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Sonic Frontiers just got a free DLC pack, Sights, Sounds, and Speed. While we knew it would give us a photo mode and custom jukebox, it also came packaged with some much-requested quality-of-life improvements. But it turns out there's even more hidden away in the update than we thought.
As they revisit Starfall Island, players are finding that Frontiers can now tell when you've cheated to get a high score in Cyber Space levels. From now on, anyone who uses the "homing dash" exploit to speed their way through a level will find an asterisk next to their time, shaming them for cheating their way to an S rank.
This unexpected feature was first spotted by Reddit user JoBroDX, over on r/SonicFrontiers. They spotted the asterisk next to their time after blasting through the first Cyber Space level in just 39 seconds.
I tested this out myself, playing through stage 1-2 both with and without the exploit. Sure enough, the game knew exactly what I was up to during the run in which I used the glitch to get through the level faster than intended. And this is despite the fact that I still didn't beat the stage fast enough to S rank it, because 1-2 is pure evil.
Right now, it's not clear if the devs plan to do anything with this ability to detect cheaters. It's possible that a future update will add a worldwide leaderboard, disqualifying any of the times that are marked as using a homing dash. That's the most plausible explanation so far, since you can still earn an S rank with the exploit (if you actually beat the time, unlike me).
If leaderboards are introduced in a future update, that would tie in with another quality-of-life feature nicely. Now, you can restart a stage with a button combination, saving you from bringing up the pause menu every time you make a mistake. This makes the game much friendlier to speedrunners, since it makes restarting the run much less frustrating.