Sequel announcements rarely begin with apologies. Sure, the boasting of a bigger, bolder experience brings with it the implicit message that maybe the first game didn’t live up to everyone’s expectations, but for the most part, developers tend to emphasize the positive over the negative. So it came as a bit of a shock when game development legend and Junction Point VP Warren Spector began his Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two presentation with a mea culpa about the flaws of his 2010 pet project.
This Tuesday, Spector assured a crowd of skeptical journalists that the forthcoming sequel — launching on the Wii, PS3, and XBox 360 — will receive drastic overhauls in three main categories: camera, voice, and persistence — the first being a major sticking point for many a gamer. Anyone who’s played the original Epic Mickey (or even sampled one of its many reviews, including our own) can tell you that its camera required far too much babysitting, and often seemed to deliberately obscure platforms during some of the trickier sections. But Spector had good news about the most fatal of flaws from his initial Disney love-in.
