A wide range of Disney and Pixar characters will appear in Disney Infinity, with toys and game levels released throughout 2013 and beyond.
If you’re at all familiar with the success of Skylanders, the colossally successful mash-up of videogames and collectible toys, you won’t be too surprised by Disney’s latest gaming initiative.
On Tuesday, the company announced Disney Infinity, a multi-platform game coming this June that does something Disney is typically reluctant to do: combine potentially every Disney property and franchise, from Cars to Dumbo to Phineas and Ferb. Slated for June, Infinity is half straight-up action game and half Minecraft-style sandbox. And it won’t work without a special set of character figurines that interface with your game console. A few of the 17 initial characters will come packaged with the game, and the rest you’ll have to buy at $13 a pop.
“This is one of the most creative things in the interactive world that I have ever seen,” Disney chief creative officer John Lasseter said of Infinity at an event in Hollywood on Tuesday. “It’s a tool chest for creativity.”
Infinity will launch with characters from three popular films: The Incredibles, Pirates of the Caribbean and Monsters University, the upcoming prequel to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. that will hit theaters on June 21. Out of the box, the $75 “starter pack” for Infinity will feature three “playsets,” or traditional action games, based on each of those franchises. Throughout the course of the year, Disney will roll out more characters and playsets based on its other popular cartoon and live-action series.
You’ll only be able to play characters within the levels based on their franchise – Captain Jack Sparrow can only swashbuckle on the Pirates-themed level, for example, but can’t matriculate at Monsters U — and buying add-on collectible toys will not only add more playable characters within levels, but unlock entirely new levels to the game.
But while this careful separation of franchises may keep things canonical within the game proper, all bets are off in the Toy Box mode, where players can build their own levels by mixing and matching Disney characters and worlds. Want to slap laser guns onto Cinderella’s carriage? Be our guest — just as long as you’ve purchased the proper toys to make that happen.
“We are going to allow this place that’s kind of like your living room floor,” John Blackburn, Disney VP and general manager of Infinity developer Avalanche Studios, told Wired in advance of Tuesday’s announcement. “We’re not going to go into [your living room] and tell you how to play with your toys, and that’s the same thing here. We give you a bunch of toys and say, here, go play.”
If this all sounds like a colossal undertaking, Disney can at least be assured that the formula has worked before. Rival gamemaker Activision Blizzard has had stunning success with Skylanders, which pioneered the formula. Last week, Activision said that sales of all Skylanders figures and games had passed $500 million in the U.S. alone since its 2011 launch. Moreover, Skylanders toys outsold all other action figure lines last year, topping even Star Wars.
While the basic formula is the same, Infinity adds a few new ingredients. Besides the figurines that unlock new characters and playsets, Disney will sell “power discs” — RFID chips set in a small piece of plastic. When a player stacks these up on the interface device, they might add specific new items into the Toy Box mode, like the aforementioned Cinderella carriage. Other discs will augment the game characters when you place them between the figure and the interface. A disc with Wreck-It Ralph’s face on it will give that character more physical strength, and like baseball cards (or the collectible figures that the company sells in its Disney Stores and theme parks), the power discs will be sold in blind packages: $5 gets you two random discs.
Infinite Toy Stories
The seeds of Infinity were planted with the Toy Story 3 videogame developed by Avalanche for the Pixar film in 2010. Besides straightforward platform-action levels that were themed around the movie, the game featured a Toy Box mode that let kids play creatively, building and rearranging a town while pursuing many open-ended goals.
“We weren’t able to push it as far as we wanted to in that particular game,” Blackburn said. “There were a lot of things in Toy Story that [Pixar] wouldn’t allow us to do.” Avalanche wanted to allow players to customize and tweak the characters, but Pixar didn’t like the idea of making changes to Buzz Lightyear’s look. But when the animators took the game home, they found that the features their kids wanted were all the things that they’d stopped Avalanche from including. After that, Blackburn said, Disney trusted the developer more to tweak the properties while respecting the brand.
Still, convincing Disney’s chief creative officer to put every property into a single videogame was not an easy sell. Blackburn’s first pitch to John Lasseter involved “all different kinds of toys … childish versions that didn’t articulate, full action figure versions, plushies and stuffed animals,” he said. “When you put them all together, it looked really weird.” Lasseter didn’t like it, but he told Blackburn that if he could create one single toy line where Jack Sparrow and Sully the monster could stand next to each other and look like they were meant to be together, he could get behind the idea.
“He said he didn’t like it, but then he solved the problem for us,” Blackburn said. The final Infinity toys are cartoonish, but more realistically proportioned and aged up a little, something more oriented toward tweens than toddlers.
Players could approach the open-ended Toy Box mode from a variety of different angles. Two players could just jump into the game (whether online or on the couch) and start messing around with everything. Playing through the various “playset” levels will let you unlock hundreds of new toys and parts to play with in Toy Box. More goal-oriented players might use it like Minecraft, building their own creations and inviting other players in to see them. Blackburn showed me a Disney employee’s in-game model of the Starship Enterprise, with Sully standing on the bridge.
And players who really want to make something big can actually create a videogame. Toy Box includes parts and features that let players build obstacles, spawn enemies and even reposition the game’s camera. Lap counters and start lines let a player easily make a racing game. To illustrate the breadth of the engine, Blackburn showed me Toy Box recreations of games like Donkey Kong and Super Off-Road.
What you can’t do with Infinity is self-publish your creation. You can invite a friend to join you online and test your game in real time. But before other players can save your level to their hard drives, it’s got to go through Disney. Blackburn says Disney will solicit content and publish the best of the best. The lockdown is just about keeping the game sanitary for kids, Blackburn says: “What we didn’t want was, you’re a 12-year-old, you go create something vulgar, send it to an 8-year-old, and then their parents see that and say, where did this come from?”
Infinity, And Beyond
“We’re kind of launching a five-year plan,” Blackburn says. Disney sees Infinity not as the launch of a single game but as a platform that it will grow and improve upon indefinitely. “We’ve got a lot of our best properties from Disney that you’re going to see over the course of a year,” he says. All of the new characters and playsets will be included on the disc that players buy, Blackburn said, but they won’t be playable until the toys are released later in the year.
Infinity will ship at first on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Wii and PC. An iOS “companion” app will also be released in June. This will not be a full-fledged action game, but it will allow players to keep raising their figures’ experience level and earning in-game rewards that will transfer back to the console versions. (As in Skylanders, the electronics in the toys themselves keep track of that character’s experience points.) Each figure will come with a unique “web code” that will unlock that character in the PC and iOS versions of the game.
With its integrated touch screen, the Wii U version of the game would seem to have the most potential for an easy-to-use building interface. “Touch sensitivity, drag-and-drop, point-and-click is really powerful for the building modes,” Blackburn said, also noting that the team would like to add two-player split-screen play, with one player using the GamePad while another plays on the TV. But, he said, Avalanche is “still trying to put these features in right now.” Because the Wii U just came out, he said, Avalanche only just finished its engine, and is putting in all the features it can, but only has about a month of development time left to do it.
Blackburn says that plans are in the works for Infinity 2, but notes that Disney is really out to build a “platform.” As the company, which now encompasses LucasArts and Marvel Comics, continues to release more films and cartoons, it can release Infinity levels and characters to promote them without necessarily having to create entirely new videogames for each of those properties.
“I’m so excited about this because…. I know the amazing new stories and new characters that we’re creating, and this is now something to look forward to, bringing the future to the Infinity game set,” Lasseter said at the Tuesday event.
“Man, Disney has a lot of really cool properties,” Blackburn says. “I want to do it all.”
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