SEGA completed scrapped their first attempt at Sonic Frontiers

“In 2017 Sonic forces was released. After the game was done the team said, alright, what’s the next title we’re going to make, and because we had the idea we needed to make something new, we needed a different format… You know, it’s been five years since 2017. But we really wanted to spend a lot of time to iterate and create this new format.’

We played it in testing and we thought this isn’t working, something’s not going right. So we had to scrap it all, throw it all away, start again and keep iterating and iterating and iterating. It took so much longer, you know - usually when we’re making a Sonic game, we’re going to make something based off of the previous format so we can just roll right into production, we know what we’re going to make it. But it’s this iteration that we needed to get us to this open zone, style and format that took a couple of years, which is why it took a whole lot longer to get us to like a brand new title than it usually does.”