- All the story skills you get are now on the tree itself
- Redundant skills like Sonic Boom have been replaced.
- Key abilities were added to the skill tree, namely the 4-hit combo, lightspeed dash, Spindash, and Power Boost.
- Projectiles have been removed.
- Auto Combo has been removed.
A lot of this has been a result of me thinking a lot about the combat and why I like it. I like the launches, the phantom rush meter, the quick cyloop meter, the cyloop as is, etc. There's a lot that I think synergizes in the combat when it's not distracted by a bunch of flashy animations. Cyloop is a fantastically designed move both in and out of combat (apart from the the infinite rings and boost trick lmao), as it interacts with just about everything in the environment, and acts as a shield break and a launcher. As a move in combat it's designed around mastery over the movement and speed. There's probably more, but I think it's the smartest combat move ever made for a platformer.
Quick cyloop acting as a finishing launch that consumes meter is pretty smart. Making the homing attack a combo like Shadow had in 06 and P-06 is pretty smart. A move like Cyclone Kick being a "heavy attack" based on holding the button down makes sense. Grand Slam being put in there as a parry counter works. Loop kick acting as a horizontal launch you do out of a boost makes sense. Stomp being given an upgraded combat animation makes sense. I get that this is a little rambley but I think trimming the skill tree down to these moves makes the most sense for a Sonic combat system.
Then there are things I'd change entirely like how stomp works. I'd make the stomp entirely a move you have to unlock. You won't be able to stomp or bounce anywhere in the game until you unlock it. Same goes for Lightspeed dash, similar to Unleashed. The choice of keeping your 4-hit combo away from you until later in the game is also a bit of an inspired choice. Playing as a basic Knuckles without a combo at all during the very beginning of the game was really tense, leaning into the atmosphere the game was going for during the tutorial a lot further.
Then there's the Spindash. I don't really like the idea that the Spindash is a post-game unlock. It's much too iconic and honestly too important for the open-zone formula to just leave on the table in favor of boost. Playing with the Refined Physics+ mod and getting to experience an early game rebalanced around the spindash was a ton of fun. However, this mod doesn't really break the progression in any meaningful way. When you have the spindash, yeah it's easy to bust open different parts of the game, but it's not like the boost where there's constant speed at the push of a button. Even if it's a broken Frontiers spindash, needing to charge it, or just having it be momentum based where you can't climb slopes with it, has a meaningful distinction from the Power Boost.
With this reasoning, The majority of, or at least half of, Frontiers could be an Adventure style game, until you unlock Power Boost where it plays much closer to vanilla/Unleashed. Whether Power Boost is on the skill tree or a level 100 reward should take some actual development and play testing. Trimming the fat of the combat system to make room on the Skill Tree for movement options you need to unlock would give progression more meaning. Just by making Power Boost harder to get than cylooping a few times in place at the very start of the game and never losing it again, we've successfully justified the speed stat. By meaningfully changing how you move throughout the world as the game progresses, and by shifting priorities to make the stats actually mean something, it gives Frontiers not just more replay value but more variety along one playthrough.
