Sonic Frontiers’ Director Reacts To Negative Game Reviews
Sonic Frontiers' game director responded to players' negative comments on the new game, reminding them it's a work in progress.
The reviews for the recently released Sonic Frontiers have divided the Blue Blur’s fandom, with some praising the game for its narrative, while others chose to dislike the game over its repetitive gameplay and minor technical issues, including the non-working DLC. Now, that game’s director issued a public response to negative game reviews, calling Sonic Frontiers a title that still has a long way to go — pretty vague, just like all the other statements regarding the gaming industry’s botched releases.
According to The Gamer, Morio Kishimoto, Sonic Frontiers‘ game director, acknowledge that the game still has a long way to go. He apologizes for the delay in his response and says that the Sonic Team is currently checking out all the criticism and praise directed at the game, branding the release as a global playtest.
Some have taken the last part of the statement in the negative sense, and quite reasonably so since they paid for the game, but it would seem that the statement regarded the feedback which would be implemented in future Sonic releases. Sega teased Sonic Frontiers in May last year but hasn’t officially announced the title, followed by an apology from the company for a premature tease.
Apparently, the company felt it necessary to tease Sonic Frontiers since it failed to deliver any release for the franchise’s 30th anniversary or a whole game since 2017’s Sonic Forces. The company later trademarked Frontiers and announced it during the Game Awards 2021, and we finally got the game on November 8 this year.
Whatever the case may be with Kishimoto’s statement, Sonic Frontiers actually performed pretty well, despite the negative commentary by fans and critics. Admittedly, the game was criticized for repetitive gameplay and praised for its storytelling, but it’s quite possibly the best 3D Sonic open-world game the fandom has received in years.
The game garnered a massive number of positive reviews on Steam, and according to data sourced from SteamDB, it also set a record for the largest number of concurrent players for a Sonic game on Valve’s digital platform. This marks a massive success for the Sonic franchise, which was a bit side-lined in the gaming world.
The highest number of concurrent Sonic Frontiers players on Steam was approx. 20,000 players, which can’t actually compare to massively popular franchises that count millions of players, but it’s still a massive improvement over 2017’s Sonic Forces, which had approx. 2,000 concurrent players on Steam. The previously mentioned Sonic Colors Ultimate is currently an Epic Games Store exclusive, so we can’t actually find any concurrent players figures.
So, let’s dive a bit deeper into why the game divided the fans and critics. In truth, Sonic Frontiers is, with all its shortcomings, a fantastic game and quite possibly the best one we got in years.
The negative commentary and mixed response actually stemmed from previous, earlier reports when critics got their hands on a preview version of the game, which still hasn’t been polished yet. Luckily, the polished version is much better, and gamers shouldn’t really judge this book by its covers — the covers contain nothing but a headline.
