Today, Sega shared a brief look at Sonic Frontiers, the upcoming installment of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise that will be released on all major gaming platforms later this year. It’s an open, very green world, so you know what it means: people couldn’t help but make comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on social media.
Sonic Frontiers was first unveiled at last year’s Keighley Awards with stunning cinematography showing its magnificent ruined stained surroundings. Sega directly described the game as Sonic’s first “open zone-inspired gaming experience” at the time, but images from today’s game seem to have really driven the look of the open world for fans.
As is often the case with open world games these days, much of the discussion about Sonic Frontiers online involved its superficial resemblance to Breath of the Wild in 2017, so much so that Zelda’s game is back in trend. Twitter.
“Guys, this new Breath of the Wild mod is crazy,” says one especially popular tweet, while another jokingly refers to Sonic Frontiers as “Sonic: Breath of the Wild.” A third simply chains a series of capitalized references to Zelda, Elden Ring, and even Death Standing.
Kotaku editor-in-chief Carolyn Petit and I strongly agree with this last comparison, for the record, but I totally admit that I’m still desperately in love with Hideo Kojima’s post-apocalyptic package delivery simulator.
Breath of the Wild so dominated the conversation about the mechanics of the open world at launch that its name became an abbreviation for all open world games. And while it may sound like an often repeated joke about the folly of such comparisons, this is a common phenomenon in games. When Doom made the scene in 1993, for example, its popularity meant that later first-person shooters were often called “Doom clones,” a trend that ignored the fact that the troops we now associate with genre were largely invented by Wolfenstein 3D. another id Software game released a year earlier.
Seriously or not, it seems like not even Sonic is fast enough to escape the Breath of the Wild comparisons (either back to those comparisons, or back to back, or back to back to back, etc.) . I’m more concerned, to be honest, with Sonic Frontiers ’giant hamster wheels that seemingly resemble towers that reveal Ubisoft-style map icons. But really, we’re all working on such small footage that probably the general statements about the game can be saved for us until we have a fuller picture of what it will bring tomorrow.