Hands On With Disney Infinity 3.0

I was recently invited to Disney Australia’s Melbourne office to check out Disney Infinity 3.0, but this was not your average hands on, Producer Mat Solie was in attendance to answer any questions I had, well those he could and provide more information about various features of the game. Mat first gave a brief rundown of what was Disney Infinity 3.0 and then it was over to us to start playing. As I had played it at E3, I insisted that the other media people there go first and Twilight of the Republic was the first part loaded. It was fun to see someone else play, even more so when they were not someone familiar with the series.

After that, Mat loaded up the Inside Out playset, which tells a story that takes place after the movie, so if you have not seen the movie, this won’t make a lot of sense. Riley has been baby-sitting and has fallen asleep while watching tv. As she has fallen asleep the channel has changed to a horror movie, with swamp monsters and other nasty things, this has the emotions worried as they fear Riley won’t be the same when she wakes, so they decide to take action and defeat all the nasty elements that are seeping into Riley’s mind.

What makes this different from the Star Wars playsets, is that Inside Out is more of a platformer, using both 3d and 2d styles, which allows for a lot more variety than the others. What is also different is that each of the five emotions has a different special ability, Fear runs faster than the rest as he is always running away from something, Anger being such a hothead is able to walk across lava and Sadness is able to walk across clouds, whereas Disgust will bounce really high off them as she is disgusted by them. What is really fun though is that if you don’t own a specific character, there are stations in the levels that will let you swap to them, for a limited time in order to help you out.

What I liked about that playset was just how different it was between its own stages, let alone between the other playsets, something that 2.0 really suffered at. From here it was time to check out the new Toy Box Hub in greater detail, for each of the areas, there are multiple spaces within, the combat space for example, which is themed to The Nightmare Before Christmas is a great space, but once you have completed the basic challenges it expands some more. The platforming area is another such space, initially it is themed to Castle Dunbroch from Brave, but later on an Ewok village is created out the back.

This was a new feature that Mat described, in 2.0 you can place down a builder and let them go, or choose a terrain option and grow a lot, but you could not do the same with the villages, forests or such. Now you can select what you want the game to build for you, place that down and specify your size and the game will do the rest. This means you can create your own Ewok village with minimal effort. Around this point I asked about the new spline tool, which I know a few Toy Box Artists are excited to put to use. The best example that Mat could show us was an amusement park that was built using the new tool, in this blocks went around a track to simulate a rollercoaster. Attempting something like this in 2.0 it required a whole lot of tinkering and some really smart design, so a tool that allows this to happen with relative ease is something I am excited to get my teeth into, but to me this is what 3.0 is all about, it’s not just adding more, which seemed to be the case with the 2.0, it’s about listening to the fans and adding content that they want.

Sitting on the table in front were a range of figures for 3.0, included in that group were Hulkbuster and Ultron, the only time they were in Australia, until the release at least, but also mixed among them were Olaf, Mulan and Sam Flynn and Quorra from Tron Legacy, all characters that have been highly requested by the fans of the game. It is not just in the character selection that they are listening to fans, but with other areas such as the power discs, no longer coming in blind bags. Mat was really happy with the amount of changes the team had been able to bring to the game, based on fan feedback.

The spline tool was one of the items I really wanted to check out, but there was another, Farming, yes you can farm in Disney Infinity 3.0 and no not spark farming, but actual farming where you can grow crops. Your farm is where you can grow food, which you can use to level up your sidekicks, something that was only slightly touched upon in 2.0, in 3.0 it’s a whole new beast. The food that you grow will impact your sidekicks’ stats, so if you feed them broccoli their attack might go up, tomato might boost their defense and pizza might make them smarter. As the stats increase on your sidekick you can actually then give them different gear to use, which means you will be able to bestow upon them gear that will help them help you.

But giving food to your sidekicks so they can help you in combat is not the only thing they can do, you can actually help train them to be farmers themselves, meaning they will grow things while you’re off doing whatever else you want to do. While you can have a single sidekick farm on his own, he may grow more weeds than anything else, but again you can level them up and have them become specialists in growing pizza from pizza trees or ice cream from the ice cream tree. You can even assign one sidekick to farm on one plot of land and a second to another, to really help crank out the resources.

My time with Disney Infinity 3.0 was short, I could spend days just messing about and not really doing anything, but thankfully the game is out really soon. With the Star Wars playsets, Inside Out playset plus the announced Episode 7 and Avengers playsets, plus the Toy Box Takeover and Toy Box Speedway games, Farming and the Toy Box itself, there is so much content in this game, that I am going to be hard pressed to choose what to do first.