Sonic Frontiers developer says it isn’t an open-world game
When Sonic Frontiers debuted the first little bits of gameplay, fans immediately drew comparisons toBreath of the Wild. It wasn’t hard to do. We were shown Sonic racing through realistic, natural-looking environments, exploring great stone artifacts that dotted the landscape. There was no timer, no counter ticking up the number of rings acquired, just Sonic and a seemingly open world.
And while Sonic Frontiers’ creative officer Takashi Iizuka understood why, to some fans, the game looks like Sega’s late-hour attempt to replicate BOTW’s success, it’s actually nothing like that. “We’re starting a design perspective that is totally different from what other open-world games are,” Iizuka said to me through a translator at Summer Game Fest earlier this month. “We don’t see ourselves as an open-world game.”
Iizuka told me that the idea for Frontiers came after Sonic Forces shipped in 2017. For 10 years, he said, 3D Sonic games had fallen into a distinct pattern and that the team was “at the limit of what they can create that’s going to excite the fans.” For Frontiers, they decided to revisit an idea they had but couldn’t execute with the technology at the time, a kind of “open zone” concept in which Sonic would not be bound by a track or a forced perspective typical to his games at that point.
“We tried to expand on the 3D platform action gameplay from previous games in the Sonic series,” he said, “and take from that linear, traditional format and expand upon it to make it a platform action game across this huge expanse of 3D environments.”
In my hands-on with the Sonic Frontiers demo, I could see that vision. While I don’t necessarily agree thatFrontiers isn’t an open-world game — it still speaks the same open-world language
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