We haven't seen many Sonic characters in the Frontiers promotional material. In fact, we've pretty much just seen Sonic, and have had Tails, Amy, Big, and Eggman's involvement confirmed to us separately. Now, it seems that this has all been by design, with few of the Blue Blur's pals joining him in his latest adventure.
This was confirmed by Sonic Team's Takashi Iizuka, who has just clarified that we "won't be seeing a huge cast of characters" in Frontiers. This makes it likely that we've already seen the full returning cast, as Iizuka also explains that Frontiers is set in an "undeveloped land that no one has visited before", making cameos harder to justify.
Speaking to Game Informer, both Iizuka and writer Ian Flynn elaborate on what we can expect from Frontiers later this year.
"The story begins as Sonic, Amy, and Tails visit undeveloped Kronos Island and are separated by a mysterious phenomenon", says Iizuka. "Sonic sets out alone to find his missing friends, but this is an undeveloped land that no one has visited before, so we won't be seeing a huge cast of characters."
Flynn, who is writing some of the dialogue for the game, does confirm there will be cameos of some kind, but they won't be as grand as some fans may have been expecting. "As you're running around, listen to what Sonic says to himself. You might hear some names dropped that'll surprise you."
However, it sounds like Flynn has managed to worm some more characters in. "Flynn presented some ideas for bringing different characters into the story", Iizuka explains. "We had the development team think about how it could get integrated into the new open-zone format, which then prompted Ian Flynn to present even more new ideas to us, and through that cooperative back and forth, we settled on the characters that would appear in the game."
It remains to be seen if Knuckles, Shadow, and other popular picks will return for this latest Sonic story. In any case, Sega seems to want to keep much of it under wraps, so we'll likely have to wait until Frontiers launches later this year to find out for sure.