kocos and character exclusive challenges. I didn't expect them to create as much new content as they did, and while this adds to the mystery, it did feel overwhelming at first. I'm also a bit on the fence if it was really necessary to have the skill tree again since you're unlocking basic moves such as the stomp. Anyway, now that I've unlocked all of Amy's moves and a good junk of the map, I'm starting to see the greater picture. Making progress feels familiar again and I can't wait to find out what all of this means.
Man, I realy love the Cyberspace stages not just in how well done they are but their gimmicks as well. 4-G involves a mechanic where you basically have infinite boost, but the longer you boost without interruption, the faster you go. It's how I always thought the boost should be; an acceleration button with tiers of speed. My exact ideal is a gradual acceleration and the addition of pinball physics, but this implementation is great as well.
