After more than 6 years since the last game in the Sonic Racing Series, SEGA’s Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds finally released on September 25, to generally positive reviews and a remarkably high Steam rating. In a recent interview with Dengeki Online, Sonic series producer Takashi Iizuka and CrossWorlds producer Ryuichi Taki talked about why they insisted on implementing cross-play in the game, despite the impact the decision had on development.
“The Sonic series has always been pushing for multi-platform support,” says Iizuka. “We’ve always been providing players with playable environments across platforms like PC and Switch, even when it comes to our regular action games. But implementing cross-play was leagues more difficult.” Multiple Sonic racing games have come out over the years, and despite releasing games like Team Sonic Racing (2019) on all major platforms, the team hadn’t been successful with implementing cross-play so far. However, Iizuka explains that teaming up with SEGA’s arcade division and incorporating their network technology know-how into the game was crucial for achieving cross-play for CrossWorlds.
While the team aspired to implement cross-play so all Sonic players across the globe could get together regardless of the platform they’re using, Taki notes that another crucial factor in making the decision was fair matchmaking. Online multiplayer games tend to suffer from matchmaking issues when there’s not a lot of players in-game. Less experienced players could end up matched up with highly-skilled ones, making the game unfair and taking away from the fun. On the other hand, with cross-play, the pool of available players largely expands, allowing for fairer competition among players, Taki suggest. “If you want to secure a sufficient number of players [that are on a similar level], breaking down the walls between platforms undoubtedly helps. That’s also one of the benefits we saw in cross-play, and the decision to implement it was made quite early on.”
With cross-play in the picture, Taki admits that dealing with performance issues between different hardware was probably the most challenging part of development. The Sonic Team had to make sure to provide the same experience and a fair environment to all players while also trying to maintain the visual quality. According to Taki, ports for each of the platform were fine-tuned individually to match the specs, and “it was an incredibly down-to-earth process that took an insanely long time to complete.”
“However, if you, for example, play CrossWorlds on Xbox and PlayStation at the same time, you probably won’t notice the difference. And that level of refinement was a culmination of our know-how and our sincere approach to each of the platforms,” he added. Due to this process, CrossWorlds had the longest development cycle out of all the franchise’s racing games so far.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is out now on PC (Steam), PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X❘S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2
