With all the excitement about Swap Force and Disney Infinity, it’s easy to move on a bit too quickly from Skylanders Giants. After all this is still the current Skylanders game for a many more months. It’s also easy to get distracted from what is likely under development at Toys for Bob — Skylanders 4.
To this end I’ve been going back through some of the research I’ve done for Giants. This quickly reminded me that my excitement about it was as much from the talent and artisans behind the game as the finished product. I was happy in the knowledge that people like I-Wei Huang, Robert Leyland, Paul Yan, Dan Neil and Paul Reiche were given such a free artistic hand with the development.
Of course this year, for Swap Force, we have another talented team of individuals from Vicarious Visions taking the helm. Provided they are allowed the same creative freedom and are able to work closely with the existing progress of Toys for Bob I expect Swap Force to be another strong chapter.
Although it hasn’t been confirmed, I very much expect that Toys for Bob are themselves already working hard on the 2014 game. It makes me wonder what sort of things may be included. Perhaps Paul Reiche gave a few clues away when I spoke to him just before the BAFTAs this year. He made mention of sound, laser, light-sensitive and GPS-location-sensitive toy figures, time will tell if these make it into what will be Skylanders 4 in 2014.
Then I went back to the interview with I-Wei and started wondering what was hiding under that blanket in the background. What new types of figures will we see probably depends on the experiments and design work that goes on in those few square feet of office space.
Flicking back through posts and videos I came up with the following set that capture the Skylanders Giant developer’s work-ethos and feel of the Toys for Bob studio. As I said in my review this is the real reason I think the game is such a success:
Skylander Giants Evolution with I-Wei Huang Character and Toy Director
Skylanders Giants Sound Director Interview Dan Neil
Skylanders Giants Art Director Interview Paul Yan
Skylanders Giants Technology with Robert Leyland Senior Engineer
Skylanders Giants Wave 1 Character Play Through with Paul Reiche
The news that Toys for Bob wasn’t doing SwapForce really surprised me since they were the ones that originated the games and are personally responsible for this new type of revenue- I mean game- for Activision.
SwapForce is such a big visual improvement I had assumed that politics were at play and the franchise was taken away from Toys for Bob for not making big enough improvements in the sequel. However, this might mean that it was simply a division of labor to guarantee an annual release. Giants was considerably shorter than Spyro’s Adventure, so maybe this will give both companies enough time to develop bigger games.
Who knows, maybe setting up a biennial competition between Toys for Bob and Vicarious Visions will end up with better games overall… or be like Star Trek movies where only the even or odd ones are good.
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