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

Hm, I was playing in normal mode, but interesting to know nonetheless.

 

The game does tell you that Hard difficulty contains "something extra". That's pretty much it lol. There's nothing else in the game suggesting you'd want to play on Hard to experience The Entire Final Boss

 

I think Frontiers is good but could have been better. Can’t remember if I mentioned some of this before.

I completely agree about the Open Zones being bland with nothing much to do. I like that it ties into the story that the islands are abandoned but as-is they feel unnecessarily big.

The few mandatory things in the Open Zones are nice challenges but maybe the Starfall Islands should have been smaller hub worlds so you weren’t just running around for the sake of it. Spyro’s hub world’s which also used portals comes to mind as a great example. Everything feels very cohesive in those.

I know the updates added things but they’re optional and don’t really matter to the story...except Final Horizon which I agree is pretty hard. I haven’t finished it.

Since there’s not much to do a lot of the extra tasks like upgrading your rings/speed and collecting things could have been replaced with something that felt worthwhile.

I like that there’s a variety of Cyberspace stages. I don’t even mind reusing assets. I just wish there were more themes. I get Sonic = Green Hill, Tails = Chemical Plant (I guess, cause he was introduced in part 2) and Knuckles = Sky Sanctuary but I don’t understand the City stage either. Being based on memories they could have used more from their past.

The enemies scattered around are cool but again mostly optional and sometimes hard which makes them not worth the time. The Boss Fights are awesome. They feel grand and the music is great.

I never really had any problems with the camera or pop-in and I have the Switch version.

 

The city stage represents Sonic's trauma from the overabundance of city levels in Sonic Generations. \s

 

Now that you mentioned it, it would have been nice if instead of a City level we had Stardust Speedway to match Amy. This way I feel the whole memory thing would make sense. Of course it would be better to have new levels, but since they're going with the memory excuse to reuse assets, this would fit better.

And Green Hill could be referring to Eggman instead of Sonic, since it's supposed to be based on Sonic's memories. Sonic met Eggman in Green Hill.

 

Ya I like that idea since Amy is the other character trapped in Cyberspace.

Well Eggman is trapped in the City stage. Green Hill is Sonic’s home. It must represent Sonic.

 

Yeah, I don’t appreciate how randomly the camera switches to that lite version of the Sonic Heroes Robot Carnival boss style enemy when I’m trying to do something ELSE.

 

Finally got a half decent pc (that was not the one I wanted. Freaking dudes sent me an Inferior model with a an apology, which I was not happy about but don’t care enough to pursue) that can run this stupid game. So I will be playing that.

I have not begun taking the game seriously yet. Not yet started trying to actually….

THINK about where it is that I have already gone, decide with intention where I am going to go next and how I am going to do so. Just kind of wandering around half aimlessly.

Yet even still, I am already starting to see the issue with the gameplay stuff floating in the air. I was 98% certain that was going to be a problem even before playing, but that has been basically confirmed.

It really is completely possible to just boost straight through the area a good amount of the time, doing little else. If you have already done the platforming “challenges” floating up on the air, there is no real reason to do them again.

It really would have been better to shape the actual terrain and ground itself in ways that traversing it would require…

anything…

But the game is still fun so far.

I do find it questionable how overpowered Sonic is. We’ll see how that affects things. But being able to air boost in any direction (unlike the previous boost games that matter) on top of the already super generous air control and floatiness on top of the ability to just straight up pause midair with the parry and look around freely means you can play a bit carelessly and that not be that much of a problem because of how easy it is to mitigate the consequences of that.

We’ll see how it goes.

I do find it annoying how the homing attack works in this game, with the camera having to face the thing you want to lock into. You get the worst of both worlds.

Homing attacks is still mediocre gameplay that takes no skill or thought. But in general, at least it is indeed a tool to keep the speed up. Like, you can know something is behind you and just turn around and instantly launch yourself at it in games where it works the other way.

Not so in this game. In this game they say, “Nah, bro. Spend time relatively slowly turning the camera in the direction of the thing that you already know is there and that you are probably already facing before you can do this move that still takes no thought.”

That is one change to the controls I find kind of stupid.

 

It's of course totally up to you and I can understand not wanting to do this, but I personally folded and installed a physics mod somewhere around the second island and it improved my impression of the game significantly. You'll spend the majority of your playtime just wandering around the islands, so anything that makes that more enjoyable goes a long way.

 

Idk if it's worth mentioning at all but Kishimoto is back liking tweets on xitter after a break.

He also liked a video tweet about the fangame Sonic Horizons which is cool because I think that project looks great.

Obviously he can't talk about what they're working on next but it's nice to see he's still keeping in touch with what fans are doing, hope this bodes well for the future.

 

Hope he's already aware about Shadow Generations itself too.

 

Super Sonic 64

Finally.

 

I hope he's more aware about Shadow Generations than he is about whatever Sonic Horizons is.

 

I honestly don’t care that much as this is something you can fix with mods. (Never buying a Sonic game outside of PC exactly for that reason) but a side thought I had is that when it comes to momentum midair, this game kind of has the worst of both worlds.

The Adventure games have no momentum midair at all. You can completely stop moving in a direction whenever you want and your air control, ability to turn, is not affected by your speed whatsoever.

This is….

Fine. In itself. It basically just means Sonic controls like any other 3D platformer in this sense. And there is a theoretical benefit as, in theory, if this was the only consideration, it would mean that you can flow through platforming prettty well and it wouldn’t require the platforms be arranged mostly in a straight line right in front of you.

You can jump on a platform to your right and then, as soon as you land, turn around and jump to a platform to your left and so on.

Meanwhile the boost games do actually have momentum midair. Sort of. They try to emulate it at least in that that you can’t turn around midair and, with air control alone, you can’t just completely stop whenever. There is a slowing down period.

What this means is you have to exercise a bit more precision to complete platforming challenges, actually making sure you start slowing down in enough time to not overshoot while also not too early so you fall short.

I personally like this. And I would also personally say it feels closer to the Classics.

But it does mean you can’t really do that thing I mentioned earlier as far as flowing through platforms unless they’re lined up in a very specific way.

Frontiers by default is the worst of both.

You can’t just turn around freely. But this is not a speed or momentum thing. The game doesn’t actually have momentum. There is no precise braking so as to control your speed to make sure you don’t undershoot or overshoot platforms. That’s not really a thing.

No. They just made it to where, for no reason, even when moving slowly, Sonic can’t just turn around. He needs to go through some strange little period of gradually turning which doesn’t work because it does at times arrange platforms in that way I mentioned earlier.

You can air boost in any direction without having to deal with this, but it is still weird.

Personally, I just said whatever man and just enabled the code that allows Sonic to turn as freely as 06. It takes the already trivialized platforming and makes it even more so, but at least I don’t have to deal with the awkwardness.

 

Lol looks like Sonic Movie 3 is boosting Sonic Frontiers sale.

 

I think that has more to do with joining Playstation Plus lineup in December. This is an engagement tracker and not a sales one.

Although the movie would have motivated people to check it out.