PALGN: Can you tell us a little about yourself Matt, and your role at Disney Interactive Studios?
Matt Carroll: I’m the country director for UK and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and South Africa. I'm a commercial person based in London, and I’ve been at Disney for five and a half years and I’ve been looking after Australia for three and a half. In terms of Australia, in the past most of our games came to market under a license agreement with another publisher. More recently we’ve moved to a publishing model by which Disney Interactive Studios works with a local distributor, Funtastic, who provides sales, distribution and marketing focus.
PALGN: Where do you see Disney Interactive Studios going in the next five years with publishing? Can we expect to see more mature rated titles or will it always be about the Disney titles?
MC:We’ve got ambitious plans. In the public domain we’ve announced that within five to seven years we’ll spend 350 million US dollars on development - a big growth curve. Our strategy is for the majority of our output to be associated with existing Disney properties such as films, TV shows or franchises. A good proportion of our output will be on original IP which we can be added to the Disney family and a smaller proportion will be mainly original, non-Disney opportunities. To illustrate: Pirates of the Caribbean is a Walt Disney pictures property, we’ve got games on all formats coming May 24th, that’s going to be a real push for us. An original IP example would be Spectrobes which is our first original IP project for the Nintendo DS – out in March. With regards to the final group, examples are Turok or another DS project, Anno.
We have four internal development studios, three regional production management groups and work with many many third-party developers. We have a global vision for development. We have development groups in The US, in Japan and in Europe based in London and Paris. Spectrobes was developed in Japan, that was very much on purpose. Japanese developers have a particular view of how those style of games should be made. Within these development groups, we have a number of skillsets that are designed to help us innovate, and some great game designers and creative talent working on the challenge of coming up with new gameplay.
One of the advantages we now have of the Walt Disney Company being a film studio and a games publisher together is that our development teams can work with the studio teams very closely a lot earlier. In the olden days you’d have a movie coming, you’d get all excited about it, you’d wait for a final script, you’d wait to get visuals then try to find a perfect publisher, then the right developer and you wouldn’t get going for another nine months.
The model has changed now; our creative people can talk to the studio people very early. We can tell a story in a completely complementary way. With Pirates of the Caribbean, with the next generation games we’re able to tell more than the story of the film, and the games are then more surprising, the gameplay mechanics can be more interesting, we’re able to do things we wouldn’t have been able to do.
Another studio that we’ve got is Fall Line Studios, specifically for the handheld and the Wii. One of the goals in our company is to find innovation in gameplay for propriety technology. So we strive to find new ways to play and ways that we can genuinely bring innovation to a platform. Relying on third party developer studios who work for a number of people makes it a little difficult to get that innovation going. Our third studio, Canada based Propaganda Studios, is currently working on Turok, a first person action game that will be published under our Touchstone label. Finally, the last studio story I want to tell you about is Climax Racing, which we acquired last year in September. They’re a great UK studio that are famous for doing ATV for Sony and Moto GP for THQ. This is a studio with amazing talent in simulation racing genres and they’ve got lots of expertise. The products that will come from that studio in the future will follow on from this interest. That’s a snapshot of our ambitions and maybe some of the drivers that are leading us into product output.
Spectrobes is a new IP from DIS and it's surprisingly good too.
PALGN: On the subject of Pirates of the Caribbean, can you tell us a little bit about how Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End will provide gamers with an experience beyond what the film will provide?
MC: Let’s start off with a clarification. There are different games for different platforms. So the next gen platform games for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are completely different than the Wii, PS2, PSP and DS versions. They’ll be rated differently. The gameplay is far more sophisticated. I don’t want to say it’s a better game on next generation; it’s just a different game for more mature gamers. The next generation games are visually extremely rich, the environments are 3D, fully navigable and interactive.
At its core, the game is about “living and dying by the sword” – the sword provides many uses beyond simple fighting. The majority gameplay is based on combat, we have a melee combat system where you will fight surrounded by opponents and you’ll need to fight off your opponents in different ways. If you just keep with the same moves then your opponents will quickly learn it, then you’ll get stabbed in the back. There is also a good focus on duelling. Two important features in the combat is the idea of notoriety, that’s the game points system depending on how you take out your opponents your notoriety will change. You have a swordfight and finish them off with flashy moves. Doing so your opponent’s notoriety will increase and the higher notoriety that you have the different way that people respond to you in the environment. Some might run away whereas some might see you as a bit of a challenge.
The notoriety has a genuine impact on the gameplay. Another important feature in the product is what we call Jackanisms. You’re not just a Pirate of the Caribbean that fights like a pirate, you are Jack Sparrow! The goal of this game is to fight like Jack Sparrow would fight. The game will include lots of humour as well, and will focus on cinematic drama.
PALGN:What sort of differences can we expect in the Wii, PlayStation 2 and DS versions?
MC: The Wii version obviously uses the full functionality of the Wii remote and the nunchuk. This one is a more linear experience than the next gen, the storytelling comes to you. The Wii control is really a nice feature to help get “hands on” using the sword of course providing a more challenging mode of play. You might have to put your sword into various combination moves, so that you're navigating through the screen. Again Jackanisms appear and must be earnt through clever sword control.
The PS2 is probably our most important format as you'd expect. The gameplay continues the story by starting at the end of the second movie and then you go down the more traditional model of following the story’s greatest moments. There's definitely a lot of variation in there though, it's not just a hack and slash type game, we have a many puzzles, you're kind of working your way through the landscapes and interacting with the characters that are there.
DS is very different to the PS2, it's more than just your standard jumping around hack-and-slash game. The duelling system uses the touch screens, so you literally have to slash with your stylus, there's a number of mingames, cards and dice, you're able to navigate boats, there's a nice RPG element in there as well so it's a nice round solid offering.
PALGN: Will you have the option of playing as characters other than Jack Sparrow in the 360 and PS3 incarnations?
MC:Yes, in the 360 and PS3 versions, at various times you'll need to play as Jack, Will and Elizabeth at the same time, and you'll need to work together to overcome opponents. If you play it well, you can put them close together and they'll then perform combination moves together.
Jack Sparrow is back.
PALGN: The game is under something of a time restriction, because the movie's out in a couple of months - indeed, a lot of movie-based titles are sometimes rushed to be released in time. What has Disney Interactive Studios done to address the time limitations that they have had to deal with in developing At World's End?
MC: Well, one thing is that we started early, which gave us more time - we knew about this movie pretty early on. The movie itself was filmed in sequence with the second movie, so many of the story ideas were available early. The Jerry Bruckheimer group have been quite involved in helping the game be put together, we've been given a good idea of what they want to achieve, and they've had input into how the games could progress as well. So in all honesty I think this project has a lot of opportunity because we keep our eyes on the ball and there's more that can be done. Beyond that, many of these games suffer because they don't get all the right elements or assets at the right time and to be honest I just don't think that's been an issue in this project, I certainly believe that we're under the crunch just like any developer is, we're coming to the final mode, but I think we're in really good shape. We have genuinely innovative features that haven't been seen elsewhere, we've got a lot of play on the humour as well which I think will be an important part of the game.
PALGN: We'll move on to Turok now: can you give us a general overview of the return of Turok, what it's about and where the story will pick up?
MC: Turok is set in the future, and he is part of the military company, who's been asked to go down to a planet's surface to take out a faceless opponent with extreme firepower and what will be revealed “a history”. The history will tie back to the original Turok stories, I won't reveal too much about it at this stage. Now, he always has objectives, your objective is typically related to your military opponent. In this landscape there are dinosaurs of all types and personalities, who are neutral in the conflict, but they are a really crucial to your progress. The idea is that you're in a natural jungle environment where the ambient noises are really important, so the small dinosaurs who are quite vicious and annoying, difficult to actually target, may be given away by the environmental signs, you will see the grass moving. As for the really big ones, you'll hear them from a long way away, and they'll hear you as well.
The dinosaurs are a key component of gameplay, you might bait them, you might turn them onto one another, they can be a powerful ally depending on what you want to do. But it may affect your gameplay because they're also sound sensitive, so if you're intending to sneak up on someone by surprise or if you don't sneak up on them by surprise you may find the odds overwhelming. You will play the game in lots of different ways. You can go out all guns blazing, you can be slightly more stealthful but it will be the mix and match that will really count.
Turok is back.
PALGN: Will it be coming to just the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3?
MC: At this stage, that's the plan.
PALGN: Can you tell us a little bit about Anno for the DS?
MC: Anno has been a PC game for a while, previously 1503 and 1602 and they've recently done 1701 in Europe, I don't believe it's come to Australia yet, but we're bringing it to the DS and we think this is the first product on the DS which is like this. Essentially it is is an exploration game in the genre of say, SimCity or Sid Meier’s Civilisation where you populate an island, so a new colony is founded, you lay down a market, you lay down your houses, you grow a population, you feed them, you give them their churching and their schooling then you tax them, you produce goods and you trade those goods or those goods might be plundered by pirates who could be paid off . The DS user interface with stylus is just amazing to use
I've been putting it in the hands of people because you have to see it to understand it, but with the stylus interface and with the zoom in function you can really cover a lot of ground, you scroll around the island using the stylus to drag the map around, you can move it from island to island with a point. If you want to build something, it's two clicks away, down goes the house and down goes the farm or a mine or a plantation or a ship yard, whatever. What's nice about the DS version is that we have a story mode as well and five levels of civilisation, and the story mode is more goal driven so it puts you in various scenarios, it might force you to defend against an aggressor, it might encourage you to trade. Basically it gets you to explore the variety of dynamics that you could play in the continuous play element.
Anno will be out in June.
PALGN: So when can we expect to see Anno?
MC: Anno will come in June, the build I've got is pretty solid, I've been playing it on the flight over so I got maybe three hours in, I got fairly advanced, I had about 1500 people on my island.
PALGN: Will there be any DS specific enhancements for the game?
MC: Yeah, the game is quite different, the story mode is different, we also have the Wi-fi four player mode, so you can have your colonies compete against other colonies. To be explicit, it's not a war game, it's not like Age of Empires, but you do have garrisons, you do build warships that you use to send you folks over and overtake another colony, today's people enjoy that kind of gameplay, it's there, but the real enjoyment comes from seeing your achievement of say building this huge ecosystem of working islands.
PALGN: Thanks for your time Matt.
MC: That's alright mate.
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PALGN would like to thank Matt Carroll of DIS for the phone interview, we'd also like to thank Paul at Funtastic. And we'd ALSO like to extend our gratitude to PALGN forum members admeister (Adam S) and LordHaloNerd for helping with the transcription.
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