Every year at E3, Sony holds "breakout" sessions for their top games. These developer-hosted sessions are typically about an hour long and held in front of a small group, so it's a great way to learn more about a title as opposed to playing it for five minutes on the crowded show floor. Yesterday I attended two breakout sessions, one for LittleBigPlanet 2 and one for the PlayStation Move. Here's what I learned:
The developers are going to do their best to make sure all LBP 1 levels are compatible with LBP 2. That's great for the level-creation community, but it also means we'll be stuck with the same lousy jumping physics and controls from the first game. You can adjust the physics on certain objects, but from what I understand, you can't adjust them on your sackboy.
Vehicle building will be much more robust, and while the developers said this process had been simplified, it still seemed too complicated for a dummy like myself. Instead of switches, you'll now be able to use chips and program them with actions (including tilt functionality). The good thing about these chips is that someone else can make a chip that's great for a jet or helicopter, and they can distribute those chips to people like me, who are too dense to program a chip, but just smart enough to make a jet.
The creative types will enjoy the new website that's set to launch with LBP 2. You can see what your friends are doing, choose levels to download to your PS3 (even from your phone), and you can even promote your work on your page and share the easy-to-remember URL with friends.
The developers brought in some of the top LBP 1 level creators and gave them 24 hours to see what they could do with LBP 2. The results were astounding. One guy made a top-down Ikari Warriors-type shooter, complete with a cutscene intro. Another person made a StarFox-like shooter, which is particularly impressive because you still only have three levels of depth to work with. The developers attempted to show us exactly why this feat was so impressive, but it was so complicated I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. Like I said, I'm a dummy. The last user-created level was an RTS. Yes, a real-time-strategy game complete with A.I., unit creation, pathfinding, and everything.
Here's the problem with all three of the user-created levels I just mentioned. While it certainly takes a high level of skill and creativity to make them, they just don't look like they're any fun. I can't figure out why anyone would want to play these levels for more than a few minutes. Don't get me wrong, it's very impressive to see what people can do with seemingly limited resources, but I don't see myself investing much time in a LBP 2 first-person-shooter level.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I love the concept of the LBP games, but the gameplay just isn't for me. If you liked the first one, you're totally going to love what Media Molecule is doing with the sequel.
This demo wasn't about showing off new games, it was to give the media a look at the development tools and middleware Sony has created to help developers create full games. We got to see augmented reality stuff, multitouch, head tracking, and a number of concepts that could be fleshed out as part of future retail games.
While it was fascinating to get a look behind the curtain, I came away less-than-impressed with the Move. Some of this stuff was shown in EyeToy demonstrations for the PS2 many years ago, and much/most of what Move can do has already been done by the Wii (with Wii Plus). I don't particularly enjoy the Wii and I don't anticipate being a big fan of the Move. Hopefully Sony proves me wrong, but I didn't see anything yesterday to change my mind.
