Little Big Planet (PS3) – New beta videos
September 25, 2008
Wednesday brought some new Little Big Planet Beta media hosted courtesy of 1UP and Gamespot that sheds some additional light on what we can expect come its release October 21st. While I’m looking forward to the release of the game, there’s a few worries I have now that I’ve seen user-created content in action.
First, from 1UP, we have the beta’s introduction video and a tutorial/credit roll level.
The introduction doesn’t have anything to do with gameplay, it is in the “everyone is a gamer, unleash your creativity” vein that Nintendo has been spewing since the promotion wheels started spinning for Wii a few years back.
The tutorial level is more interesting thankfully. While it’s not new news, here’s as good of place as any to say that I dig what they are doing with the controls, and the mechanisms that are put to use in the level design re-emphasize the flexibility that Sony and LBP developer Media Molecule first displayed back in June at the Sony E3 press conference. If you haven’t seen the next serious competitor to Microsoft Powerpoint (I’m only half joking), check this out.
Next up are a handful of videos from the “LittleBIGPlanet 24-Hour Game Jam” that took place in New York this week. 150 students split into teams (not sure of the sizes) from Parsons The New School for Design went at the game for 24 hours to see what they could create. A great write up of the event from Heather Moore can be found at The TONY Blog. Gamespot picked out some standout levels that are linked below for your enjoyment. The videos only cover the playthrough of the level and unfortunately don’t show any of the methods used in the creation of them, but they are interesting to see nonetheless.
I have mixed feelings about these levels. On one hand, I now am certain that LBP is a much more powerful canvas for artistic expression than most people would have imagined even after the parade of videos we’ve seen the last couple of years. On the other hand, the amount of actual fun to be had playing these pieces of art once they are finished is going to vary pretty wildly. Just in these few videos, platforming seemed to suffer at the mercy of bad level design (step heights, platform shapes, object physics), making jumping to and from odd shaped objects a very ugly experience. In the right hands, amazing levels will certainly be created, but I think there will be a lot of crap from a playability perspective in the LBP community even with the benefit of a lot of effort from very creative minds.
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Thanks for the link! There was so much I saw that I couldn’t put in my blog entry, simply because of space. As a casual game player, I wonder if I’ll get involved in the creation of any game levels myself. Many of the students were pretty worn-out at the end of their Jam (even beyond the up-for-24-hours thing) and it seemed like a really labor-intensive process, despite the easy-to-use tools. I think you’re right: creating a GOOD, playable level will be tough, and there will probably be some lousy stuff uploaded to the servers. But one of the Sony PR reps told me that the allotment for each user (the number of levels they can share with the world) will go up as their ratings increase; make better stuff that people like, get to upload more product. This is, I think, a clever way to avoid too much of the dreck you can get from users on games like Echochrome.
As with any technology, I think the more access users have to cool stuff (and WHOA, there is so much cool stuff in LBP) and the longer they have to fiddle around, the more likely we are to get some really amazing things. Keep in mind that these students only had a day to make their levels. Given time to fine-tune without a deadline, I think some of your platforming concerns will go away. There’ll also be a way to “test” levels or share them with certain people by hosting it on your own machine, not on the PS3 servers. It’s my hope that worthwhile users will get in the habit of beta-testing their own games. (Maybe I’m just dreaming.)
The MediaMolecule guys were really quick to point out, though, that you don’t HAVE to use the creation tools to make a GAME: It’s simply a way to create STUFF. Some exec at Sony took pictures of his wife during all stages of her pregnancy and created a sort of visual diary. Me, I keep thinking about how many of my friends could get my Christmas “card” if I made one on there.