And we really wanted to challenge ourselves to do something new and make something that is going to last for the next 10-plus years as a new game format. But at this point, he says, "the team kind of felt like we were hitting a limit of what we could do, and how we would innovate on the game. Iizuka explains the history of Sonic as really "20 years or so" of following the same "linear game design" style, with the 3D linear zones of Sonic Adventures, in 1998, the first "evolution" of that. So regardless, if it's a 2D game, or 3D linear zone, it's that sensation, that feeling when you play with Sonic, that the team is really focused on." And it's really through the design of the course, and the things that you're having to do, where you feel that speed and where you feel that fun. You could be, you know, just running in a straight line superduper fast, but it's going to be kind of boring, you're not going to feel like you're going fast. "It's very clear to me that just going fast does not make it fun. Honestly, Sonic Frontiers looked better in this preview, but I'm not sure it looked this good. "So whether it's a 2D game or 3D game or an Open Zone game, it's really that sense of enjoyment that I'm running with Sonic at a high speed and : this is fun, and I'm having a great time. The "essence" of a great Sonic game, Iizuka says - or just how he'd define the best parts of playing it - is really the "fun feeling" you have while moving. But it's the goal of all these games that ties them together: to take that next step while still keeping the series' essence intact. Some kind of openness - an open world, or area, or with Sonic Frontiers what the team is calling Open Zone - is the natural next step. It's the step back from that: a realisation that the medium as a whole has evolved, at least a little, and that there are some players who want to decide their own goals and discover things for themselves. The common thread here isn't a mechanic or premise like Zelda's discovery-via-systemic-physics, or Pokémon's catch-and-catalogue scientific method. Playing some Sonic Frontiers, though, and speaking to Sonic Team studio head Takashi Iizuka, you see where that kind of thinking goes wrong. Watch on YouTube Sonic Frontiers' new story trailer from Gamescom 2022. These games all have fundamentally different systems and different goals, after all, and so Breath of the Wild isn't an influential game it just had really influential box art. A common point made is that, while these games like to market themselves in the same way, finishing a trailer with a series mascot channelling a bit of Caspar David Friedrich by looking out imperiously over a green and mountainous world of adventure, that doesn't mean the games are the same, or that one was inspired in an any meaningful way by the other. People do like to cut that thread, mind - or go further and suggest it doesn't really exist. It's another knot in the thread, which we can now rather neatly tie from Breath of the Wild's leap into the fully open world to Sonic, this coming November, doing the same in its own way. Pokémon is of course barely relevant here, but that means of going sort-of-open-world might sound familiar to those with a close eye on Sonic Frontiers. Availability: Out 8th November on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Switch.It wasn't until this January, a good four years later (a lifetime in Pokémon development terms), that we saw what that possibility really was in Pokémon Legends Arceus - an open-ish world game that was really more of a series of open areas, linked together but gated according to your progress, and that progress achieved by doing very traditional, classically Pokémon things. At the time he called it a "possibility," if, and only if, the studio could find the right way to balance the traditional Pokémon staples with the open-world formula that was proving so successful elsewhere. Back in May of 2018, I remember briefly asking Junichi Masuda, then of Pokémon developer Game Freak (and now chief creative officer at the Pokémon Company), whether Pokémon might one day follow the likes of Zelda and Mario into some kind of open-world format.
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