Details From Disney Infinity 3.0 John Blackburn Interview
It’s a new week and that means we get some more Disney Infinity 3.0 news from GameInformer and today’s information is all about how Disney dealt with the Rise & Fall of Licensed games. John Blackburn from Disney Interactive discusses how the games industry dealt with licensed games where games suffered from quality control due to budgeting and timing. He discusses how building a game about a new movie, is extremely difficult and Disney wanted to change how licensed games work, which is where Infinity came from, which originated from the Toy Story 3 game.
During the interview, John discusses how games are changing with regards to consoles and mobile devices plus the mistakes they made with Disney Infinity 2.0. One major advantage of doing a project like Infinity was they could spend more money on building a single game structure and improving it year on year.
John mentions how all three versions of Disney Infinity are part of a launch to bring all the different Disney brands including Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel. John also says that moving forward, they might not have a yearly release and change things around, as ideally they would like to get new content out for each new movie at the same time it is released.
One of the issues they had with 2.0, was bringing in Marvel, was alienating the Disney fans which they acknowledged confused people and Disney Infinity 3.0 is a much more broad launch that includes all the brands. Also John said that they had a bigger budget following the success of the original game but many of the planned upgrades didn’t make it into 2.0. So they were able to bring in more different companies to work on the project each year. The team developing the game has increased in size, to almost 500 people involved in the game.
John also explained that they are pretty tied to the film slate for the future, so they have a pretty good idea of what is ahead. They are working with companies on giving them enough time to work on future play sets and content for those new properties. But now the team has expanded, it will probably stay around this size following a quick growth from 1.0. They also want to go back and deepen the experience of some gameplay mechanics from previous games.
During the interview, there was some new 3.0 footage which showed off a new moving armchair from Wall-E. They originally planned for this game to be a 5 to 10 year plan and something that will have a broad audience.
What do you think of this?
You can catch the full video interview at Gameinformer.