They’re not the characters exactly but players in costume who then assume special abilities. It’s a multiplatform game avoiding exclusive console controllers.
”Just letting characters meet is not something we traditionally do,” said assistant producer Mark Orgel. ”Like having Captain Hook run into Cinderella, you can’t really do that, and if we did, it would change our whole lore. So even when you’re looking at titles like Kingdom Hearts… they’re all isolated; they never touch each other in the storyline.”
”So that’s something you really can’t do with Disney in general.” Disney Universe was announced back in May and hopes to get fans of all the Disney characters and films playing online together dressed up as their favourite heroes and villians.
”You don’t have to be Sully, and if someone’s in a Randall costume you’re not necessarily enemies. You can be friends and play together or you can be two characters that are traditionally friends and fight each other,” Orgel said, referring to Monsters Inc.
The Disney Universe platform can easily add new characters to the world through DLC without having to build an entirely new game to host them. The control schemes are largely the same across each of the versions so not to give anyone an advantage.
”We wanted that gameplay experience to be the same”, he said. ”All of the players can pick their preferred platform and play and feel like they weren’t left out or short changed in any way.” That means Kinect, PlayStation Move and even Nintendo Wii motion control features are all being ignored by the Disney Universe team.
Disney Universe releases on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and PC late this year.
