Megathread Sonic Frontiers (2022) | MT | General Discussion (DO NOT discuss leaks here please)

[Soniman]

Generations reskins back in full force, 2D sections, yeah my excitement for those cyberspace levels is pretty much nonexistent now, at least It’s not the main part of the game but man, I LIKE good boost levels but Forces 2.0 ain’t it.

I think the idea behind the constant asset reuse is to invoke certain iconography related to the series like how Mario will have World 1-1 aesthetics in his games be it the landscapes or 8-bit sprites. But Sonic was at its best when it’s trying new things but now getting new levels with new ideas and concepts barely exist anymore, feels bad man 

[Cosmos Rogue]

36 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

I'm still bewildered by this. Does SEGA think that every game needs to be Generations and/or Mania? Why do they keep doing this? I find it hard to believe that it's just laziness and think it's more likely just a conscious decision to keep including these same locations. 

The video game industry is infamous for the long hours, if not outright abusive workplace environments, its developers work in. "Lazy" is a word gamers need to remove from their vocabulary when it comes to discussing game development.

Sega and Sonic Team are surely aware that fans are sick of seeing the same stages over and over again. Sonic Team's reasoning for using GHZ/CPZ/SSZ again is likely something along the lines that they can either make one wholly new level for Frontiers, or make multiple levels by reusing old assets. Game developers have finite resources to make their games, so game development involves making compromises, and Sonic Team have decided that they'd rather compromise on delivering a new experience than compromise on providing a content rich one.

[mudhtt]

Same level design as Generations

 

[Shaddy Zaphod]

I think I may be eating my words a bit.

Spoiler

Sunset Green Hill stage. NOT entirely 2D (not 2D at all, judging by this footage), which is weird given we thought there would be strictly 2D and 3D stages, but that shot from the trailer definitely was 2D. I guess they just...stripped the 2D sections out of modern Gens GHZ. Ditto for chemical plant...

...COULD they build a whole game out of cutting their other games up and stitching them back together? I don't know why you would even do that. I'm honestly, truly hoping this is not a trend across the majority of the game.

Finally, Sonic running through those fields of things sticking out of the ground. I'm not sure what to make of this. It is clear that something is...happening.

I honestly don't know what to say.

[Cosmos Rogue]

On the other hand, this amount of level reusage is pretty bullshit.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

I guess the best you can hope for is that this is padding out the stage count. A few reused stages don't necessarily destroy what is supposedly the longest game in the series (especially since you could just not play the ones that reuse design, I guess???), but cramming them all in at the start certainly isn't inspiring confidence. I mean, what. We're maybe cutting Green Hill and Chemical Plant into 2 stages each for 3D and 2D, so if we assume they do that with the rest of the levels (which, judging by sky stanktuary, they aren't?), that gets you eighteen acts from Generations, stretched to its absolute limit? I'm still not seeing anything from other Sonic games, which is what I said would be a smart move if they were gonna be reusing content.

I dunno what the fuck is going on, man. This game has routinely showed me things I love and hate at the same time, and I really really want it to pull through and be cool. It still DOES look cool in a lot of places! But then it just goes and makes a decision so confusing I have to wonder what the vision for the game was even supposed to be.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and the drop dash is an actual spindash, so that's nice I guess.

 

[LegoFedora]

So chemical plant is back (yay...) but it looks like new assets for it? Did the forces chemical plant ground look like that? Also using the same layout as gens which is...fine. If they absolutely must reuse layouts, I'd rather it be the better gens layouts than any forces layouts.

Also again with the sunset theme. This is looking like a trend with the old stages. I wonder if there's a sunset sky santuary too.

[Wraith]

My guess: the cyberspace stages were a last minute addition to cover some kind of flaw that they encountered during focus testing. Maybe people thought the game didn't feel enough like a Sonic game or that there wasn't enough content to justify their intent to sell it at full price. 

Either way it feels like clunky padding to me so I can't respect it. Even in the best case scenario where the open world is the cake and this is just the icing, you'd never want your reward for exploration to be boring.

The silver lining is that nobody noticed the levels were reused until the footage made it online, which probably means most gamers have long forgotten Unleashed and Generations so these levels should feel fresh. It creates an infinitely worse experience for anyone who's been playing these games for a long time, but that business as usual for Sonic. 

 

 

[Ming Ming Hatsune]

Yeah, Sunset Green Hill reminds me a lot of GHZ Generations. I haven't played Generations in over a year, but I certainly remember these layouts used.

Wow.

[Badnik Mechanic]

3 minutes ago, Ming Ming Hatsune said:

Yeah, Sunset Green Hill reminds me a lot of GHZ Generations. I haven't played Generations in over a year, but I certainly remember these layouts used.

Wow.

That's because it is literally the Cave Grinding Section of the stage to the end of the stage.

It's almost a 1 for 1 copy.

[ZinogreVolt]

The lazy dev rhetoric is one that needs to be taken out back and shot in the face. It's an idea talked up only by people who are completely ignorant of how game development works.

Cyberspace levels are most likely hodge-podges of old stuff because they're likely pooling most of their resources into the open zone and bosses, and old stuff is used to supplement that to give a more "classic" experience on top of that. Whether that's a good thing or not is your own prerogative, but it wasn't born out of "laziness", never mind how difficult it would be to rebuild levels like this in the first place.

[Wraith]

Developers are rarely lazy, but if you toil away on something for 5 years only for it to come off as lazy when people finally see it you've made a critical mistake somewhere. 

[Shaddy Zaphod]

Titan footage incoming:

Spoiler

Not exactly a "boss fight" as the tweet claims, but Sonic gets absolutely bodied, thrown into a mountain and through a couple of rock spires. I wonder when exactly this takes place in the game, that doesn't look like a blow he should be getting right up from.

I really wish that dude in front of the camera would stop swaying back and forth like that.

[Diogenes]

10 minutes ago, Shaddy Zaphod said:

I wonder when exactly this takes place in the game

A reply to one of the tweets you posted earlier said it happens after getting the second emerald. Seems like it's setting up the need to go Super to take it down.

[Kuzu]

44 minutes ago, Wraith said:

Developers are rarely lazy, but if you toil away on something for 5 years only for it to come off as lazy when people finally see it you've made a critical mistake somewhere. 

I don't think it would come off as lazy if there was enough new content to justify it...or if this wasn't the third time they decided to do this. 

 

In a vacuum, this isn't that bad. But ugh, it's annoying for a long time fan as you said.

[A super No.1 washedupgamer]

Looking at it from another perspective, you could say that sunset hill from sonic advance 3 got represented and the new highway stage does look like a brown route 99.

 

[PSI Wind]

I don't know how the argument of Sonic not trying something new is even a part of this games discussion. More than half of the game is completely new for a Sonic game experience. 

[Shaddy Zaphod]

Huh...I only just noticed this now.

Spoiler

The goal here. There's a platform behind it with rings, and what looks like a spring to put you there. Do some of these have multiple exits?

1 minute ago, PSI Wind said:

I don't know how the argument of Sonic not trying something new is even a part of this games discussion. More than half of the game is completely new for a Sonic game experience. 

It's because the main gameplay isn't traditional Sonic, and it's not clear exactly what it does to be challenging throughout the course of a playthrough when it doesn't appear to have strict platforming challenges and combat with enemies is allegedly optional. The cyber levels are not only what people tend to expect from Sonic and thus "the real game", but have been positioned by the devs as equivalent to stages in...a platformer game, with the overworld as a hub. Obviously it's more than that, but the reason people are upset is because this game is supposed to be a paradigm shift for the series, but the way it chooses to shift things is by having a bunch of exploration and combat mostly-separate from a gameplay style where nothing is any different from usual, and in many ways, is a direct downgrade.

 

 

[Sega DogTagz]

1 minute ago, Shaddy Zaphod said:

Huh...I only just noticed this now.

  Reveal hidden contents

The goal here. There's a platform behind it with rings, and what looks like a spring to put you there. Do some of these have multiple exits?

There is another vid somewhere that shows what's up there. An open room with some extra rings. But it is a short diversion before you are forced to backtrack and drop down to the goal ring 

[Ratcicle King]

1 hour ago, Wraith said:

My guess: the cyberspace stages were a last minute addition to cover some kind of flaw that they encountered during focus testing. Maybe people thought the game didn't feel enough like a Sonic game or that there wasn't enough content to justify their intent to sell it at full price. 

Either way it feels like clunky padding to me so I can't respect it. Even in the best case scenario where the open world is the cake and this is just the icing, you'd never want your reward for exploration to be boring.

The silver lining is that nobody noticed the levels were reused until the footage made it online, which probably means most gamers have long forgotten Unleashed and Generations so these levels should feel fresh. It creates an infinitely worse experience for anyone who's been playing these games for a long time, but that business as usual for Sonic. 

Cyberspace feels like an afterthought but given how relevant to the plot it is plus how many levels there apparently are, I don't think it was a last minute addition, instead it feels more like they were consciously focusing dev time on the more experimental parts like the open zone and combat, and played safe with this aspect of the game by cutting corners so it wouldn't take away too much of their resources and development time that would be better spent polishing the game instead. And given Cyberspace is but one aspect of the game (and a skippable one at that going by some previews), it's not that big of an issue here given the focus of the game is in somewhere else entirely.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

Spoiler

Gameplay thread. Starts with drop dash.

 

[PSI Wind]

4 minutes ago, Shaddy Zaphod said:

Huh...I only just noticed this now.

  Reveal hidden contents

The goal here. There's a platform behind it with rings, and what looks like a spring to put you there. Do some of these have multiple exits?

It's because the main gameplay isn't traditional Sonic, and it's not clear exactly what it does to be challenging throughout the course of a playthrough when it doesn't appear to have strict platforming challenges and combat with enemies is allegedly optional. The cyber levels are not only what people tend to expect from Sonic and thus "the real game", but have been positioned by the devs as equivalent to stages in...a platformer game, with the overworld as a hub. Obviously it's more than that, but the reason people are upset is because this game is supposed to be a paradigm shift for the series, but the way it chooses to shift things is by having a bunch of exploration and combat mostly-separate from a gameplay style where nothing is any different from usual, and in many ways, is a direct downgrade.

They've said that anything that revolves around the Chaos Emeralds are optional in the sense that one could avoid doing a lot of the open zone puzzles and combat encounters that get you one to do the Cyberspace levels, or you could forgo those levels entirely and do the other two tasks. Its a tiring thing to say, but its exactly what BotW did (at this point the game is a HUGE influence on Frontiers) with its dungeons. You don't HAVE to beat the 4 Guardian dungeons to beat the game. You could easily do the shrines, exploration, and side quests for equipment and stats and challenge Hyrule Castle afterwards and still beat the game.

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

12 minutes ago, PSI Wind said:

I don't know how the argument of Sonic not trying something new is even a part of this games discussion. More than half of the game is completely new for a Sonic game experience. 

In addition to how jaded some folk who haven't gotten to play the game are, the marketing hasn't exactly helped things that much either.

People who haven't gotten to properly experience the fame hands-on, can possibly have a warped perception of things, unfortunately. 

[Shaddy Zaphod]

7 minutes ago, PSI Wind said:

They've said that anything that revolves around the Chaos Emeralds are optional in the sense that one could avoid doing a lot of the open zone puzzles and combat encounters that get you one to do the Cyberspace levels, or you could forgo those levels entirely and do the other two tasks. Its a tiring thing to say, but its exactly what BotW did (at this point the game is a HUGE influence on Frontiers) with its dungeons. You don't HAVE to beat the 4 Guardian dungeons to beat the game. You could easily do the shrines, exploration, and side quests for equipment and stats and challenge Hyrule Castle afterwards and still beat the game.

Exactly. And just like this, Breath of the Wild is a lesser experience if you choose to ignore its dungeons and bosses and shrines. So it would be fair to complain about those things if you thought they sucked.

[Wraith]

31 minutes ago, Ratcicle King said:

Cyberspace feels like an afterthought but given how relevant to the plot it is plus how many levels there apparently are, I don't think it was a last minute addition, instead it feels more like they were consciously focusing dev time on the more experimental parts like the open zone and combat, and played safe with this aspect of the game by cutting corners so it wouldn't take away too much of their resources and development time that would be better spent polishing the game instead. And given Cyberspace is but one aspect of the game (and a skippable one at that going by some previews), it's not that big of an issue here given the focus of the game is in somewhere else entirely.

I think Cyberspace was always part of the game. I just doubt it was as big of a focus in earlier versions.