How to fix Sonic Frontiers

 SOS. Save Our Sonic

We've seen the highs and lows of it. Sonic Frontiers is coming before the end of the year and I don't think there's a single sane person on the planet who thinks it's ready and waiting to hit that release window. I maintain that the entire thing needs to be fundamentally reworked at a core level, but its all well and good just saying that, but what about actually discussing what needs to be reworked and establishing the standards that it has to meet? Be constructive with our criticism. Because at the end of the day I want Sonic Frontiers to be good. We all want a great Sonic game which pushes forward the franchise; so ranting and raving helps nobody. Although with that in mind it doesn't hurt to remind Sega just how unfinished this game looks so they remember how badly it needs to be delayed. Because it does and they really need to know that.

The big stand out problem which strikes down everyone's first impression is the World that this game is set in. The Frontier we're looking at here is empty, lacking in visual flair and seemingly totally lacking in intent. We can see that there are no real landmarks in the places we've seen so far, just hills and embankments with parkour objects slapped on top of them to really hammer home this sense of 'tech demo'. (My brother theorizes that this could all be a tutorial space, but that just makes it a really lazy tutorial anyway.) For some reason the team went for a realistic visual style which means muted green grass and generally plain terrain only split up by their garish additional robot designs that are also monochromatic and not fun to look at. Fixing the world is going to start by addressing these three issues.

Firstly, the world needs to be redesigned with a purpose and intent behind design that can influence all the rest of the development. If, for example, they wanted to make a place for Sonic to show off his speed they could have wide flat racing spaces with environmental frills in order to wow the eye and keep it busy, such as active grass deformation, puddles of explosively reactive water physics and galleries of exciting surrounding hills and mountains. Exploration themed world design would demand varied and distinct areas to break up the world and encourage the wandering eye, maybe with obstacles erected in the way of obvious sight lines so players have to travel and move to come to grasps with what they've got in front of them to explore. The visual style may be set but the team could take a bit more creative licence with the colour palettes they're working with to at least give the grass hills that classic neon deep green from the original Sonic games, just to introduce some recognisable visual flairs. They could also go the extra step to incorporate some of that geometric patchy grass texture that Sonic has rocked up until now.  

The animations that Frontiers is rocking has been another huge point of contention for the fact that they look to be lacking in many of the finer points that really differentiate an indie product from a triple A offering. For one, Sonic has no variation animation related to the speed at which he is moving when he's not running. That is to say, although he can walk slower depending on how the player pushes their movement stick, his walking animation is static, so Sonic can end up animating his walk pattern in a speed faster than he is actually moving creating an illusion similar to moon walking. Plus some of his transition animations, from jumping to running and attacking to manoeuvring, seem jittery and lack fluidity. (Although that's just extra polish anyway. I wouldn't throw away a game just because it's transitory animations aren't perfect.)

Then we have the combat which is a tale of both hope and trepidation. Sonic has languished in this hell of 'lock on and dash' gameplay for so long that the Sonic Team didn't even bother to program enemy attack patterns in Forces. This is not the case for Frontiers and enemies do indeed attack, albeit not in any aggressive patterns. I'm not asking for Souls-level of attack and reaction gameplay here, but these robots look to be largely static for extended periods of time before uttering a single attack and then going dormant for several seconds. It's not very intimidating. The boss fight at least looked cool, what with the impressive scale of the robot and the seemingly couple of avenues to beating him which I appreciated. I also like how scaling him became more difficult each time you broke one of his conduit-things, and to which that design philosophy made its way into the trash mobs a little more. Give them some dynamism so that they're fun to fight, make them more aggressive and perhaps throw in a little more colour to their otherwise monotone designs.

But what we fight is only as important as the tools we have to fight it, and I'm giddy to say that Frontiers has a combat system, even if it's incredibly rudimentary. The tracing and feedback speed move is okay, if a little slow; but it's just a shame that Sonic Team don't appear to be doing anything with the actual momentum of Sonic to be used in combat. Can we not roll up into a ball and crash into enemies anymore, or are they just neglecting to show that? Plus, are there going to be any enemies that actually match the blue blur's speed or is this going to a case of slow, plodding enemies that we tear apart like silly putty akin to Sonic Adventure enemies? And I have to mention that vortex tornado move which for some reason spins Sonic around upside down, that looks silly, and the special lock-on chain-dash move which appears to teleport Sonic several yards back from his target before executing, which is a really jarring way to set up an attack. (Or at least I think the move does that. Either it teleports you or the editor for the combat trailer really wanted to make it look like it does with several jump cuts every time that move activated.)

And behind it all we have to work on the purpose of the game and it's world. Why are we making this open world Sonic game a reality and how can the team put their efforts toward achieving that purpose? Do we want to put players in the shoes of playing Sonic in his daily life? Probably not given the far-cry-from-normalcy setting of the game. Do we want to put players in a position of wonder in a mysterious world with Sonic's repertoire at their disposal to explore at their own pace? That feels closer to the mark. In that case effort should be invested in feeding the desire of discovery and mystery. Far off landmarks that have a functional challenge to them, whether that be a scaling platforming challenge or a puzzle, inspire that call to adventure. (Which means that the pop-in really needs to be worked on.) And creating a sense of functional believability to the layout of the world gives the player the impression that there is intention and purpose to this world that can be discovered. Which is why we take half pipes and platforms and attach them to facilities and world landmarks, so that these navigation tools exist outside the sole context of "Sonic can jump on this in order to get somewhere." That last trick is the anvil around Frontier's world design holding it back, and once that design philosophy is totally banished we can start to look upon this gameplay as an indicator of an actual finished product.

I've heard some claim that the Frontiers footage is an alpha build and everyone is wrong to judge their opinions on the game from the footage, but I challenge that for two reasons. One, yes it's an old build of the game but the thing launches before 2023, this game needs an identity to be visible in it's world and presentation more than a handful of months out, and two, this is the footage that Sega themselves put out to showcase the viability of this game. They slapped this tech demo for the public in the hopes that this would sell the dream of their game, in the knowledge that this would likely be the first and last chunk of gameplay footage put out before launch. Sega thinks this is a strong foot forward, they need to be told explicitly why that is not the case and the more ideas to fixing this game up that we give them, the better the chance that Frontiers can be delayed and reworked into the rough gem we know it can be. Let's do our best to save Sonic.