
SEGA is billing its upcoming Sonic Racing CrossWorlds as a fair and balanced racing game taking a slight dig at Mario Kart World. Sonic series producer Takashi Iizuka recently sat down with Games Radar to chat about how the team balanced the game to make it both fair and fun. Iizuka says that one thing the team did is that they removed any items that were “stressful” for players and also rather importantly removed anything that allowed people to come from behind and win all the time. Here’s what he said:
“They wanted to make sure the racing itself without any items was fair and fun,” Iizuka says. “The dev team really took things down to the base level, and wanted to have that fun, competitive racing mechanic.” Vehicle and course design came first, and only once the devs had nailed the racing experience did they build it out by adding items.
But those items weren’t set in stone, even after they eventually made it to the game. Iizuka says that the team did “a lot of playtests,” and “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.”
Thanks to SonicGalaxy27 for sending in the news tip!