At Epic Mickey 2‘s announcement press conference last week, Junction Point’s Warren Spector talked about how the three biggest issues in Epic Mickey have been addressed for the upcoming sequel, which takes the Mouse and his paintbrush multi platform, with cooperative play. He told attending press members that even though he is proud of his team’s work on the first title, you can “never get everything right the first time.”
Spector said that most of the complaints from Epic Mickey stemmed from the game’s camera, which gave players trouble in sections, limiting the view and hindering smooth gameplay. He said that he would defend the work his team put forth on their first outing, but the reality was that different camera systems were needed, and he felt they could do better this time around.
The day Epic Mickey shipped, a dedicated team started working on improving the camera for this sequel. Spector said that over 1,000 changes have been made to the new camera system since then, and they’re still working to improve it even now. He also claimed that if a player were to only follow the game’s main story path, they would never have to touch the main camera controls. He left some room for himself and his team after making this claim, adding that he has his “fingers crossed that this is the case.”
Following the game camera, Epic Mickey’s lack of voice acting was the next biggest issue players had. The game used beeping or “barking” in place of actual dialogue, much like some of older Japanese role-playing game titles. Spector took responsibility for this choice, saying that he originally thought that if silent film character Oswald couldn’t speak, then no one else should. Now he admits that this was a bad decision.
In Epic Mickey 2, every character speaks every line of dialogue, and even player direction is voiced, meaning that reading is no longer required. Junction Point worked directly with Disney to use the real voices of each character, with an internal team working to craft story lines and dialogue to fit each character. 1920’s character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit has a voice of his own for the very first time, voiced by famed voice artist Frank Welker.
Spector said that persistence was another major issue players had with Epic Mickey. All of his 22 games have been about player choice and consequence, but in Epic Mickey the choices were not permanent. He admits that he had game choices revert back to default settings to make play a bit more accessible for kids and other less experienced gamers the first time around, but now says that “all bets are off this time” as they’ve made every game choice permanent.
