Sonic Team talks Sonic Forces' custom hero creation limitations, why they offered the options they did

The following comes from a Polygon interview with producer Shun Nakamura and studio head Takashi Iizuka concerning the custom hero creator...

“It’s not gonna be as in depth as Fallout or some of those other extremely complex creation mechanics. What we had in mind when we were making the whole create a character scenario was, out of all the people being depicted in this world, you can choose those characters that populate the world. It’s not complete free creation, but we’re going and making a lot of parts and features and animals that could exist in this world and you’re going to be able to put them together.” - SN

“Most of the fan art that we see are hedgehog characters,” said Iizuka. “A lot of the characters are created and designed matching the Sonic the Hedgehog body shape. That’s pretty much what I see in the fan art out there. Nothing really deviates too far from that, so when we were thinking about the customizable character feature ,we didn’t really go to far in creating different body types and shapes, because most of what is saw had a similar type of body shape to Sonic.” - TI