General Sonic The Hedgehog thread

Enjoy the bosses and beware of the DLC Difficulty Jump.

Agreed. I hated the DLC so much. I did not find it fun at all for multiple reasons, not all difficulty related.

That critic who said the game has no redeeming values seems like just another person who's irrationally bound and determined to hate Sonic just because it's Sonic.

Honestly, I do not even bother to look at professional reviews. They mean nothing to me. I look at Steam reviews or general sentiment.

There are times when I've strongly disagreed with the Steam reviews, like when I got Planet of Lana and found the game mediocre, or 198X and hated it. But generally, the reviews do a good job of giving me an idea if I'd like the game or not.

Or oftentimes I just learn the basics of what the game's about and see some footage and end up buying it, avoiding learning any more info lest I spoil any of it for myself. That's how I got Road 96, Treasures of the Aegean and Gylt, all of which I ended up loving.

Edited by BonsaiForest on Mar 11th 2024 at 3:43:12 PM

Professional reviewers are almost entirely first-impressions reviewers - they only have time play games for the first hour or so, and give assessments based on what they see.

And as much as I love Frontiers, I do have to admit it's not a game that looks great if you only play just the first hour or so. I remember back when we first got to play the demo, even user reviews tended to be pretty lukewarm, and a lot of that was due to on first look the game has a lot of earmarks of things people generally assume are poor design that you only realize aren't actually that way when you have the time to sit down and play it.

I remember when the demo first came out, for instance, there was a user review from one of those Sonic channels posted here where the user complained about how none of the traversal options worked right. Not because the traversal options didn't actually work right, but because the reviewer mistook all the rails and such that are attached to puzzles or collectables as traversals, which is a mistake, but admittedly isn't a super difficult mistake to make if you're solely looking at the first twenty minutes of the game.

Even stuff like the pop-in I eventually started to realize was probably there on purpose as I played the game, but on a first glace it looks sloppy.

I assume the pop-in is related to the Hedgehog Engine 2 not being very powerful at handling that. The game wasn't made with something well-known and very established like, say, Unreal Engine.

But I assumed professional reviewers were given games early so they could finish them? If not, that's ridiculous.

I don't think it was there as the result of a rush or some mechanics limitation. I think it's there on purpose.

To clarify, I think it's there because they didn't want to hide any nearby the puzzles and traversal options - of which there were very, very many - from the players' view, since exploring all those random options is kind of the point of the gameplay.

But they didn't want everything on any given island to be visible all at once, because that would completely obscure and clutter up the landscape, so there's culling. But for the same reason, they also didn't want to obscure the landscape with fog or whatever, which is how you would usually obscure that sort of thing.

So instead of coming up with an elaborate solution, they just allowed the pop in to be visible and hoped nobody would care. And I mean, like, people noticed, but they were right in that it didn't seriously keep anyone from enjoying the game.

Or put briefly, it's not that it's a level of pop-in the game design couldn't handle, it's that there a ludicrous amount of visual content to be culled in and they didn't have a better solution for how to make it visible in the way they wanted it to be.

The pop-in is determined by a single value in the game's code, and you can get rid of it on PC by just using a mod that sets the value higher and it works just fine. I'm going to assume the pop-in exists for the reason most people assume, which is to make sure the game runs fine at all times on Switch and they just left the same setting for all the other ports as well.

Plus, but if you've ever seen a picture or a video of what the game looks like without pop-in, you can immediately see why it was probably taken out from a visual design standpoint.

All that traversal content visible on the screen all at once clutters up the visuals of the game and makes the landscapes - which are a big visual draw to the game - look ugly.

They didn't have a more elegant solution to that problem (except maybe having the stuff fade in? But that's just a different version of the same situation), because of the sheer amount of visual content involved.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Mar 11th 2024 at 1:16:21 AM

I'd at least accept slowly fading in as you approach, so you have time to react, compared to just popping into existence and demanding god-like reflexes to react.

Given how quickly Sonic moves, fade in would likely result in the player having less time to reasonably react, not more.

I can accept culling everything beyond a certain horizontal distance because of the visual clutter and most of what you'd be seeing being irrelevant to your current surroundings. But the vertical pop-in gets real annoying when you have some collectable right above you and you get no clue as to how to get up there to it because you look up and it just looks like it's floating in the sky with nothing around it. I could get the argument that it shouldn't always be too obvious to how get something, but with no clue at all that's not a puzzle, that's just wondering around the island until you happen to run into some spring or rail or whatever that takes you on the course you need, which is probably like a half a mile in some arbitrary direction from where the collectable is.

Some Sonic games take time to get used to.

I finished Unleashed but I don't feel like returning to it. Eggmaland was hell.

I already beat my first Titan boss so far. This may be my first Sonic game where I'll get a Platinum trophy.

iirc there already is more organic forms of fade-in fade-out in the game, but the various floating platforms lack it because they were added relatively late.

Initial closed beta feedback (back when Giganto was gonna be hiding behind a big ol' fog cloud and we all thought it was the final boss because when else does Super Sonic come out) was very negative on the initial design, thinking the island (which was a combination of Kronos, Rhea, and Ouranos) was too big and had too little to do, since there was just the portals and enemies as far as playable content went.

So platforms and rails were added all over with memory tokens so as to provide some more platforming gameplay in this platformer franchise.

So it's not a case of "game bad" it's a case of repurposing already existing stuff in a context it wasn't originally intended for (in the context of Frontiers development that is), and so the awkward pop-in is an artifact.

EDIT: okay it wasn't fade-in/fade-out that already exists, it was actually another method of performance saving, multiple levels of quality. Yeah platforms and rails only have the one quality, and rather than make multiple versions for different distances, getting progressively less detailed with more distance, they just kept the one and made sure pop-in kept them from eating too much storage.

Edited by Numbuh1234 on Mar 13th 2024 at 6:05:11 AM

Quick question though: Did I glitch the game? I thought I had a blue Chaos Emerald, but now it's missing from my inventory in Ares?

Did you get got by a ufo looking enemy? If yes, it has it now.

Oh phew. IDK why the game didn't point that out, I thought I lost some rings but it went by so fast I didn't notice.

The nice thing about getting into Frontiers so late is some of the quality of life improvements. Resetting levels with the Elder Koco used to have to be done one level at a time. Now you can do it all at once.

There's trophies for having Speed Level and Ring Level maxed out, but I don't think there's one for having all stats maxed at the same time, so being able to swap them is VERY useful.

I really loved the new ideas that Sonic Frontiers brought to the franchise, like having Sonic's friends split from Sonic for awhile, which was something that haven't been done in the games for years. I just hope that they stay with this plot point for the next few games so that we can see where this goes.

I just defeated my second Titan in Frontiers.

How are you liking the game so far?

Wait, what?

I haven't seen that, iirc. Do you have an example?

@Ladybug: If you have the setting where you can pop into the simulator for a refresher on what skill is needed to beat certain enemies, it'll remind you what the Emerald thief does. Basically, it "steals" an Emerald and then runs away, but is can't actually fight back, and of course the Emeralds are mandatory to proceed with the game. When it runs away, it leaves behind a short glowing trail that you can grind on, and then stomp it to destroy it and take your Emerald back. As with other places in the game, you can't autosave when you're "fighting" it. This is to prevent it from getting so far away that it despawns or you forget where it is, keeping you from softlocking yourself. If you close the game and restart, it'll bring you back to the last autosave before the fight.

Edited by wanderlustwarrior on Mar 13th 2024 at 11:00:49 AM

Like I said before, this might be my first Sonic game that I'll get a Platinum trophy in.

TIL there was a Sonic X game for Leapfrog that had Sonic 3 style Amy sprites. https://www.spriters-resource.com/leapfrog/sonicxleapster/sheet/131879/

Edited by lalalei2001 on Mar 13th 2024 at 3:16:37 PM