Spector comments on Epic Mickey’s camera
This information comes from Warren Spector…
“First, there has never been a game that I couldn’t break if you give it to me for 30 seconds. 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.
What I try to be completely clear about is that this is not a platforming game. 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. So we took the hardest problem in third-person gaming and made it harder by trying to accommodate two different playing styles. And I will go to my grave, imperfect as it is, proud as hell of my camera team
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.”
The camera in Epic Mickey has definitely been one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about the game. To be fair, I feel that Spector is right in that it isn’t easy to make a perfect camera. The system was criticized in Super Mario Sunshine, and even many titles today have similar issues. For those who have played the title, how many of you have been having trouble with Epic Mickey’s camera?
