Sonic Riders TE 1.4.2 Patch Notes
General Changes
Developer Comments
The main focus of these changes is to implement some of what was cut from the development of SRTE 1.4. However, some of the changes you'll see are refinements to 1.4's quirks and underdeveloped aspects. The feedback given from the community was instrumental in many of these improvements and we thank all those that took the time to provide the team with detailed constructive criticism.
QOL Changes & Bug Fixes
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Added E10R EX Load. He functions exactly like normal E10R, with Power type and normal HUD colors, although he still retains E10B's voice lines.
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All Super Forms now have a rainbow exhaust trail.
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All Super characters lose 5 rings when attacked.
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The stage icon preview in the CSS has been moved down a little bit to account for 4:3 screens.
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When a gear/character stat combo on the CSS has a value of more than 7 stars, the 7 stars are represented as a single blue star. This means for every blue star, you'd have 7 yellow stars.
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QTE hints and other on-screen hints whilst drifting have been removed.
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Trick text is now smaller in 2-player matches, and will not completely obscure the top player's screen anymore.
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Battle Mode now has a timer whilst playing in multiplayer matches.
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Hitting a wall whilst charging jump will now retain your charge.
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Cars on Metal City and Night Chase won't honk anymore.
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Omni-type builds gain only 50% of all bonus power object speed.
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Overhauled braking. Now, if you want to brake, you have to hold the bumper and down on the left stick at the same time. You don't have to keep holding down on the analog stick the entire time you wish to brake; you only have to start braking by firstly holding down, and then one of the triggers at the same time, but once you do that, you can let go of the analog stick. Braking works as it does in vanilla if you're under 100 speed.
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The downhill speed multiplier has been reduced by 10%.
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Edited some of the gear descriptions to be more accurate.
Tornado Changes
Developer Comments
To be blunt, the Tornado Pass and Tornado Tank mechanics were in an unfinished state for Ring Gears, only siphoning 10 rings regardless of if the gear was boosting through the tornado or not. These changes aim to flesh out our ring gears and accommodate high boosting air gears more suitably towards the new mechanic.
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Tornado tanking (ignoring tornadoes whilst using a high boosting gear in boost state) has been lowered to 10% extra cost (from 40%).
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Ring gears under 250 boost speed use Tornado Pass (boost duration is lost when ignoring a tornado). Ring gears above that boost speed will be able to use Tornado Tank (boost duration is not lost when ignoring a tornado). It costs 8 rings for Tornado Pass and 15 rings for Tornado Tank.
Trick Changes
Developer Comments
The implementation of S Rank granting speed was a very exciting addition for most players. Although, in hindsight, players have optimized their air consumption so well that many began to forgot X ranking entirely in favor of speed. These changes aim to achieve the original intention of giving the player the choice between more speed or more air. Particularly, the speed buff to X rank now allows standard gear to boost chain off the speed they get. This is a change that would have been implemented regardless of the existence of S Rank as we found that X Rank was unnecessarily slow, even in the original game.
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X ranks now grant you 220 speed upon landing.
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S+ ranks now grant you 200 speed upon landing.
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The air you get from an S rank upon landing has been reduced to 40 air (from 50).
Magnetic Impulse/Slipstream Changes
Developer Comments
Overall we are very thankful MI turned out as well as it did. Many games are closer and harder to call early as a result. They are generally more exciting for the viewer, and more engaging for the players. However, there are things that needed to be addressed with the mechanic, especially in situations it wasn't supposed to be as prevalent in. This is mostly due to the fact that Slipstream wasn't as active in 1.4 as intended.
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Slipstream has been changed to consistently work everywhere. It now also accounts for player rotation. The size of the cone is roughly the same. This was possible thanks to Sewer's implementation of slipstream, massive thanks to him!
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Maximum MI now gives you 2 rings from 10 and 20 ring boxes (instead of 5).
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Reaching maximum MI now displays the stars effect from leveling up.
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When playing as a no-type build, the effects of MI are doubled.
Gear Changes
Super Hang-On
Developer Comments
In 1.4, Super Hang-On received substantial buffs to its versatility and raw speed. They proved to be a bit too much with the addition of S Ranks and especially Magnetic Impulse, making Super Hang-On's ability to catch up from staggering leads a complete nonissue. These changes aim to retain Super Hang-On's viability while reducing potential MI buffs, and giving the opponent more opportunities to strike during a pit refill.
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Air gain from pits has been reduced by 10%.
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At Level 4, your passive air drain increases by 100%.
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Air gain from tricks has been reduced by 50% (10 air to 5 air).
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Air gain from shortcuts has been reduced by 9% (from 10% to 1% air gain).
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Super Hang-On randomly forcing Britney Spears' 2003 hit song "Toxic" was reduced to a 1% chance. (from 5%)
Advantage-S
Developer Comments
With the ambitious alterations made to Advantage-S, there were a couple of "jank" incidents left to fix up.
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Fixed a bug where the gear was not able to attack.
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Fixed a bug where the hitstun from hitting a power object as non-power type would put you in hitstun the next time you jumped.
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Fixed a bug where you could use Air Debt coupled with Boost Control to essentially boost with no limits.
Hovercraft
Developer Comments
In recent times, the cloud has had a marginal increase in pick rate and performance. There are some concerns about it potentially becoming too great of a force, however the current lack of dominating play makes this prediction a little inconclusive. Still, we are still observing it closely so that it remains in check.
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Level 1 boost speed reduced to 210 (from 215).
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Top speed reduced to 192 (from 197).
Berserker
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Fixed a bug where the gear's attacks were triggered inconsistently.
Heavy Bike
Developer Comments
A similar principle to Hovercraft, Heavy Bike is a gear that could easily become meta if players pushed its limits. With the entire cast gaining access to it now, that may become reality soon.
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Ulala, E10G and E10R/E10B can now use Heavy Bike. It appears as a retexture of Gambler.
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Level 1 boost speed reduced to 260 (from 265)
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Level 2 passive air drain has been increased by 12.5%.
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Level 3 passive air drain has been increased by 25%.
Fastest
Developer Comments
Fastest benefited a lot from the universal mechanic changes. A couple of nerfs have become necessary. Although, Super Cruise no longer capping speed is a buff that also makes the gear feel better as you no longer have to deactivate Super Cruise in order to get speed from dash panels and drift dashes.
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Nerfed drift cap by 10 speed.
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Nerfed top speed by 4.
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You gain Battle Armor (formerly Berserker effect) after 1.5 seconds of Super Cruise (from 1 second).
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Your speed isn't capped to your Super Cruise speed anymore.
Auto Slider
Developer Comments
Auto Slider is a really fun gear, but there was always one problem... it's never quite been viable in competitive play. The goal of these changes is to remove and rework the things that plague it, especially on drift characters, which ironically would be seen even less on the gear.
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Decreased boost duration by 20 frames.
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Buffed boost cost at all levels to default boost costs.
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Removed halved drift efficiency when using drift characters.
Legend
Developer Comments
Legend released a little bit undertuned due to the unknown power of being able to control one's trick speed. Now that it's clear that ability's implementation went off without a hitch, we can bring it back up to snuff. We did this by playing with one of the more niche statistics of the extreme gear - deceleration. This allows Legend to gain more value from the extra trick speed.
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Lowered deceleration by 10%.
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Decreased trick air gain multiplier to 100% (from 115%).
Slide Booster
Developer Comments
Funny story: due to a universal change to how the drift cap works, Slide Booster was able to abuse the changes to maintain extraordinary speeds by continuously out-putting drift dashes while over the gear's drift cap. The team knew this exploit existed, however, it was predicted that the gear would still not be played regardless due to its low defensive profile and the introduction of Magnetic Impulse. This very quickly proved to not be the case. We hope to alter Slide Booster in the future to make it more playable.
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Fixed an oversight, where you could get insane speeds whilst drift boosting off of high speeds.
Beginner
Developer Comments
Beginner was about 70% complete last patch. Such is the nature of deadlines. In 1.4 you can overcharge your drift past 60 frames to perform a more powerful 90 frame drift. In addition, we are granting the other intended drift dash, a weaker 30 frame drift, and an even stronger 120 frame drift. This should give the gear more nuance and skill expression in its gameplay.
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Exhaust trail color now properly matches each drift level.
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You can now perform a mini drift dash that requires 30 frames (half a second) of charge.
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You can now perform an extremely powerful drift dash that requires 120 frames (two seconds) of charge.
Cover-F
Developer Comments
The ability to change your Extreme Gear archetype gives Cover-F the potential to be one of the most overpowered gears. We were playing with a lot of dangerous elements so the margin for error was high. There was a lot that could have gone wrong, easily. Suffice to say, the caution for concern was a bit overdone. Thus, our favorite mode-changing gear receives a vital buff for its future success.
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Switching between modes now costs 30 rings (from 40).
Advantage-F
Developer Comments
Advantage-F now gets the long-awaited rework intended for the last patch. The idea behind this gear is that it has the two most negative traits that would hinder a gear most, that being hovercraft effect and no-type. In return, it has massive positive bonuses to skill-based statistics. For example, it doesn't get extra boost speed or anything like that. It gets bonuses to things that you have to use and execute properly: like boost chaining, no speed loss while jumping, and bonk speed.
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Gains the following special flags: always on ice, tornado boost, charging a jump doesn't reduce cruising speed.
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The gear is now no-type.
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Top speed is now 162.
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Gains a +15% boost chain multiplier
Super Sonic
Developer Comments
In a wild twist of fate, Super Sonic turned out to be the most viable out of all Supers, even going on to achieve meta status as he has in previous patches over the years. This time, however, it is more so due to the introduction of the universal mechanics and the playerbase not yet fully grasping the understanding of how Super Sonic can and will abuse them. The universal nerfs along with the following character-specific micro-adjustments should make him feel a little less invincible.
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Gained Trick of Greed. (Lose 3 rings upon performing an S Rank)
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Daze effect timer nerfed from 120 frames to 100 frames.
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Nerfed acceleration by 50%. (previously had 2 times of default gear)
Super Tails
Developer Comments
Some community members mentioned that while they like Super Tails, he had missed potential, both thematically, and as a Speed/Fly gear design. This idea resonated with us, so we made it happen. The rest of the changes aim to make normal-state and super-state feel a bit more different from each other,
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Instead of gaining Power type when transforming to Super state, Super Tails now gains Speed type instead.
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Super Tails' normal state is now immune to ice and has no speed loss whilst charging jump.
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Super Tails' normal state now has 200 top speed and his Super state has 210 top speed.
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Fixed bugs with Super Tails' transformation in the middle of a QTE.
Super Knuckles
Developer Comments
Super Knuckles is getting some much-deserved refinements, both in increasing viability and fitting into the "combat-oriented Super" designation. Combining long drift dashes with boost chains will prove massive for the gear.
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Passive air drain reduced by 50%.
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Drift dash frames have been nerfed to 60 frames (from 50).
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Gains 0.3 speed every frame when drifting.
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Acceleration nerfed to 20% less than Super Sonic's acceleration.
Super Shadow
Developer Comments
The goal here is to increase the versatility of Super Shadow so he can function on more stages, while keeping his power level roughly the same on stages like Metal City & Night Chase. With these changes, Shadow has more opportunities to make a risky play, and better yet, he's now rewarded for doing so.
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Now has the "Sticky Fingers" special flag (each attack gives you 15 rings).
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Nerfed acceleration by 50%. (previously had 2 times of default gear)
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Boost speed has been reduced to 300 (from 325).
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Boost cost has been reduced to 30 rings (from 40).
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Passive air drain has been increased by 20%.
Character Changes
Eggman
Developer Comments
Eggman is a little rounded as you may know. While he can pick up rings more easily than the rest of the cast, his bigger body plagues him with a severe disadvantage. Because his hurtbox is larger than all other characters, but his attack range remains standard, he is fundamentally the worse in all facets of player interaction. By appropriately increasing his threat range, the doctor will be able to stand among the rest of the cast, with his own unique strength to boot.
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Buffed attack range to 4 (from 3).
Knuckles
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Fixed a bug where the character had inconsistent attacks.
Splash Canyon
Developer Comments
Lovely improvements to the first manual ramp make operating as a non-speed type less of a netplay nightmare. We predict the player base will rejoice at a common source of frustration being reduced to a far more functional and even satisfying stage element. The rail changes are aimed to buff mono speed types while reducing the raw time output of the all type & speed/fly routes.
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First manual ramp now gives you a farther jump arc.
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First manual ramp now requires only 50% normal jump charge.
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Decreased the speed of the first rail to 430 (from 460).
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Increased the speed of the last two rails to 450 and 460 (from 410 and 420), and increased the air gain of the last rail by 20%.
Red Canyon
Developer Comments
Red Canyon is getting a similar QOL treatment with its first ramp. With enough air and enough Magnetic Impulse, the dash panels at the end allow for one more push from the underdog.
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There are two new dash panels on the bottom path after the ramp proceeding the windmill QTE, right before you go down the waterfall.
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You land a little bit further when front flipping off of the first ramp, so top path is more easily reachable.
Misc Stage Changes
Developer Comments
The following minor changes are aimed to decrease frustration and/or increase stage quality.
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Egg Factory: The "spinners" set before the QTE have been modified to offset you a little less harshly.
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Sand Ruins: The arrow at the QTE will shoot you out at minimum capacity at last lap.
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Digital Dimension: When falling from the QTE, it doesn't account for your top speed anymore.