Sonic Frontiers gameplay

[Perkilator]

I am hoping for more visual and musical variety but other than that, this actually looks great!

[Armchair General]

I can't believe that they're charging 60 bucks for this.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

A lot of what I immediately think to critique comes down to just how representative this is to normal gameplay, and the answer is we don't know. There's no UI elements, no enemies in this footage. No perceivable objective beyond some light puzzle solving. No NPCs. And even if this is strictly a demo of showing off Sonic's movement and traversal abilities, there's some jank going on. What in the world broke this box at 0:52? And this jump at 1:18 makes me really tense to watch. Because like any non 2D sonic, I have no idea what sorts of gaps Sonic can clear based on his current velocity. It's an extremely vague mental math that you can only ever master through multiple playthroughs. Now that it's an open world beneath every missed jump instead of a kill zone, you can end up having to repeat entire minutes of platforming after a missed jump. Hopefully if the game doesn't detect ground nearby below you as you fall it just whites out and spawns you back up there.

The obvious game design answer is to give Sonic one uniform air velocity for any jump made while holding forward on the control stick, and a second, faster velocity for jumps made while boosting. So many 3D platformers have arrived at similar answers to this, why hasn't Sonic Team? Probably because platforming is largely matched to the on rails experience of 3D Sonic games. How do you cross this gap? Homing attack these floating enemies, obviously. How much velocity do you need to homing attack? Zero. You need zero platforming skill to perform these (functional) QTEs.

If there's one thing I hope they're not showing yet, it's NPCs. I hope this isn't actually some abandoned island with only automatron enemies to interact with. Now I'm not saying dump Sonic's annoying friends into the game, I'm just saying don't make this the lonely game that I'm looking at right now. Where the only signs of life I have are Sonic soft grunts with each jump. The baseline, generic complaint people will have of any open world game, regardless of quality, is that it's a lifeless world with no incentives to explore beyond waypoints and map markers. The only way this can end up a good game is by addressing these two objectives from the outset of development: A) Make it fun to move around as Sonic and B) Give us reasons to move around as Sonic. They're partway there on Point A, but Point B is a major question mark.

Also I saw this tweet last night and it's a fun observation.

6 minutes ago, Armchair General said:

I can't believe that they're charging 60 bucks for this.

Hey now, Sega actually charged 40 for Sonic Forces to avoid this precise comment. So you never know!

 

[Fabulously Olivier]

This is nowhere near ready for release, and I'm continually amazed that Sonic is still relevant. No other non-licensed franchise could survive having more bad games than good ones.

[Armchair General]

1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Hey now, Sega actually charged 40 for Sonic Forces to avoid this precise comment. So you never know!

That's almost an reasonable price, for that game.

 

14 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

and I'm continually amazed that Sonic is still relevant. No other non-licensed franchise could survive having more bad games than good ones.

I have an few explanations why people keep buying the games, but you guys probably won't believe me.

[Perkilator]

Thinking about it some more, I think they should’ve gone for a more Sonic Adventure approach, with the hub world being open with levels sprinkled throughout.

[netsquire]

Ignoring the obvious lack of polish, something about this gameplay just felt a bit too slow for my taste. If you put the video at 1.5x speed it looks way cooler and more fun. 

[Perkilator]

I know this game…doesn’t exactly look super great, but I feel this needs to be said:

I’m not gonna dictate whether or not people think Frontiers looks good or bad. But it’s not like they won’t fix however many issues they can before release.

[Armchair General]

9 hours ago, Perkilator said:

But it’s not like they won’t fix however many issues they can before release.

Well, you only get one chance at making an first impression; and if you waste it, then people have an right to call you out.

 

But at any rate, here's IGN showcasing the combat.

 

Can't say that I'm blown away by it, but it's an nice change of pace compared to what I grew up with.

Edited June 3 by Armchair General

[Perkilator]

More screenshots arrived and they actually look great!

 

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Here's IGN's latest video. The footage isn't necessarily new, but there are new details in the commentary, like how the story premise is Sonic, Tails, and Amy getting Isekai'd into this world. Or how fighting enemies give you experience for some kind of skill tree? 

 

[Samz707]

Yeah it looks pretty bad.

Also the "The Skill Tree will improve it" argument isn't one, I hate forced-in skill trees, which is what the vast majority of them feel like in my experience, so I really doubt that'll make the game good if your argument is the "Combat isn't bad! Sonic just starts weak!"