Sonic Frontiers ‘has a long way to go’ admits director – despite smashing Steam record-Michael Beckwith-Entertainment – Metro

Sonic Frontiers – aside from the Monster Hunter crossover, Sega hasn’t announced any post launch plans for Sonic Frontiers (pic: Sega/Capcom)

While it’s proven popular with the fans, Sonic Frontiers’ director promises that he is listening to the complaints.

After so many years, it seems Sega and Sonic Team have finally found a winning formula for Sonic The Hedgehog with Sonic Frontiers, the franchise’s first real foray into open world gaming.

It’s the first genuinely good Sonic game to come out in forever, but it’s certainly not perfect and has its fair share of questionable design choices and technical drawbacks.

Hopefully it’s just the first step towards a brighter future for Sonic and Sega, though, and according to Sonic Frontiers’ director Morio Kishimoto that’s very much how he sees it.

In his first comments since the game’s release, Kishimoto says that he and his team are ‘checking the opinions of the critics and everyone’.

‘We still have a long way to go, and we take this seriously as a global playtest,’ reads a recent Twitter post, via Google Translate.

It’s not entirely clear if Kishimoto is referring to work on future games or if there are plans to update Sonic Frontiers via patches.

A Monster Hunter themed collaboration is supposed to be added to the game first thing on Tuesday, November 15, which includes new costumes for Sonic and a cooking mini-game, but that’s it as far as anyone knows at the moment.

Some quality of life touches wouldn’t go amiss, though, such as being able to fast forward the day/night cycle or even a boss rush option so you can replay what are amongst the game’s best moments.

Kishimoto’s words also reiterate how Sonic Frontiers is serving as a testing ground for the future of the series. Something that series producer Takashi Iizuka has mentioned in interviews before.

Speaking with VentureBeat earlier this year, Iizuka called Sonic Frontiers the ‘next step for the next 10 years’ of games, meaning there were already plans to expand on its open world (or open zone as they call it) gameplay for future titles.

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Luckily for them the game has been a major commercial success already, with the game enjoying an all-time peak of 19,181 concurrent players on PC, according to SteamDB.

This is the highest concurrent peak for any Sonic game on Steam. It even crushed the record set by 2017’s Sonic Mania, which peaked at 11,937 players.

Sonic Frontiers is available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

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