If you were to distill the concept of Sonic Frontiers into an elevator pitch, it would likely involve the term "open-world" somewhere. However, while the game features many tenants of the open-world genre, Sonic Team is adamant about calling Frontiers an "open-zone" game instead. While on the surface that sounds like little more than a marketing ploy, after chatting with the developers, it makes more sense as you dig deeper into its meaning.
Coming off 2017's Sonic Forces, a game that didn't fare well with critics or fans, the development team wanted to shake things up. Forces received criticism for its generic 3D level design, unfulfilling story, short length, and poor 2D gameplay compared to the then-newly released Sonic Mania. According to Sonic Frontiers director Morio Kishimoto (who also directed Forces), the team carried a lot of lessons from Sonic Forces and other previous 3D Sonic games into Frontiers.
"I’ve been on the Sonic Team for 19 years now, and I do want to say that we have constantly learned from our successes and failures, not just the previously released Sonic Forces but on every Sonic title we have ever worked on," he says. "Now with 32 years of Sonic development experience with us, I am putting all my experiential learnings to practice in the development of this game. [...] Selectively only speaking about the learnings from Sonic Forces, I believe we learned that the method of designing stages with specific game mechanics (which all started with Sonic Unleashed) where we have shorter stages, pull back on Sonic’s speed a bit, and implement new actions for Sonic in the title is no longer going to satisfy the expectations of either our Sonic fans or those who like stage-clear action games."
One of the responses to this lesson was to create big, open areas in which players spend hours exploring, solving puzzles, fighting bosses, and collecting items. Not only does this approach shake up the pacing of the traditional Sonic the Hedgehog formula, but it extends the playtime, another criticism Sonic Team creative officer Takashi Iizuka heard coming out of Forces. As such, Iizuka believes Sonic Frontiers is the longest mainline Sonic game to date. "Whenever we work on the concept for a new game, we always refer to the reaction to the previous games and user feedback, so there are a lot of lessons, but one of them would be playthrough time," Iizuka says. "The playthrough times ended up being short for the previous games, but due to the open zone and other factors there has been a substantial improvement this time."
One of the primary challenges when starting development on the open-zone concept was making sure it felt true to the Sonic franchise. "When taking on a new challenge for a 3D Sonic game, I always go back to revisit Sonic's roots," Iizuka says. "With classic Sonic, you could enjoy high-speed experiences and route exploration just by moving to the right. That's the starting point for Sonic games, and when Sonic Adventure made the evolutionary jump to 3D, it was based on that same starting point. And for open-zone as well, we revisited the starting point and made an evolutionary jump from there to come up with a new play style that suits Sonic."
Kishimoto can trace the inspirations of Sonic Frontiers' open-zone format as far back as Super Mario Bros. 3 with its hub world connecting multiple linear-style stages for you to clear. Since that 1988 release on Famicom, Kishimoto has enjoyed watching the evolution of games using the world map mechanics. While games like Sonic Adventure have previously used the playable world map idea, Sonic Team wanted to evolve that concept with Sonic Frontiers further. Now, players not only explore a big hub area with environmental puzzles and challenges, but those areas are massive and house several diverse challenges that surpass those of the traditional 3D action levels that began with the first Adventure game.
The open-zone format allows the developers – and by extension, the players – to take advantage of the two most important elements of Sonic games, at least according to Iizuka. That's running through areas at high speeds and finding discoveries and surprises by traveling through that area in the way you want to. "In 2D Sonic, players headed to the right, and in 3D Sonic, players headed deeper into the screen," Iizuka says. "In the open-zone style, there are infinite directions, and the player can choose which way they want to go."
Iizuka says the biggest challenge was breaking free of the gameplay molds of past games and making sure the world is fun to explore at high speeds. "We’ve been building high-speed action on a path for more than 20 years, so it wasn’t easy to get rid of it," Iizuka says. "For example, it’s like taking F1 racing and getting rid of the course to drive on a wide, flat plain. That wouldn’t be any fun, would it? So in the early stages of the project, we kept creating the island terrain where the game would be set over and over in search of the ideal open zone."
In my past conversations with Iizuka, he lamented how the team would work hard to design environments in the linear Sonic stages, only to have players run through them in a couple of minutes or less – an unavoidable side effect of having a game based on speed. This became a sticking point in the early 2000s, as design became more intensive in the transition from 2D to 3D; sprite work giving way to fully realized polygonal design added a lot of time to the stage creation process, with players running through the environments just as quickly in many cases. During my hands-on time with Frontiers, the open-zone format seems to be a remedy for that previous problem, as one enormous environment plays host to dozens of destinations and objectives and hundreds of collectibles.
My foray into Sonic Frontiers' open-zone concept was on Kronos Island, one of the Starfall Islands. Though this first island kicks off your adventure, Iizuka assures me we'll visit all the Starfall Islands before the Sonic Frontiers story comes to a close. Throughout the adventure, players experience various biomes and environments – which isn't uncommon in a Sonic game. However, these areas house a lot more content thanks to Frontiers' open-zone twist.
Transitioning to this gameplay style is a massive undertaking but ensuring Sonic controls well in an open area is another thing entirely. We've seen him control poorly in games like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), but the risk is amplified with Sonic Frontiers's approach to the hub world. Thankfully, I enjoyed my time dashing through the open zone of Kronos Island. Sonic has the right weight for speed and exploration, and he doesn't slide around like in previous games. Even the more methodical platforming sequences feel vastly improved over previous titles.
During the initial gameplay reveal of Sonic Frontiers, many criticized the apparent emptiness of the open zone. It makes sense in the vacuum of those clips, but when you're running with the speed of Sonic, the spacing of enemies and obstacles makes sense. Games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring masterfully space out their encounters but feature a much denser world than Sonic Frontiers' early public footage. However, when you consider how much faster Sonic runs through the environment, the spacing works out; I found the time-to-encounter or time-to-discovery to be well-paced in my few hours with an early build.