My daughter will finally be able to play with Disney Infinity 2.0’s Toybox [Hands-on Preview]

Eight minutes.

That’s all it took for my 4 year old daughter to completely give up on building anything in Disney Infinity‘s Toybox mode. Granted, she’s FOUR YEARS OLD, but even when I tried my own hand at creating something — anything — with the game, I rarely was able to make an idea come to life. It was overly time-consuming, it frustrated me, and it frustrated her even more when I couldn’t quickly create what she wanted me to.

Thankfully Avalanche Software, the developers behind this year’s updated game, Disney Infinity 2.0: Marvel Super Heroes, have spent considerable time working on the centerpiece feature. I think I may have a chance at making Arendelle now.

Toybox is essentially exactly what it sounds like: the ability to play with the Infinity toys however we want, in whatever playstyles and stories our minds can imagine. It was meant to be the ultimate Disney imagination device. For something so central to the experience of the game, the first Toybox mode was unfortunately flawed. It wasn’t that it lacked the tools or the features (or my creativity), it seemed to over-complicate things, burying some aspects under menus and multiple steps. Redundancy hurt the experience for me.

With 2.0, that’s changed in some really interesting and possibly great ways.

During my time with it at E3, I was able to quickly create a world with a treehouse, slide, and floating bombs, and did it easily. This is thanks to the new procedural construction engine. I could (if I wanted to) drop individual tiles and blocks to build my level, but with the simple dragging of a cursor the world was constructed in the desired direction, without me worrying if panels were connecting or if I missed a small void. It’s akin to the difference between “painting” an image in long, clean strokes, versus stippling one.

I was able to drop characters and vehicles — the Darkwing Duck Ratcatcher! — onto the world and have them react accordingly, so that I didn’t have to worry about programming any specific details. I could customize the triggers of events by just picking a dot in the corner of an item and adjusting, via bold and simple icons. And… that was it. My Merida hopped onto the Ratcatcher bike, zipped around the world, and shot her arrows at targets I had set up in a forest.  Once the targets were all knocked down, a path opened up the tree and I could climb to the house up top, triggering the level completion.

Nice touches include the appearance of little builders reminiscent of the Wreck-It Ralph denizens running around and building my world, plumes of hand-drawn animated smoke behind my bike, and fireworks as buildings completed construction.

And all of that took about 8-10 minutes to make.

Over-complication is a natural barrier for anyone trying to play with their kids, and Avalanche hope that the changes they’ve made within Infinity 2.0 will allow players to live out their mini-adventures and tell their stories much more easily. Just going by how quick it was for me to create a level this time, I think they’re on the right track.