Game Informer has a fascinating interview with Warren Spector in which he explains a little about his upcoming Wii game, Disney Epic Mickey.
It's a long interview, but the gist is, Spector thinks Mickey Mouse was a lot more interesting in the 1920s than he is now, and he is planning to bring back an edgier, cooler Mickey for the game. In fact, when Disney proposed he do a Mickey Mouse game, Spector said, "You've done an incredibly good job of making Mickey lame and irrelevant to anybody over the age of eight over the last thirty years. I don't do games for kids." And the Disney folks said, go ahead and make a better Mickey.
The game is set in "The Wasteland," a place for all the rejected Disney ideas, waiting for the day the world is ready for them. A main character is Oswald the rabbit, a creation of Walt Disney's that predates Mickey Mouse. Oswald hates Mickey, feeling he should have had Mickey's life.
Spector says the game will be very funny, but he plans to offer some scary moments: "I really want to scare kids."
Gameplay involves drawing and erasing. Spector talks about making a world that is more than just action in front of a backdrop, and talks about seeing what's beneath the surface, so I'll assume you'll be able to erase parts of the game world to find other things underneath. Presumably you'll also be able to create additions to that world.
You'll also be able to create things from blueprints that will alter stuff somehow.
Spector talks about giving players choices. This is a theme of Spector games such as Deus Ex, which allowed players to approach obstacles and challenges in radically different ways. Spector has called it "abdicating authorship," the idea being that the game is a collaboration between player and designer in which each individual will have a unique experience. Spector won't work on any game that doesn't offer choices, saying:
"I really believe in the value of emergent situations, things that are not planned. When you get simple systems that interact with a simulation that is just deep enough to support unexpected behaviors, when you start getting things happening that the developers didn't know could happen, that's when you start to win. That's the big win, because then players discover solutions to problems that we didn't even know existed."
Surprisingly, Spector didn't choose the Wii as the platform for this game because he was drawn to the console, but rather because he felt the people who own the Wii will be far more willing to play a Mickey Mouse game than those hardcore Xbox 360 and PS3 players. He just wants the Mario crowd.
All the same, I'm sure he'll find something really cool to do with the Wii's controls.
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