Highlights
- Sonic Frontiers faced challenges during development but still became one of the best-selling Sonic games of all time.
- Developers expanded the world, added puzzles, and introduced grind rails to improve gameplay based on feedback.
- Internal playtests helped improve Sonic Frontiers, ensuring its critical success and securing a bigger budget for a future follow-up.
Sega and Sonic Team have shared some stories regarding the rocky development of 2022’s Sonic Frontiers. These details include the size of the team, the challenges faced during Sonic Frontiers‘ development, and how the studio overcame the new hurdles that appeared over the course of the game’s five-year development cycle.
Sonic Frontiers originally launched on November 8, 2022, and was met with a positive to mixed response. Many fans praised the ambitious open 3D platforming direction, Super Sonic boss fights, and character development, while criticizing the overall story, spotty presentation, and reused level designs for the cyberspace stages. Despite its faults, Sonic Frontiers became one of the best-selling Sonic games of all time, crossing 3.5 million units sold by the end of 2023. While Sonic Team has discussed the troubled production of Sonic Frontiers before, a new interview has shed some light on the issues that plagued its development.
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This interview was released by Sega of Japan on its recruitment page. In this interview, the developers described some of the issues they ran into, especially regarding Sonic Frontiers‘ open-zone gameplay. During the first year, they created a prototype that they found to be “unsatisfactory,” while also adding new features and developing a new engine at the same time to accommodate the open-zone. The team was supposedly also filled with a sense of urgency, according to a rough translation by DeepL. “We have to create something new! If we fail here, there is no way out!” said background designer Yuki Takahashi when recalling its development.
Sonic Frontiers’ Early Years
In response to the unsatisfying gameplay, the world was expanded and puzzles were added to Sonic Frontiers, which only slowed the game down and made it lack the sense of speed required for a Sonic game. A young programmer then came up with the idea to generate grind rails in Sonic Frontiers after solving a puzzle, which provided a fun way for players to travel around the game’s world and complete its mandatory tasks.
The interview also went into detail about the game’s repeated playtests, where the team received feedback multiple times from external playtesters. The initial reception to these early builds of Sonic Frontiers was pretty negative, but internal playtest scores started increasing as the team kept reworking the game, eventually reaching 8s and 9s. Takahashi confirmed this was also the first time Sonic Team approached repeated external playtests to improve the game during development.
With Sonic Frontiers‘ troubled development, it’s entirely possible that if the game failed, Sonic Team wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to make a Sonic game on this scale again. When Sonic Frontiers launched to a fairly positive critical reception and became a sales success, it was a pleasant surprise to all parties involved, with Sega allowing a bigger budget for a future Sonic Frontiers follow-up.
Sonic Frontiers
Sonic Frontiers is an open world, 3D action platformer game developed by Sonic Team and Published by Sega. Players explore Starfall Islands to collect Chaos Emeralds and find Sonic’s lost friends. Players will be solving puzzles, fighting robot enemies, and traversing the land with grind rails to discover how and why Sonic’s group was separated through a wormhole.
- Released
- November 8, 2022
- ESRB
- E10+ For Everyone 10+ Due To Fantasy Violence
