Some things that are not obvious about Disney Infinity
Somehow this blog has become all about Disney products. Oh, right, I have a 7-year-old daughter.
My kid got Disney Infinity for Christmas, a game that is both charming and brilliantly evil in its business model: like Activision's Skylanders, it's a game with huge wads of on-disc unlockable content that you access by buying collectible tchotchkes, that go on a USB platform that is a near-field communication interface.
I have to give it to them, though: you actually get a tremendous amount of play value just from the base starter set, and much of it is as fun for grownups as for kids. Basically you get a set of three full campaigns themed after Pirates of the Caribbean, The Incredibles and Monsters University, plus a monstrously addictive Toy Box mode in which you can build nonsensical worlds out of sweet Disney IP with abandon, unlocking more and more stuff as you play on in the campaigns.
Considered that way, it's not such a bad deal, though it does push the extra content at you a bit hard at times. Probably the game's single most evil touch is that, because of the restrictions on character use in the campaigns, the three starter-set campaigns are single-player only until you buy more characters. But the Toy Box is multi-player from the start, and this is indescribably fun. (This game actually drove me to buy a second XBox controller so I could mess in the Toy Box with my kid.)
The campaigns are actually solid games in themselves, too, though not without some design glitches; they've got the "open-world" design common to most big modern games, in which you can roam more or less freely, but there are missions you gradually unlock that involve both a main story progression and a large number of side quests, loot to collect, achievements and optional hurry-up challenges. My favorite is the Pirates world, mostly because of the customizable pirate ship that is transport between the game areas and vehicle for naval combat. The amount of content in each campaign world isn't as much as in a major standalone game, but for all three put together it's comparable or more.
All this has been covered in many other reviews; I think it's a case where, as with so much that Disney produces, both admiration and resentment are legitimate responses.
What I wanted to emphasize, for people who have been sucked into this maelstrom, are a few play-value-enhancing facts that were not at all obvious to me.
1. Don't be afraid to take ownership of figures (a cautionary tale of hardware/software system design).
Infinity's character figurines have a feature that is cool but somewhat confusing. They're actually more than just an RFID; they apparently have a tiny amount of storage capacity, and they can basically remember your character's experience level. If you take your character figure to your friend's house, you can play as a "guest" on her console and stay leveled up.
But for her to play with that same figure and progress with her own game saves, she needs to "take ownership" of it, which erases your XP data on the figure and replaces it with hers.
Simple enough, but the little warning that shows up before you do this makes it kind of sound like this will erase all your game saves! It doesn't! When you go home you can take ownership of it right back and keep on playing where you left off. The same thing is true for multiple players on one console. It's OK to take ownership of figures as much as you want. The game is not so evil as to require you to buy two Pirates characters if you just want two people to have single-player saves in the Pirates world.
I've been thinking about this as an example of the design of a system causing unnecessary cognitive load and anxiety for the user. The XP save feature is undeniably cool, but because understanding it enough for it to be fun rather than worrying requires learning a nontrivial mental model of figurine state vs. game-save state which the game can't adequately explain, it might have actually been better left out.
2. You have to play through the Building Mastery Adventure to get the blocks.
Infinity starts with a slick and clever intro/tutorial/opening-title sequence that introduces you to the basic controls, after which you end up in a default Toy Box world with a bunch of stuff in it. There's a voiceover that keeps nudging you to try the Mastery Adventures, a series of tutorials on editing the Toy Box, combat, driving, and using Toy Box components with physics and logic.
I skipped these entirely because I already helped my kid play through one or two of them, and I figured I didn't need the tutorial. But it turns out that completing the first one, which is basically the editing tutorial, gives you a set of basic blocks that you're going to need if you want to build any kind of nontrivial structures. I was driving myself nuts trying to figure out how to get those cool blocks that she had in her Toy Box and I didn't. The other Mastery Adventures aren't quite as lucrative, but they still give you some interesting stuff.
3. Evil Easter egg!
I learned this online, from several different places. If you've been to a Disney park recently, you may have one of those RFID wristbands I was talking about a while ago, the MagicBands. If you've got one, try going into the Toy Box and putting it on one of the pads on the Infinity reader, Mickey side down.
This will unlock a peculiar toy called the Dragon Gate. It looks like a piece of rocky landscape in an different, somewhat darker theme from the default terrain, with some random game bric-a-brac piled up in a corner, like a construction site. If you add it to your world, you'll hear some dramatic theme music and a fire-breathing dragon will start flying around in the sky (this guy apparently is from the promos for the Walt Disney World New Fantasyland expansion).
After a while, three green capsules will show up in the Dragon Gate area, which unlock a new, unpopulated Toy Box world (Dragon's Keep) with picturesque landscaping in the Dragon Gate colors; a theme that you can use to make your own landscapes look like that; and the Dragon Keep's skymap for use with the Sky Changer device.
Disney never misses an opportunity for cross-promotion.
Finally: The one extra my daughter actually bought, with some money she got for Christmas, was the Cars playset, with Lightning McQueen, Holly Shiftwell (a Cars 2 character apparently), and a campaign set in Radiator Springs (which can be played in two-player coop since you have two Cars characters). There's some fun to be had there, but I'm actually not greatly fond of that one; compared to the other playsets the story content seems much thinner, being mostly a frame for racing challenges, which I don't find as fun as, say, Mario Kart. (Reviews seem to imply that the Toy Story in Space playset is a much better deal.)
Also, in the Toy Box, the Cars characters have the basic problem that they are animate cars: they can't do most of the things the other characters can do, and about 80% of what they can do can be done by the humanoid characters as well just by driving a car.
My kid got Disney Infinity for Christmas, a game that is both charming and brilliantly evil in its business model: like Activision's Skylanders, it's a game with huge wads of on-disc unlockable content that you access by buying collectible tchotchkes, that go on a USB platform that is a near-field communication interface.
I have to give it to them, though: you actually get a tremendous amount of play value just from the base starter set, and much of it is as fun for grownups as for kids. Basically you get a set of three full campaigns themed after Pirates of the Caribbean, The Incredibles and Monsters University, plus a monstrously addictive Toy Box mode in which you can build nonsensical worlds out of sweet Disney IP with abandon, unlocking more and more stuff as you play on in the campaigns.
Considered that way, it's not such a bad deal, though it does push the extra content at you a bit hard at times. Probably the game's single most evil touch is that, because of the restrictions on character use in the campaigns, the three starter-set campaigns are single-player only until you buy more characters. But the Toy Box is multi-player from the start, and this is indescribably fun. (This game actually drove me to buy a second XBox controller so I could mess in the Toy Box with my kid.)
The campaigns are actually solid games in themselves, too, though not without some design glitches; they've got the "open-world" design common to most big modern games, in which you can roam more or less freely, but there are missions you gradually unlock that involve both a main story progression and a large number of side quests, loot to collect, achievements and optional hurry-up challenges. My favorite is the Pirates world, mostly because of the customizable pirate ship that is transport between the game areas and vehicle for naval combat. The amount of content in each campaign world isn't as much as in a major standalone game, but for all three put together it's comparable or more.
All this has been covered in many other reviews; I think it's a case where, as with so much that Disney produces, both admiration and resentment are legitimate responses.
What I wanted to emphasize, for people who have been sucked into this maelstrom, are a few play-value-enhancing facts that were not at all obvious to me.
1. Don't be afraid to take ownership of figures (a cautionary tale of hardware/software system design).
Infinity's character figurines have a feature that is cool but somewhat confusing. They're actually more than just an RFID; they apparently have a tiny amount of storage capacity, and they can basically remember your character's experience level. If you take your character figure to your friend's house, you can play as a "guest" on her console and stay leveled up.
But for her to play with that same figure and progress with her own game saves, she needs to "take ownership" of it, which erases your XP data on the figure and replaces it with hers.
Simple enough, but the little warning that shows up before you do this makes it kind of sound like this will erase all your game saves! It doesn't! When you go home you can take ownership of it right back and keep on playing where you left off. The same thing is true for multiple players on one console. It's OK to take ownership of figures as much as you want. The game is not so evil as to require you to buy two Pirates characters if you just want two people to have single-player saves in the Pirates world.
I've been thinking about this as an example of the design of a system causing unnecessary cognitive load and anxiety for the user. The XP save feature is undeniably cool, but because understanding it enough for it to be fun rather than worrying requires learning a nontrivial mental model of figurine state vs. game-save state which the game can't adequately explain, it might have actually been better left out.
2. You have to play through the Building Mastery Adventure to get the blocks.
Infinity starts with a slick and clever intro/tutorial/opening-title sequence that introduces you to the basic controls, after which you end up in a default Toy Box world with a bunch of stuff in it. There's a voiceover that keeps nudging you to try the Mastery Adventures, a series of tutorials on editing the Toy Box, combat, driving, and using Toy Box components with physics and logic.
I skipped these entirely because I already helped my kid play through one or two of them, and I figured I didn't need the tutorial. But it turns out that completing the first one, which is basically the editing tutorial, gives you a set of basic blocks that you're going to need if you want to build any kind of nontrivial structures. I was driving myself nuts trying to figure out how to get those cool blocks that she had in her Toy Box and I didn't. The other Mastery Adventures aren't quite as lucrative, but they still give you some interesting stuff.
3. Evil Easter egg!
I learned this online, from several different places. If you've been to a Disney park recently, you may have one of those RFID wristbands I was talking about a while ago, the MagicBands. If you've got one, try going into the Toy Box and putting it on one of the pads on the Infinity reader, Mickey side down.
This will unlock a peculiar toy called the Dragon Gate. It looks like a piece of rocky landscape in an different, somewhat darker theme from the default terrain, with some random game bric-a-brac piled up in a corner, like a construction site. If you add it to your world, you'll hear some dramatic theme music and a fire-breathing dragon will start flying around in the sky (this guy apparently is from the promos for the Walt Disney World New Fantasyland expansion).
After a while, three green capsules will show up in the Dragon Gate area, which unlock a new, unpopulated Toy Box world (Dragon's Keep) with picturesque landscaping in the Dragon Gate colors; a theme that you can use to make your own landscapes look like that; and the Dragon Keep's skymap for use with the Sky Changer device.
Disney never misses an opportunity for cross-promotion.
Finally: The one extra my daughter actually bought, with some money she got for Christmas, was the Cars playset, with Lightning McQueen, Holly Shiftwell (a Cars 2 character apparently), and a campaign set in Radiator Springs (which can be played in two-player coop since you have two Cars characters). There's some fun to be had there, but I'm actually not greatly fond of that one; compared to the other playsets the story content seems much thinner, being mostly a frame for racing challenges, which I don't find as fun as, say, Mario Kart. (Reviews seem to imply that the Toy Story in Space playset is a much better deal.)
Also, in the Toy Box, the Cars characters have the basic problem that they are animate cars: they can't do most of the things the other characters can do, and about 80% of what they can do can be done by the humanoid characters as well just by driving a car.