How do you feel about the new “Open Zone” direction the sonic series is taking?
The more I think about it, the more I don't like it.
There's potential in it. But the way Sonic Frontiers controls, and the way they present it, it's not very good.
The way Sonic snaps to floors and the camera jitters around feels like a bad fan game. It feels like Sonic was dropped in to an environment he wasn't made for and the developer didn't have enough technical knowledge to fix it. It reminds me of playing an old BlitzSonic game in 2007 or whatever.
And I can say with some amount of certainty that's because some of these assets were placed haphazardly, and others were probably bought and paid for from photoscan asset packs or whatever. Things absolutely have collision in ways they aren't supposed to have collision, and instead of tweaking them so they work in the context of Sonic Frontiers, Sega shrugged, used them as-is, and decided "eh, good enough."
That's why there are so many places in the open zones where if you're boosting and you collide with a small rock on the ground, it can launch you 200ft into the sky like a ramp. There are ways to fix that (or at least improve it), but they didn't.
Cluttering the sky with so many grind rails, springs, floating platforms, rings, and whatever also actively harms the experience. Since my third Sonic Frontiers stream, I've spent some time cleaning up the remainders of Chaos Island and I've poked around a little on the fourth island, Rhea.
Which, Minor Fourth Island Spoilers: Rhea Island is just Kronos Island again, but a different section of it that they wouldn't let you go to originally. But the real major change for Rhea Island is that it's... almost completely empty. At least at the start, there are no enemies, no rings, no kocos, no puzzles, nothing. There are six giant towers you have to climb, but otherwise these areas appear entirely in their natural beauty, unspoiled by Sega's attempts to flood them with "gameplay."
And all of a sudden the world has come to life around me in a way it hasn't before. Instead of looking around and figuring out how to use (or avoid) a chain of springs, bumpers, launchers and rails to get around the world, I am actually looking at the world itself for what feels like the first time. Instead of being the backdrop of a Sonic level, it has become a place. I look at ruins and I wonder, "what were you for?" I see fragments of houses, ancient roads, and lost temples. And it's interesting! This is what the game has been missing for me!
It just needed a chance to stop and breathe.
They were so afraid of looking boring that every island feels almost identical because they're all covered in the same six objects. None of the locations are allowed to be themselves.
This is one instance where I think less would have definitely felt like more.
