When the Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG launched before anyone knew what was happening, no one knew what to expect from the Disney game. Today, Carolyn Koh follows up on her first look at the game with a CES Progress Report.

 

The Disney group. What does that name convey? A higher bar than expected in others? I rather think so. “People expect big things from Disney,” said Katie Gerber, Communications Manager of the Walt Disney Internet Group, as we walked to their suite. Mike Goslin, Vice President, Virtual Reality Studio and Joe Shochet, Creative Director were there to speak about their game and answer what questions I had. We started off just chatting about the game, the changes they’ve implemented since release and their plans for the future.

PotCO was shipped with little fanfare. They had planned to ship with the opening of the 3rd movie, but that was just not to be, as the game just wasn’t ready at that point, Mike imparted. Their targeted audience is the wider non-game playing public. Such a diverse number of people is a hard group to target, but that is what Disney movies – especially their animated movies - target. Fun for the kids, with some adult humor built in to amuse the adults – take Aladdin with funny guy Robin Williams cast as the voice for the genie for example.

As an experienced MMOG player, I had some expectations. PotCO’s controls was quite different. But as I had mentioned before, if I could formulate a set of “standard” commands for MMOGs and get every development house to follow them, I would be a happy camper. Each time I played a different MMOG, I also had to figure out how to /tell or /whisper a friend, or trade an item – right click? Left click? Drag item over character? PotCO builds upon ToonTown, Disney’s first MMOG offering, so of course those who have played ToonTown will find the controls similar. Children ready to move onto a higher level game than ToonTown maybe?

 

Read the whole thing here.