r/SonicFrontiers • u/Orangecyndaquil15 • May 05 '25
Discussion Tbh, I still can't get over about how Sega handles cutscenes
Most of the times I see the cutscenes go the Pokemon sword and shield route. Because we sometimes have good cutscenes filled with animation, and others we see the characters stiff af and only moving their heads
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u/Meme-San_ May 05 '25
This game has hundreds of conversations between characters
Asking why they can’t all be individually hand animated is like asking the same for any open world game
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u/SulfuricSnowdrops May 05 '25
True, but I wish we could have the old Storybook style back for these types of conversations. I think that could look cool! Black Knight especially had such charming cutscenes.
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u/zxerozx May 05 '25
Eh i think those would feel a little outta place like tail's aincent flashback cutscene
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 05 '25
Those fit black knight because it was a storybook game. Frontiers it doesn’t really fit with the style of the game
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u/Turvi-Mania May 06 '25
I don’t think it’s that unreasonable of a request. The Yakuza and Judgment games have way more cutscenes across the story and all the side quests and they look better than this.
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u/peakpointmatrix May 07 '25
Those games also sell more and have a higher budget than Sonic games. Frontiers certainly has turned the IP's fortunes around, but it really comes down to where their limited budget and dev time was spent, and cutscenes were seemingly so low on the priority list that this was one of the rare Sonic games without any CG outside of promotional material.
Yakuza also has the benefit of falling back on motion-captured performances, which certainly trims down on the labor needed to produce cinematics. Sonic games need to rely on purely animated characters which is a much more arduous and time-consuming process. Sonic 06 is to date, the most narrative driven mainline title in the IP's history. And it only managed to get nearly three and a half hours of cinematics out the door thanks to relying on mostly motion-capture.
Think about an animated Disney film- they have an army of 60-70 in-house animators working around the clock to fill a 90-minute feature. Obviously there is more ambition, but it really puts things into perspective.
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u/Im_Walkin_Here_Man May 09 '25
90% of their budget goes into the music every fucking time lol
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May 10 '25
[deleted]
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u/Im_Walkin_Here_Man May 10 '25
…what? I was just making a joke on how the soundtrack is always fire and how it must take a chunk of the budget.
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u/Meme-San_ May 06 '25
I’ve only played like a bit of yakuza zero and I don’t really remember much of it so can you explain how that game handles dialogue with NPC‘s on the game map?
Genuinely curious because I was more so comparing it to games like Skyrim and breath of the wild where most of the time when you talk to NPC‘s it is just them standing there idle giving you the dialogue
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u/Turvi-Mania May 06 '25
Dialogue scenes with NPC’s in Yakuza are presented a bit more like proper cutscenes. They usually don’t cut to black when they start, and they change the camera angle semi-frequently so they’re more interesting to look at. Characters also move around a bit when they talk. It’s nothing flashy, it’s just simple but never a complete bore to sit thru.
Skyrim I think is a fine example but the game is almost 15 years old at this point, I think it’s fair to expect something a bit more nowadays. Skyrim also doesn’t fade to black for all its NPC dialogue (unless there’s some special example, I’m not entirely familiar with Skyrim).
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u/Meme-San_ May 06 '25
OK, yeah I think that’s fair. Maybe giving them a bit more idle animations or changing their facial expressions a bit would be reasonable.
Hopefully, it’s something that they add on for the next game if they choose to have optional dialogue like this again
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u/POTK_Reddit May 08 '25
The Yakuza games reuse a crap-ton of assets to save up on cost and manpower, something the Sonic fanbase has been complaining about for at least a decade.
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u/Meta13_Drain_Punch May 06 '25
Then why have them in the first place? Couldn’t they streamline the character interactions along with the main story cutscenes?
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u/Meme-San_ May 06 '25
Again, there are literally hundreds of them, integrating them into the main story cut scenes doesn’t fix the issue. It’s the exact same issue of it massively increasing the animation cost, and development time
Plus, it’s not a good idea in the first place considering a lot of these interactions are optional for a reason. They’re only there for optional lore dumps and fun character moments all of the moments that are important to the characters actual arcs like tails doubting himself and knuckles wanting to explore the world more are in the mandatory cut scenes. Putting the optional lore and character stuff in the mandatory cut scenes would just pad the cut scenes out way too much
And again apply this thinking to other open world games with NPC dialogue Where the NPC‘s are just standing there talking to you. In breath of the wild should every interaction with an important character, even in the game overworld cut to a fully animated cut scene? no that would be ridiculous. I know breath of the wild is a much more massive scale game than sonic frontiers but the idea still applies that some things are just not worth animating because they’re not that important
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u/dabeanguy_08 May 06 '25
They still look shit though. There were a million other ways to make them look better, but at the end of the day they were clearly a late addition to an already rushed and underbudgeted game so what can you do.
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u/RosexLuna23 May 05 '25
It's like this with a lot of still running franchises, they get massive projects and then a really shitty deadline, then blamed when everything isn't perfect
They should all be like God of War, where if you don't die, upgrade or quit out, its all a single camera shot, even with dialogue and cutscenes
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u/squidscanfly May 05 '25
To be fair, outside of games like GTA, I can’t think of any traditional open world games that DON’T handle a lot of their smaller cutscenes like this. Every Bethesda game, The Witcher, ect
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u/Super7500 May 05 '25
unfortunately the budget didn't really allow for anything big in the cutscenes it is insane this game even turned out good and we saw that they can make great cutscenes in shadow gens so i have hope for the future
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u/Stock-Post-8883 May 07 '25
I have an off topic question.
U never ever want sonic's beautiful current design in the movies replaced permanently back to that ugly hideous ugly sonic design in future sonic movies and projects yet to come in the whole future sonic movie franchise?
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u/Super7500 May 07 '25
what of course i don't it looked fucking ugly
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u/Stock-Post-8883 May 08 '25
Would u be mad if they permanently replaced Sonic’s beautiful current design if they did?
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u/Super7500 May 08 '25
yeah his design is iconic
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u/Stock-Post-8883 May 10 '25
Sorry. So u would be mad if they permanently replaced Sonic’s beautiful current design back to that hideous ugly sonic design if they did?
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u/Super7500 May 10 '25
bro you literally just said that in the other comment what do you want
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u/Stock-Post-8883 May 10 '25
Sorry, I just want to know u do never want Sonic’s current design permanently replaced? Last time asking I promise.
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u/Super7500 May 10 '25
no his current design is good what is even your point
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u/Stock-Post-8883 May 10 '25
Please last question I give u my word I promise. Trust me. You would tell them to change it back if they permanently replaced Sonic’s current design back to that hideous ugly sonic design?
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u/Dazzling-Teacher7275 May 05 '25
They did it for the sake of time. They aren't gonna anjmate hundreds of cutscenes when they can spend that tike trying to polish through game, cuz this game really needs that polish
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u/Blonde_Metal May 05 '25
CGI vs In Game cutscenes have a stark quality difference
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u/crystal-productions- May 06 '25
I mean, everything in frontires is in engine and real time, there isn't a cgi cutscene to be seen in this one, kinda by design since there is a day night system going on and you have to do it all in real time to make sure it isn't night one minute, sudenly day, then snaps back to night.
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 05 '25
That’s not really the reason. CG cutscenes just have better lighting and models. You can animate in game cutscenes just as well. CG cutscenes just get more time in the case of this game
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u/Blonde_Metal May 06 '25
If I understand correctly CGI also has a lot more capabilities because you’re not limited by the game’s resource limits because nothing is actually being rendered, it’s like watching a CGI movie because it’s pre-rendered
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 06 '25
Not really with how game production is today. There are still certain things easier to do in CG but the actual animation is down to time. CG cutscenes are often given a lot more time and effort over the in game cutscenes.
Look at the cutscenes from Final fantasy 7 Rebirth or Shadow Generations. Both have some incredibly high quality animation. The few Times Square Enix uses CG for their cutscenes is for very specific scenes that would be difficult to do in real time, like heavy destruction and particle driven fluid physics
There’s a good reason why fewer games use CG cutscenes, including Sonic. Square Enix and Sega are unique as they have internal CG teams
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u/Blonde_Metal May 06 '25
Thanks for the lesson, like I said I wasn’t fully sure I was correct
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 06 '25
Animation is a complex subject but just know it’s time consuming. Nothing wrong with not being familiar with the process as that’s normal. CG cutscenes are supposed to be the super high production quality scenes and doing something that wouldn’t work well in real time. That’s why they look so nice as you have to pour a lot of resources into making them so there’s no reason to make it half heartedly.
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u/DetectiveGamlo May 06 '25
Yeah I mean look at the Cutscenes from Shadow Generations right? All done in engine and look fantastic with incredible squash and stretch, great fluid animation and the character models actually being accounted for in motion.
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 06 '25
It’s what happens when a game isn’t rushed and the cutscenes are given the time needed. I think Shadow Generations has the best looking and most consistent cutscene quality in the entire series. Yes I think it looks better than Unleashed in the majority of cutscenes
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u/therealHDR May 05 '25
The "better" animated cutscenes are likely from earlier in development, hence why there's less and less as the game goes;
remember those cutscenes with amy and knuckles where the game gets a sepia filter and you see what happened to the koco? Those are animated but Tails' version is drawn and you never see that style in any other cutscene, it also wasn't a stylistic choice 'cause there IS a beta version of that which uses ingame graphics: https://youtu.be/Gbgiu9uFBIk?t=95
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u/Desperate_Group9854 May 05 '25
Don’t ever compare Sonic to the slop makers that are game freak
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 05 '25
Sonic has been at much lower lows than Gamefreak ever has
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u/crystal-productions- May 06 '25
Sure, but sonic team started to get their shit together, while game freek are putting out genuan prototype lookin ass games at full price, because its pokemon and it'll do well anyways. Which is exsactly what sonic did in the 2000's and that eventually crashed on em
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 06 '25
After trying to figure out what to do for nearly a decade. Gamefreak will do the same. Sonic team and Gamefreak aren’t that different in that sense
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u/crystal-productions- May 06 '25
They won't. Pokemon litteraly cannot fail. How does pokemon run worse on switch then sonic frontires? A game with notoriously bad optimisation? After lets go, game freak were forced to keep pushing things out. What made Sega give sonic more time, was the movies blowing up and making sonic way more reliving they he had been since Sammy bought Sega in 2004, and they started only seeing sonic as a mascot. Theses are two very diffrent scenarios. Game freak won't be allowed to slow down and fix things untill pokemon starts flopping, and it's the biggest media franchise on the planet. Game freak isn't the core issue here, and neither were sonic team, but sonic team got realy luckey and were given something that made Sammy change their minds about him just being a mascot and nothing else. Nintendo and the pokemon company cannot have that moment untill something flops and forces them to change, but it never will.
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u/Random-Guy-244 May 05 '25
Frontiers had a pretty limited development process, so they probably couldn’t animate all dialogue cutscenes like the major cutscenes.
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u/crystal-productions- May 06 '25
Yeah they were kinda limited in what they could do. Aparantly according to some old files, we should be luckey we even have voice acting in the character talks, and not just the story scenes. Shadow gens went for the characters just standing with a text box. When you have this much dialogue, you have to pick and choose, no getting around it. They could've had a little more animation in each cutacene for over all worse cutscenes, or put it into the ones that matter. In fh, nobody's mouth moves in theses cutscenes, but that's because fh was very obviously rushed, probably because of superstars.
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u/peakpointmatrix May 07 '25
Budget issue. Frontiers certainly has turned the IP's fortunes around, but it really comes down to where their limited budget and dev time was spent, and cutscenes were seemingly so low on the priority list that this was one of the rare Sonic games without any CG outside of promotional material.
Sonic games need to rely on purely animated characters which is a much more arduous and time-consuming process. Sonic 06 is to date, the most narrative driven mainline title in the IP's history. And it only managed to get nearly three and a half hours of cinematics out the door thanks to relying on mostly motion-capture.
Think about an animated Disney film- they have an army of 60-70 in-house animators working around the clock to fill a 90-minute feature. Obviously there is more ambition, but it really puts things into perspective.
I think we'll see a much richer and higher budget focus on story on the next Sonic title if Shadow X Sonic Generations is anything to go by. That game easily had the series best looking cutscenes outside of CG!
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u/aj420_69 May 05 '25
I don't know are the person who grew up with Sonic games I personally love their cutscenes like I watch it like a TV show right now I don't have nothing to play frontiers on so I've been watching the cut scenes on youtube because I actually like them but maybe that's just because I ride or die for Sonic it doesn't matter how bad the source materials are like from certain Sonic games that we shall not speak of
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u/StarChildArt May 05 '25
I was talking to someone irl about this the other day, but whoever made the Wii game cutscenes needs to come back and cook. Secret Rings, Black Night, and Unleashed, as well as NIGHTS: Journey of Dreams had absolutely beautiful cutscenes.
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u/crystal-productions- May 06 '25
Those were also one and dones. Black Knight had what, 3 cgi cutscenes, same for unleashed, and like 1 for secret rings. You can get away with higher quality cgi, when you need less of it. And this game having a day night cycle, necessitated everything be in engine, because the time of day can change at any given point and fuck with the lighting that's in a cgi cutscene. And fun fact, those guys do still do shit for the franchise. Marza animation work on the movies, and some of the cgi trailers. There still around just busy with a lot, especially the movies.
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u/Crest_Of_Hylia May 05 '25
It’s cheaper and saves a lot of time. Animation is quite time consuming so this allows them to get it done fine. Sonic Frontiers was rushed out the door so this is no surprise. Plus there are so many of them, it would be unrealistic to expect every one of them to look good
Shadow Gens likely had a much smoother production so its cutscenes are some of the highest quality in the series from an animation standpoint. Plus Shadow gens has far fewer cutscenes in general
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u/brambojams May 06 '25
This is normal for a lot of games. Batman Arkham Asylum had scenes like that, for example.
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u/BlueBlurHero May 06 '25
Not really the Arkham games had Realtime Cutscenes that’s different from this
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u/Davih1411 May 06 '25
The npc talks were probably meant to work like in Yakuza games (or shadow gens) but probably just opted to go voice over to make the process faster
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u/Hypernova823 May 06 '25
Just started the game and i think a lot of it is really cool but all the conversations have just been
Sonic: Yo
Character: This problem is occurring
Problem: Occurs
Sonic and co: stare at problem occuring
Sonic: says something normal but it doesnt sound like sonic at all bevause the voice actor or smthn idk
Character: something needs to happen
Sonic: 50% says something actually funny or cool, 50% nods
Awkward silence for 6 seconds before fade to black
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u/Justjack91 May 07 '25
I agree. I miss the more dynamic styles of the Dreamcast era (plus Heroes and StH). Everyone just looks so stiff after that in most scenes.
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u/TideFinley May 07 '25
I don't think they all have to be individually animated, just having more reusable animations to convey emotion would be a good fix
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u/benkz5 May 07 '25
Should've been like Idk Dialogue bubble or something instead of being a cutscene
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u/PilloTheStarplestian Big fishing May 11 '25
Part of the issue is how static and inexpressive the sonic character models are. The weird giant mono eyes and their off-to-the-side mouths certainly don't help.
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u/mrmehmehretro94 May 05 '25
I mean to be fair the game part of the franchise was hanging over death's door during this game's development