Disney Epic Mickey was released recently and it wasn’t perfect. With rather dull 3D platforming and a terrible camera, it had its problems for sure. Warren Spector doesn’t think so. In fact, he refuses to believe the camera is an issue at all, and stops just short of telling the complainers that they played his game wrong.
“There has never been a game that I couldn’t break if you give it to me for 30 seconds,” says Spector. “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.
Spector claims he didn’t use an established platforming camera (like the one in Super Mario Galaxy 2) because his game isn’t 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.
“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.”
Warren Spector’s attitude is one of the worst attitudes a creator can have. This “nothing is wrong, you don’t understand” bullshit is what makes entire game franchises suck, and I am disgusted at Spector’s refusal to acknowledge a problem, instead blaming critics instead of himself and acting like a pretentious ass.
Get a clue, developers — your games are not unique little snowflakes that we’re too dumb to understand. Suck it up and admit that sometimes your games just aren’t that hot.
