SEGA explains why Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds’ guest characters don’t speak

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is collaborating with some pretty big IPs for its guest characters, but one criticism fans have had is the lack of voices. Because of this, you won’t hear the likes of SpongeBob, Steve from Minecraft, and Pac-Man talking in the game. SEGA has now spoken about the decision.

Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka spoke about this in an interview with Destructoid. It seems that if guest characters were to be voiced in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, it would have increased the “scop of review” for external companies.

Iizuka said in the interview:

“In this game, there’s a lot of interactions between characters, so if we include voices for the guest characters, that will mean a lot of interaction between them and Sega characters. The scope of the review that we’ll have to ask the external companies will become very large. We didn’t want to make it difficult for the external company. So that’s, I guess, the reason why we decided not to be.”

When pressed on the point further, Iizuka added:

“Voices are a really important part of the game, but [Sonic Team] really focused on the interactions between the Sonic characters. The dev team really thinks that it’s surprising how much interactions they put into the game for the 23 Sonic characters. They really had to focus, put all the effort into Sonic, that may be another reason. And they had to give up on the non-Sonic characters.”

Pac-Man was just revealed as the latest guest collaboration for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. Also, as part of that, Sonic is coming to Pac-Man World 2 Re-Pac. We have more information here.