Sonic Frontiers director Morio Kishimoto has explained what the game’s “Open Zone” structure really means.
Speaking to IGN, Kishimoto’s comments somewhat clarify what separates Sonic Frontiers from open-world games.
“Level-based platformers often have a world map. Our Open Zone is a world map, only we’ve made it entirely playable,” said Kishimoto.
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“A playable world map that includes stage-like elements is something that hasn’t really been done before, so we had to come up with a new name. What is often defined as a World in other level-based platformers is called a Zone in Sonic games, so we took that and combined it with Open, which refers to a freely explorable field. So that’s what Open Zone stands for.”
See? Sonic Team definitely hasn’t just swapped out “world” for “zone”. It’s aiming for the game to be a development from previous platform games, rather than influenced by the current trend for open world games.
“Super Mario Bros. 3 was released in Japan in 1988. I believe this was the first game to introduce a world map. The system has been used by countless platformers since, even to this day. A true evolution of this structure is what we see as the essence of Sonic Frontiers’ field. We wanted to provide a next-gen level-based platforming experience. But how do we evolve a level-based platformer like Sonic into this new Open Zone? That’s what Sonic Frontiers is all about,” said Kishimoto.