Studio head Takashi Iizuka on Sonic Team’s “intentional” efforts to balance old with new.
That to me is the essence.
“It’s very clear to me that just going fast does not make it fun.
And that’s what the Open Zone concept is.”
The Open Zone concept really came from, ‘we want this open space to exist’.
We want that to be in an open space, not in a linear format.
It’s creating this open area and filling it with tonnes of things to do.
And that was really the challenge the team needed."
Some of that challenge can be felt in playing Sonic Frontiers.
An Open Zone, if you’re still not totally sure, is essentially a giant level.
Your core objective was also explained a little more explicitly.
What you’re trying to do is get the Chaos Emeralds out of things called the emerald vaults.
so you can do so, you should probably first defeat bosses called the Guardians.
And onto the next.
It’s like that with much of Sonic Frontiers, it seems.
Like, ‘I remember this exactly!’
And that’s kind of what the problem - the difficulty - was in putting in that combat system.
