It would be very fair to take a look at the upcoming Sonic Frontiers and think, ‘hey, this is giving Breath of the Wild vibes.’ Admittedly it’s a bit of a surface level, kind of reductive reaction, but like, come on, there definitely was some influence, right? Well, despite what looks to be pretty obvious similarities, Iizuka has said that the two aren’t similar in a recent interview with Shacknews (spotted by TheGamer). “From the development [team’s] perspective, they’re going out and making an action game,” said Iizuka. “So when they think about Breath of the Wild, they see Breath of the Wild definitely as a role-playing game, and it’s not similar at all to the action game that they’re making. “You know, yeah there is the same element of freedom that has been applied to Breath of the Wild as a role-playing game, and they’re taking the linear high-speed action Sonic game and implementing freedom into there. “But when we think about, ‘is it an open world game? Is it similar to Breath of the Wild?’, a lot of people on the team love the Zelda series, they love Breath of the Wild, they’ve played it, but to them, they don’t really see a similarity between the games.” Of course, in the interview, Iizuka did talk about that open zone style that definitely isn’t open world, and how that’s different from other games. “This open zone format has never been done before. We’re trying to look out there at other titles in the market place and we couldn’t find anything that had that linear platform action gameplay but in an open environment.” If you’re not much of a completionist, you also won’t have to worry about beating all of the bosses in the game, as it’s not a requirement. But in turn, that meant Sonic Team had to make sure the bosses were fun in their own right. Shadow fans might also be disappointed to hear that he won’t be in Frontiers, though Iizuka does want to bring him back. Sonic has been doing incredibly well for itself recently, with the second film becoming the highest grossing video game movie of all time earlier this year, and the entire game series having now shifted a massive 1.5 billion copies worldwide.
