With Epic Mickey finally released to the Wii late last month, Warren Spector now has a chance to look back and comment on how the game has performed. Though the sales picture is not yet complete, reviews were not the most praising. In a new interview, Spector comments on the tough development needed for third person games.
"There has never been a game that I couldn't break if you give it to me for 30 seconds," says Spector to MTV. "I mean, I will break a camera in any game ever made. And if I learned one thing on this project, it's an immense amount of respect for people who have been making third person action and platforming games. Third person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development. Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it.”
To Spector, Epic Mickey is by no means a platforming title. "This is a game that takes platforming elements and adventure game elements and role-playing elements and merges them. So we couldn't tune the camera perfectly for platforming or for action adventure. It’s a very different camera style. What we did is try to find the best compromise in the moment and give the player as much manual control as we could.”
"If reviewers want to give us a hard time about it because they're misunderstanding the game we made, it's not for me to tell them that they're wrong, absolutely not. But I wish people would get it out of their head that we made a Mario competitor, because we didn't."
Gamers can decide for themselves by checking out Epic Mickey for the Wii.
2 Comments
December 9, 2010
Uh-oh, it's never a good sign when a designer starts complaining about reviewers "misunderstanding" a game. After all the praise that Deus Ex got, is Spector a little thin skinned that Epic Mickey isn't a game of a decade candidate?
December 10, 2010
I loathe platformers so I never gave Epic Mickey a second thought. I am surprised that Mr. Spector didn't think that everyone would assume that it would be a character based platformer. It's Mickey Mouse (that's the character) and it's on Wii (that's the platformer console). Also, what I hate most about platformers is instant death. If there's camera related instant death in Epic Mickey, count me out (I could care less about what else is in there).