The upcoming Sonic Forces features a new mode that allows players to become a hero of the game with a custom avatar, but the development team’s approach to the character creator is more simplistic.
As previously announced by Sega, players can choose one of seven animal archetypes to customize for their Hero Character. Sonic Forces Producer Shun Nakamura said, with the help of a translator, that the creator isn’t anywhere near as complex as something like Fallout, but said players will instead get to pick from set characteristics, kind of like a doll maker.
“What the team wanted to have people do is create a regular character that exists in the world and have that character go on this great adventure with classic and modern Sonic and become a hero,” Nakamura said.
Of course when talking about the Hero Character, we asked about the impact of fans’ influence. Sonic Forces is the first Sonic game that allows players to create their own character, and it’s well known that if you search your name with “the Hedgehog,” you’re bound to find fan art of your own hedgehog character. Several members of the Sonic team made it very clear that they pay attention to fan feedback.
“What [the team] wanted to do is make sure that when you create your character, this character starting out is just another person in the city. But what [the team] see online is probably what the fans kind of want to imagine to be is this super unique, super powerful character on the same level as Sonic,” Nakamura said. “None of your character’s are at Sonic’s level yet. They’re just regular people that are taking on this important task and going on this adventure with Sonic as a normal person.”
Takashi Iizuka, head of the Sonic Team, said that of course none of the custom character attributes were taken directly from fan art, nor did the team look at fan art when working on the character creator. But after seeing Sonic fan art over the past 10 years, Iizuka said it helped him understand what color pallets and features people like to put on their custom character.
Most of the fan art Iizuka has seen has been of hedgehog characters like Sonic. Since a majority of the fan character designs also match Sonic’s body shape with few deviations, Iizuka said the team didn’t go too far into creating different body shapes or body types.
Yoshitaka Miura, and artist for Sonic Forces, said the team was also considerate of customization preferences for both the Japanese and western audiences. For instance, there’s no dragon character archetype because it may be too eastern and they wanted to prioritize more neutral animals. Very early on in development, Miura also said they also had to change some features, specifically eye shapes, that were deemed too cute or possibly make the characters look too juvenile for western audiences.
Sonic Forces’ character creator gameplay has yet to be revealed, but you can see some options for custom characters in Hero Character screenshots in the gallery above. Aside from the created character and Sonic, Shadow the Hedgehog will also be a playable character in a DLC side story. Sonic Forces is out on November 7 in North America.
For more interviews, news, and previews from TGS, be sure to bookmark IGN’s Tokyo Game Show 2017 event hub.
Miranda Sanchez is an Editor at IGN. You can chat with her about video games and anime on Twitter.
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