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Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds focus is on competitive play | Developer Interview.
Veteran Sonic developer Takashi Iizuka spoke to GamesRadar+ at Summer Game Fest about the upcoming Sega racing title, what we can expect down the line and how it differs from Mario Kart World.
Interview by Dustin Bailey
Filming by Tom Ryan-Smith
Video Edit by Maddy Kendall-Murray
Veteran Sonic developer Takashi Iizuka spoke to GamesRadar+ at Summer Game Fest about the upcoming Sega racing title, what we can expect down the line and how it differs from Mario Kart World.
Interview by Dustin Bailey
Filming by Tom Ryan-Smith
Video Edit by Maddy Kendall-Murray
Category
🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00Time for me to win this!
00:11Travel Rings. Can you tell us a bit about how the idea for that came about and what it adds to the game?
00:18So when making Sonic Racing Cross Worlds, we're trying to think of what is a new idea we can bring to the game.
00:24How can we kind of turn things around and make something fresh and new for people to play?
00:29And in that brainstorming session, we had this idea that we've had this three lap course up until now.
00:36It's always been race once, twice, three times around. What if that's the thing that we change?
00:41And that was really the idea that brought about the travel rate.
00:45Instead of racing the same lap around the same course, on the second lap around, you're going to a different world,
00:52different universe, whole different race course, and that's how we can kind of change things up and make something new and fresh for it.
00:58So that was the genesis of the idea and that's how it got implemented into the game.
01:02The Grand Prix format as a whole too is also very interesting with that third race being built out of the laps from the previous races.
01:10What prompted the decision to go that way instead of a more traditional format for the Grand Prix?
01:15That's also due to the travel ring that we have.
01:19You know, usually for the Grand Prix, you know, racing one, two, three and whoever gets first place, that's kind of the end.
01:24But since we have the travel ring, we said, hey, we can warp around to different places.
01:28We don't need to stay on the same course.
01:31So wouldn't it be fun to do the first lap, the second lap and the third lap as, you know, different stages from the previous races that you've done?
01:38That was the idea to really make something fresh and new and bring that idea and really make the most out of the travel ring and bring it into the Grand Prix mode as well.
01:46There tends to be like a very chaotic feel to most kart racers and CrossWorld's no exception there with all the items going off and the track effects.
01:56How do you kind of balance that sense of chaos and chance over the course of the race while still keeping the races feeling fair?
02:03Yes, when we talk about kart racing, balance is extremely important.
02:08This title was developed by the combination of a Sonic development team and the Sega Arcade racing team.
02:15They have come together to develop this title.
02:18And what they're bringing with them is all the long experience of making balanced fair arcade racing games and bringing that as the core base that this development started from.
02:29They wanted to make sure the racing itself without any items was fair and fun.
02:34The development team really took things down to the base level and wanted to have that fun competitive racing mechanic in there.
02:42Having the feel of the vehicles, having the course design really match and work for a really fun and fair racing experience.
02:49And from there, once they had that fair racing experience, they built it out by adding in items.
02:54So if you were maybe not in first place, you could use items and still get to that first place position.
03:00And working on balancing that was a very important challenge for the team.
03:05We went into a lot of play tests and anything that was very stressful for players, anything that kind of always allowed people to come back from behind and win all the time needed to be removed from the concept.
03:17And then we'd go back in and play test some more and find ways that we could balance and get it to feel the right amount of stress, the right amount of chaotic, but still lots and lots of fun.
03:28And always feeling fair to the racers.
03:31Obviously, we had the big announcement this week that we would have Minecraft characters as part of the season pass.
03:37And it sounds like maybe some more in that vein from other franchises coming in.
03:42What prompted the decision to kind of bring in these outside franchises to the game?
03:47Yes, we wanted to make this title something that pulled from the best of our previous racing games.
03:54So things like Sonic All-Star Racing Series all the way through Team Sonic Racing.
03:58We wanted to take the best elements of all of that.
04:00And one of those elements from the All-Star Racing game was having the Sega characters also racing in there with Sonic.
04:06You know, and that's why we have Kasukai in there is really to, you know, and Joker and Hatsune Miku.
04:11We have these other characters joining in, so it's not just a Sonic Universe game.
04:16And we want to make sure people are playing this game for a long time, not just playing it when it comes out, having fun and that being it.
04:23But really, you know, we need to support and make sure people are having fun and getting a fresh experience for as long as possible.
04:29And we're able to do this because we have a paid season pass.
04:33And when you're paying in to the season pass, you're getting all the cool additional franchises that we're going to be working on and delivering to people.
04:41It was that kind of business model that really made sense to us.
04:44And we wanted to approach it, you know, by having a season pass and for one year after the game launches continually add in new content.
04:53So what we've shown first is Minecraft as that big piece of IP that's going to be joining in.
04:59And we have, you know, characters and courses.
05:02But as the year progresses, we'll have additional new characters coming into the race, new courses that the team is developing that will make it into the game to make sure we have that long, long time experience and a lot of fun for players who want to continue playing.
05:17With both the outside franchises and the other Sega franchises, how do you kind of determine what makes a good fit in a kart racer like this?
05:26So, yeah, we wanted to make sure, you know, we're pulling a lot of characters from a lot of places, you know, for the for the first months.
05:34Like every month we're going to be providing people with a free character that will come from, you know, either an Atlas property, a Sega property or, you know, partners we work with to release games together.
05:47We want to bring those kind of characters to people for free every month and really make sure it's a wide variety of fun characters to choose from.
05:56And then through the season pass that will extend on for a year.
05:59We wanted to pull in and reach into different IP that come from different places and really make sure we were featuring a wide variety of really fun characters to present to the audience.
06:09The main character roster to even without the crossovers is pretty expansive.
06:15How do you determine like bringing back old Sonic characters as well?
06:19What kind of deep cuts from the old games make sense to bring back here?
06:24So, yes, in our main game, just, you know, when you buy the game, you're going to get 24 playable Sonic characters.
06:30And we believe that's probably all the characters people know and are familiar with.
06:36But, you know, those 24 playable characters will be in there.
06:40We think everyone will know or have a character that they're very fond of that will show up in that 24.
06:46Obviously, when we're talking about kart racers, there's another big one out right now with Mario Kart World.
06:52What do you feel like most differentiates a game like Cross Worlds from a Mario Kart?
06:58So I haven't yet played Mario Kart World, but just kind of what I see out there from the videos, it looks like Nintendo did a good job of putting in a lot of fun.
07:08Like, so it's more of like an action game. I see a lot of that coming through.
07:12And the Sonic Racing Cross World game is different in that it was made by the Sega Arcade Racing team along with the Sonic team.
07:22And the focus really is on racing and on that competitive play.
07:26That was really important to the team and they wanted to make sure it was in there.
07:30And you could also cross match against everyone out there who owns the game.
07:35So cross platform play is in there and you can go ahead and race and have that competitive experience against anyone on any platform.
07:43That really makes it exciting.
07:45You know, having the travel rings kind of change up the race every time you race.
07:50So even if you're playing the same course, you're going to have different experience.
07:54That also brings another level of excitement and it's something really different in the kart racing genre that we think everyone's going to get really excited about.
08:02Ah, yes. So one additional feature that I didn't that I forgot to talk about is our gadget system.
08:09This is a brand new system that is in our racing game and it's not car customization per chance, but the gadgets allow you to customize kind of your play skill.
08:19And this will come in as a new system.
08:23You can attach the gadgets and maybe as you're drifting, you can choose to have your car spin around and attack other other drivers on the course.
08:31Maybe you want a gadget that when you hit an enemy, you get rings or maybe you just want to have a gadget that enhances your ability to do tricks or maybe your ability to drift.
08:43There's all these ways that the actions in your game will actually be customized and you can choose what actions you're able to do.
08:51And that customization of the skills and the things you can do on the race track are going to be brought into the online play.
08:57So as you're playing online against 12 people, you'll be able to not only use your actions through the gadget customization, you'll be using your skills.
09:07People will see that and maybe they'll be like, oh, I got to look out for this guy because when he spins, he's going to attack me.
09:14And therefore I need to do this is how I need to change up my racing style to deal with this racer.
09:19Or maybe some people are going to see the gadgets that you're using and realize, oh, you're using a good combination or a good set of gadgets as a package.
09:26And that's a bunch that I should be using together. So it's really something there to not only make the online gameplay more exciting and interesting,
09:34but have people be aware of the other racers and maybe how they're using the gadgets to enhance their driving skills and have a lot more fun in that online play experience.
09:45When I was playing the demo yesterday, I really enjoyed the rivals system in there. Yeah.
09:51But I didn't really get a great sense of how it kind of develops over the course of the Grand Prix's, the way it kind of levels up.
09:58Can you kind of explain how that works?
10:00Yeah. So we do have a Grand Prix system, but Grand Prix is really always about getting first, you know, coming in first place.
10:07And we built the game and put that Grand Prix system in place.
10:11And as we were playing it, we kind of realized, you know, we need something more.
10:15There needs to be something else to do other than just trying to get in first place, because it's going to be you and 11 other people.
10:22And it really just feels like you versus a bunch of other NPCs out there.
10:26And the rival system was really born because the team wanted to do something to enhance that and really give it a competitive feel.
10:35So it feels like you're going out and you're not just trying to get first place, but you're also racing against a rival.
10:40And that additional by adding in the rival, we get that competitive feel.
10:46We get that like needing to compete and be first, or maybe we just need to beat our rival.
10:52But it kind of added an extra layer of depth to that Grand Prix feel and the rival system as well.
10:58We do allow people to change the difficulty of your rival.
11:02So if you want to really challenge yourself, you can bump the difficulty level of the rival up and then go and try to compete against that.
11:10Or if you want a more casual experience or maybe you just want to, you know, put the rival level down to better match your skill level, you can do that as well.
11:18So we're, you know, putting a system in place that really kind of enhances that competitive nature.
11:23And we think people are going to have a lot of fun with the rival system.
11:26You had the closed network test a little while back.
11:30I'm curious what kind of feedback you got from that and how that's kind of informed what you've changed with the game since then.
11:36Yes, in February we had the closed network test and we were able to successfully capture a lot of really good player data of what items people were using, when people were kind of quitting the game.
11:48And based off a lot of the data that we have, we were able to analyze it all and really do a good job of balancing the game to make it feel much better.
11:57So, you know, some of the items, maybe they appear too often, maybe they don't appear as much.
12:03Maybe some of the enemies were either too tough or they were coming back too hard against people or maybe they weren't offering enough.
12:10There was a lot of tuning that went into the game after CNT that really helped make the game a better experience for people.
12:17Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe this is the first Sonic Racing game with the customization system in it.
12:24Team Sonic Racing, we did have customization in there as well. Maybe not to the same level.
12:29Sure. Well, how have you then expanded that system here and what does it add to the game?
12:35Yes, we kind of expanded on customization because we have had car customization in Team Sonic Racing.
12:41But what we haven't had is the ability to have any character driving any car or riding any vehicle or machine.
12:50And that's something that we wanted to integrate into this game.
12:53So it used to be that Sonic was always driving Sonic's car. Shadow was always driving Shadow's car.
12:58But we're able to take the characters out and thus you can have whatever racer you want race in the vehicle that you're choosing.
13:05And this allows not only a lot of freedom of choice for the cars and the characters, but it also brings us to the next level of actually customizing what the cars look like.
13:15Of either changing the front or the rear or the wheels. We're able to add stickers to the vehicle.
13:21You can change the color or the material type. We also have horns that you can customize. You can have your own horn.
13:29And a lot of this is really to make sure you're going out and creating your vehicle that when you go online with, you get to be that unique person.
13:36You get to show off the vehicle that you have customized and you get to race against everyone else in their custom vehicles.
13:41Speaking of online too, I was curious what the sort of suite of modes consists of. Like ranked, custom, like what do players have access to?
13:52So we can't talk too much now about the details of the online modes. But what we can remind everyone is that we have a 12 player online experience.
14:01It will have cross platform play so you can play with anyone. There will be like time attack in there.
14:06You'll be able to, you know, have your ghost recorded and that data shared with people or shared to race against.
14:15We also want to make sure the online experience and the online modes are constantly fresh.
14:21So, you know, in addition to the season pass, we're going to have a lot of really fresh content coming out.
14:27Things that will add in or things that will really make the online experience a little bit new.
14:32So you want to talk to your friends about, oh, did you see the update? We got new events coming out.
14:37Or maybe there's new game modes or things to do in the online experience there.
14:41So constantly keeping the modes fresh in online is one of the things that the team wants to bring to everyone.
14:48That is actually the end of my list of questions. I just wanted to finally ask if there's anything you would want to say directly to the fans who've been waiting for quite a long time now for a new Sonic racing game.
15:04Finally, a message to our fans who have been waiting so long for a racing game.
15:08We are making Sonic Racing Cross Worlds kind of like the best Sonic racing game out there.
15:13We're taking the best elements from a lot of our past games and making sure it's in there.
15:17Features like having Sega characters and other guest characters join into the racing experience, adding in the extreme gear, making sure all of the courses and the racing is a lot of fun and fair competition.
15:29It's coming out September 25th. We are working hard to get it there. It will be out on all platforms and we really hope everyone has a fun time playing the game.
15:38It was a fun time playing the game.
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