Last week, Sega revealed the first gameplay for the long-anticipated latest entry in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, Sonic Frontiers. This new entry was first announced in summer 2021, and is set to be the Sonic franchise's first foray into open-world game design, taking inspiration from games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game is slated to release later this year, however after recent gameplay reveals, fans are calling for Sonic Frontiers to be delayed to 2023.
The reason for this is due to controversy surrounding the gameplay reveal, which has been heavily criticized for looking very unpolished in terms of visuals and art direction. The trailer's gameplay has also been criticized for being hard to understand, as both showcases for the exploration and combat feature no commentary explaining what the purpose of the gameplay is, and feature no user interface elements to follow. The whole scenario is very similar to the 2020 gameplay reveal of Halo Infinite, which Microsoft and 343 Industries received a similar level of backlash for.
How Sonic Frontiers' Reveal Invokes Halo Infinite's
In July 2020, Microsoft held its Xbox Games Showcase in which, two full years after its first reveal at E3 2018, gameplay was revealed for the sixth main entry in the Halo series. The gameplay trailer for Halo Infinite contained eight minutes of uncut gameplay footage from the upcoming game, and showcased the franchise's first footage in an open-world environment. The trailer was immediately met with backlash however, with many fans criticizing the underwhelming visuals of the game, which was set to be a launch title for Xbox's then-upcoming Xbox Series X and S consoles. The trailer even sparked the birth of a viral meme based on the game's underwhelming visuals, in which an unpolished looking brute model was dubbed '"Craig the Brute."
The fallout from Microsoft's reveal of Halo Infinite was so massive that a month later Xbox made the shocking announcement that Halo Infinite would be delayed to 2021. Eventually, Infinite released over a full year after the launch of the Xbox Series X/S, leaving the consoles without their flagship exclusive.
It's not hard to see the similarities between Sonic Frontiers and Halo Infinite's gameplay reveals; both have been widely criticized for failing to contextualize new gameplay concepts that fans are unfamiliar with, and both were showcased with visual and art direction changes that look very jarring and in many ways unpolished. Sonic Frontiers, much like Halo Infinite, is also coming at a point where fans have waited a long time for the next entry after being disappointed with the last major entry in the series -- in the Sonic franchise's case 2017's Sonic Forces, and in the Halo franchise's case it was 2015's Halo 5: Guardians.
How Sonic Frontiers Can Avoid Halo Infinite's Problems
Ultimately, Microsoft made the right call with Halo Infinite. While the decision was likely very difficult, Halo Infinite received an extra year of development thanks to the decision to delay the game to December 2021, despite its multiplayer launching in November. Microsoft banked a lot on Halo Infinite being a platform for the next decade of content for the Halo franchise, so it needed to do right by the audience out of the gate.
While it can definitely be argued that if both the developer and publisher succeeded at this, with many fans criticizing the excruciatingly slow drip-feed of content since Infinite's launch, the launch itself was a huge success. At launch, Halo Infinite received a Metacritic score of 87%, an average of over 100,000 active players, and even won a fan-voted category at The Game Awards dubbed Player's Voice. By January 2022, only a month after launch, Halo Infinite had received over 20 million players, likely due to its online mode being free-to-play, but nevertheless, the game was a quantifiable success.
This is why delaying Sonic Frontiers to 2023 is likely the right call for Sega and Sonic Team. The game is releasing at a point of new beginnings for the franchise, especially coming off the success of the Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise and the upcoming Netflix animated series Sonic Prime. Fans are hungry for a new Sonic game, but Sega has continuously fumbled new entries with the controversy surrounding the DLC and pricing of Sonic Origins, and the incredibly rough launch of Sonic Colors: Ultimate in 2021.
Sonic Frontiers could be a make or break moment, as fan confidence in Sonic Team is at an all-time low. The difficult announcement of a Sonic Frontiers delay could help to redeem some fans' expectations for the game, and could see it come out the gate as a surprise success for the Sonic franchise just as Halo Infinite was for the Halo franchise.
Sonic Frontiers will release in Holiday 2022 on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
