Negative feedback on Sonic Frontiers gameplay videos does not change the game’s release date.
In light of the disturbing videos from Sonic Frontiers, players begged SEGA to take their time and not jeopardize the franchise. You don’t have to proceed, the game will be available in 2022 and you still haven’t grasped the concept. Ah!
Sonic Frontiers: no postponement to 2023
The #DelaySonicFrontiers hashtag is a commendable initiative, but one to forget. SEGA doesn’t want to postpone Sonic Frontiers to 2023. For Sonic Team boss Takashi Iizuka, the alarmed reactions come from players who haven’t yet understood the proposal.
It’s not really surprising. We know that everyone reacts to the videos they’ve seen and because they don’t understand this new gameplay, they kind of compare it to other games they already know. So we see a lot of people saying, “Oh, it’s like that, like that, but it’s not like that.” The team is creating this new game format for Sonic, which we call “Open Area”. This new gameplay system doesn’t exist anywhere else in similar titles, so we really hope we can really explain this concept of open-area play by release.
Sonic Team Patron Takashi Iizuka, via Eurogamer.
In addition to the gameplay, fans have raised concerns about the tech with a very present clipping or even a fairly ordinary type of game engine demo environment.
In his interview for Eurogamer about Sonic Frontiers, Iizuka also reveals that this “new format” has been in testing since 2017. But this first unsuccessful attempt was thrown in the wastebasket. From there, the developers went through several iterations until they found something interesting.
Sonic Frontiers will be released in 2022 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.
