Sega keep telling us how Sonic Frontier It doesn’t make any sense that it’s an “open area” game rather than an open world game, but it probably explains it successfully by now.
Since everything has to be completely original these days, Sega seems to refuse to call Sonic Frontiers an open world game, opting instead for an “open area.” But in an interview with IGN, director Morio Kishimoto took the time to explain what the company means by an “open area.”
“Level-based platformers usually h ave a world map. Our open area is a world map, it’s just that we make it fully playable,” Kishimoto said.
“A playable world map containing stage-like elements was something that had never really been done before, so we had to come up with a new name. In other level-based platformers, what is usually defined as a world is called an area in Sonic In the game, so we combine it with open, which refers to a freely explorable area. So that’s what open-zone means.
considering Breath of the Wild Basically doing the same thing, except for the little puzzle dungeons, which still sounds like an open world game, but hey, the marketing has to do its thing.
“Super Mario Bros. 3 was released in Japan in 1988. I believe it was the first game to introduce a world map,” Kishimoto continued. “The system has been used by countless platformers since then and to this day. The true evolution of this structure is the essence of what we see in the Sonic Frontiers realm.
“We want to deliver a next-generation level-based platformer experience. But how do we evolve a level-based platformer like Sonic into this new open area? That’s what Sonic Frontiers is all about.”
Kishimoto also sees Mario, Kirby and Donkey Kong as rivals rather than other games that are actually open worlds. That’s fair, because it’s more in line with the Sonic-playing crowd.
open world or not, Sonic Team’s The boss is confident that the game will not be delayed. But we’ll have to wait and see if it lives up to Sega’s goals.
