Sonic Frontiers’s reveal could’ve been a lot better. The game definitely didn’t see a kind reception after the IGN First footage was first shown. As the Summer Game Festival passed, we also saw more tidbits of gameplay. However, most fans pretty much said that the game is going to need a delay in order to be made better.
Well, there’s some bad news for those fans. The lead of Sonic Team, Takashi Iizuka has told VGC that Sonic Team will not delay Sonic Frontiers despite the player feedback. When asked about the negative reception the first gameplay trailer got, Iizuka mentioned the following:
It’s not really that surprising. We do realize everyone is just kind of reacting to the videos that they saw and because they don’t understand what this new gameplay is they are kind of comparing it to other games that they already know.
So we do see a lot of people saying, ‘oh, it’s kind of like this, it’s kind of like that, but it’s not like this, it’s not like that’. And really, the team is going out and creating this new game format for Sonic, and we’re calling it an ‘open zone’ format.
He went on to say that players should get a more hands-on experience in the game to understand the game. Why? Well, because this new game system itself is something that doesn’t really exist in any other comparable titles. So, instead of doing the sensical option of opening a demo and letting players ‘understand’ the game, Takashi Iizuka tells people to go to Gamescom or Tokyo Game Show instead to “get that hands-on experience to play the game and understand what the game is.”
Regardless, Iizuka-san and the development team are currently happy with where the game is standing. According to him, the target audience of the game has given it very positive feedback. Well, it seems like Wccftech isn’t part of the said target audience as Kai Powell had some mixed feelings surrounding Sonic Frontiers in his SGF preview:
The various activities in Sonic Frontiers largely feel disjointed from one another so far. Here Sonic has a large open-world map with safety bumpers in place to keep the player moving forward on one track early on (with hills too tall to scale on one side and endless pits of clouds and open skies on the other).
The activities and points of interest feel randomly thrown together without something to really bind them together. If Sonic Frontiers wants to be a unique and memorable experience for grown-up Sonic fans, I do hope that those guiding rails drop away shortly into the experience and Sonic truly has the opportunity to explore those Frontiers with his own two feet.
Sonic Frontiers blasts onto PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and Switch during the 2022 holiday season. Since the game won’t be delayed, it seems like this release window is set in stone.
