Soon, Sonic will have another high-speed adventure in Sonic Frontiers. As the first game in the series to release on a current-generation console, Team Sonic opted for a more ambitious design, with a huge “open area” that you can explore at will.
Meanwhile, the game is still being released for older consoles, the Xbox One and PS4, and even hardware-wise, at least on the humble Nintendo Switch, at the same time.
During a press conference, we had the opportunity to ask Takashi Iizuka, the producer of the Sonic series, about the challenges of delivering on such a wide range of platforms. While he admits it’s certainly not an easy task, he also believes their proprietary Hedgehog engine will do the job.
“Developing on this incredibly wide range of hardware is extremely challenging. But the good news is that we’re using the Hedgehog Engine,”Iizuka Yamamoto.“The Hedgehog Engine is an in-house developed engine that we’ve been using since Sonic Generations, and we’ve been updating it since game development in 2010 to really make sure that multi-platform development is as easy as possible. We’ve been working hard to perfect everything about the engine These multi-platform capabilities and capabilities. As we’ve seen with Sonic Forces, yes, we’re not only able to deliver games on very low-end spec machines, but we’re also able to deliver games on high-end spec machines.
While running at 30fps and having a lower resolution compared to its high-end counterparts, Team Sonic remains committed to delivering a comparable experience on the previous generation of consoles and the Nintendo Switch.
“Our artists are producing a ton of high-quality content, and it’s great if you have this great and amazing high-spec PC. But we also want to make sure that people who play games on Nintendo Switch have the same experience. So we’re not necessarily using the same high-end assets, but the Hedgehog Engine is able to shrink it down to a size, if it looks very comparable on the Nintendo Switch, like it does on a high-end PC,”Iizuka-san explained.
We’ll have to wait until November 8th to find out what the Switch version actually looks like, but since family-friendly games like Sonic are so popular on the platform, we can definitely imagine Team Sonic has spent a lot of time making sure this particular version is performance wise will not be left behind.