Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds’ items won’t let players ‘come back from behind and win all the time’, Sonic Team head says
Takashi Iizuka hints that Sonic’s latest Mario Kart rival won’t have a Blue Shell equivalent
The head of Sonic Team has promised that Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds won’t have items designed to let players “win all the time” from a losing position.
The recently released Mario Kart World, like previous games in the series, has a number of high-powered items which are given to players near the back of the pack, such as Bullet Bills, Stars and the infamous Blue Shell.
However, in an interview with GamesRadar, Takashi Iizuka said the upcoming CrossWorlds – while still designed with fair and balanced racing in mind – won’t have such items.
Without naming Mario Kart or its specific items by name, Iizuka explained that the game was initially designed without any weapons at all, with the development team “really taking things down to the base level” to “make sure the racing itself without any items was fair and fun”.
Only once the racing was considered acceptable did the team start adding items, but after “a lot of playtests” it was decided that “anything that was very stressful for players, anything that always allowed people to come back from behind and win all the time needed to be removed from the concept”.
According to Iizuka, the resulting selection of items provides “the right amount of chaotic” while “always feeling fair to the racers”.
In an interview with VGC at Summer Game Fest, Iizuka said he felt that Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and Mario Kart World can co-exist because they both appear to be offering something different to the player.
“With Mario Kart World they did the whole open world racing, that’s their new way of playing a Mario Kart game, and we really think it’s a great, interesting direction for them to go in,” he told us.
“We even started at a different point. Our development team, the people who developed Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, is our Sega arcade racing team.
“They have tons of experience making racing games, and the whole focus about what we wanted to do from the very beginning was about taking that racing game and improving it and modernizing it and putting all these new, fun, crazy ideas into what a racing game could be, and developing that as our product.
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“So even from the conceptual level, I think both of the titles are going in different directions and offering different experiences to people, so the design itself is fundamentally different.”
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is due for release on September 25 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch. A Switch 2 version will then follow sometime after this.
The game’s first season of content will include numerous crossover cameo racers, vehicles and tracks, based on such licenses as Minecraft, SpongeBob Squarepants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Avatar Legends.
