Sonic the Hedgehog is in a good place right now. Three well-received movies, a set of Magic The Gathering Secret Lair cards, and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds — one hell of a racing game. Sonic Team’s latest game indicates the devs are ready to go even faster and farther with the Sega icon.
“We really appreciate all the positive comments we’ve gotten from fans and from reviewers. People really like the game, which gives us the confidence to continue making more content,” series producer Takashi Iizuka told me during Brasil Game Show. However, to determine the next steps they are taking, Sonic Team wants to build a strong path based on player feedback.
“If enough people are coming in and playing it, there’s conversations about the game. We have one year of DLC, we could do year two, we could do year three of DLC,” Iizuka says. “Tell us what you want!” Sonic: CrossWorlds being an online game gives room for the team to expand its content in the future. “These are the things we can do because it is an online game. We could add new gadgets, we could balance the game differently.”
While CrossWorlds is giving Sonic Team the opportunity to create a brighter future alongside its community, the beginning of the project was purely a result of chance.
“It actually started because COVID happened and started affecting the arcade sales and the profitability of the arcade development teams. And so Sega itself said, ‘We need to restructure how our teams are working and what they’re working on,’” Iizuka explains. Those internal changes ended up giving Sonic Team an unexpected opportunity: merging with the Sega Arcade racing team.
“That was really the opportunity for Sonic Team to think, we need to make a game with these guys. What are they best at? What can they make that’s amazing? Racing games! What are we great at? Sonic! We’re going to make the best Sonic racing game because now we have the Sonic experience, we have the racing experience. It’s a perfect fit,” Iizuka says.
The collision of the both team’s expertise culminated in a game where piloting cars feels as Sonic-y as running around in the classic 3D and 2D titles. Sonic: CrossWorlds has the style. Sonic: CrossWorlds has the speed. But achieving that greatness involved refining the core aspects of a Sonic game.
“Sonic must always be driving a really cool car. These aren’t go-carts, these are cars! And so even when the team was designing the vehicles, I would be going in and touching up how the side looks, and how the front looks, and how the back looks to make sure all the vehicles, for all the characters, are unique to that character, but also look really cool and feel very stylish,” Iizuka explains.
“The other really important thing is — and it goes through for even the 3D action games — is the feel. You have the controller in your hands and you’re pressing buttons. It’s about how that feel connects with the in-game experience. Having Sonic just drive fast is great, that’s very Sonic. But it also needs to feel really good. And so the team spent a lot of time working on not just the speed, but the cornering, the handling, the drifting, all the other elements of racing that needed to go in to have it feel just like a 3D Sonic action game.”
While the responsive gameplay helped CrossWorlds captivate players, the inordinately fun list of characters gave this game a distinct identity. To make this reunion feel even more compelling, Sonic Team came up with the Rival System, a set of unique interactions characters have with each other. Although a cool dynamic on paper, making each encounter feel natural was daunting for Sonic Team.
“A big challenge was having these characters all speak to each other directly with the Rival System. It was extremely difficult to go through this huge roster of characters and some of them have never ever met before,” Iizuka explains. “Usually if you’re writing a story for a story-based thing, the story is happening and the characters run into each other. And so you can think of what they would say to each other in that situation. But this is really a direct competitive comment that they’re making.”
Sonic Team developed the concept of Travel Rings — portals that connect multiple worlds — to bring together Sonic characters who have never met, as well as characters from other IPs. Longtime fans of the franchise might have seen the singer diva Hatsune Miku and the blocky structures of Minecraft as weird additions. Their presence is, however, a direct statement by the Sonic Team that fun is the top priority.
“The development team thinks it’s a lot of fun, and they thought it was a great way to kind of get all this play activity together. So instead of thinking of it as a hard canon of ‘this is how the world is,’ we hope everyone just enjoys it more like a fun party experience with a story reason for why it’s happening, but not necessarily the absolute truth of the characters,” Iizuka says.
Sonic has always been iconic, but the future looks brighter than ever with Sonic Team working to create a solid foundation within the game’s community. The road ahead for CrossWorlds has only just begun.
