Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds was originally balanced around a complete lack of items, which allowed the devs to be ruthless with anything that was too stressful or too powerful.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, veteran Sonic series producer Takashi Iizuka explained that the joint development teams – from the Sonic and Sega Arcade Racing franchises – came together to create a “balanced, fair” racing game, starting almost completely from scratch.
“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.”
After that somewhat ruthless-sounding approach to balance, there’d be even more playtests, and more balance passes. Eventually, the team settled on what Iizuka says was just “the right amount of chaotic,” but retained the feeling of being fun, “and always feeling fair to the racers.”
Now, I’ve not played all that much Mario Kart World, but I’ve heard plenty about being utterly bombarded by shells or watching in horror as the guy who was in last place for two laps surges forth to take the win thanks to some sandbagging-related item trickery. Whether Sonic and his many friends are immune to exactly that fate isn’t clear, but if they are it could make the battle for kart racing pole position a little more interesting.
