Sonic Frontierswasn’t always split into five islands. At an earlier point in development,Kronos, Rhea and Ouranos were all part of the same stage, before being split off into their own mini-islands. Some fared better in this split than others, with it generally being acknowledged that Ouranos suffered the worst, being far too big and having too little to do.
The devs are aware of this and are working on a fix. That’s at least according to a tweet from Sonic Frontiers director, Morio Kishimoto, who says that an update will help Ouranos feel more exciting and less repetitive. It’s not clear how this will be pulled off, but it could mean that it will be filled with more challenges, perhaps ones that are more difficult than the current offerings, given that fans are complaining that the final part of Frontiers is a tad anti-climactic.
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“As everyone has pointed out here, I also agree that the climax of [Ouranos] Island, which is the largest island, lacks excitement and becomes repetitive,“says Kishimoto. “We are currently working on an update for this issue as well!”
This comes after Kishimoto was asked why the three islands weren’t joined as one to begin with, leaving Ouranos with less to do than the others. It was previously assumed that this was due to time constraints, thrown together relatively last minute to flesh out the final part of the game. This was seemingly supported by the fact that traces of the larger island can still be found in the game’s files, suggesting that the split was a recent decision.
However, Kishimoto counters this, saying that the devs instead broke the island into three in response to playtesters.
“As you might guess, Kronos was originally a [larger] island,” says Kishimoto. “When we did playtests in the early stages of production, we received a lot of feedback from testers saying that the island was too big, that it was ‘boring’, ‘[had too much] grass’ and ‘tiring’.”
He continues, explaining that other solutions were theorised before setting on the idea of having five islands altogether. He says this went down much better in the next round of testing, even if the final product fell a little flat for some fans, at least in comparison to other aspects of the game.
There’s no timeframe on when we can expect improvements to the final island, However,the next free DLCis meant to celebrate Sonic’s birthday, which is next month.The last updatecame with abunch ofsurprise fan requeststhat weren’tadvertised on the roadmap, so it’s possible that this patch will too. Maybe even these long-awaited fixes for Ouranos Island.
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