I’m a pretty big fan of sandbox games.  Always have been.

I was the kid that enjoyed flying around in Magic Carpet but couldn’t stand the combat (1994 me just wasn’t that interested in the quirks of early FPS aiming I guess), the kid that loved pretending that the over-world of Zelda games was infinite and I just hadn’t quite got round to checking out its extremities and I still remember my infatuation with the demo of Grand Theft Auto in 1997 (it was time limited and felt vastly different to the finished game, the change of pace changed the gameplay mechanic).  I love the sandbox, I adore Morrowind (and to a lesser degree, Oblivion), I loved killing time running about the levels of Mario 64, I loved the original Tomb Raider, Nights, anything that gives me impression that the world is infinite and worth exploring, it’s what draws me to MMOs.

With all that said, I’m not really sure about the upcoming PlayStation3 game Little Big Planet.  It’s an interesting predicament, because if anything it appear that the game is the epitome of sandbox gameplay.  A physics based platformer that…. Now here’s the thing.  I’m not really sure what Little Big Planet is really about.  I’ve read the hype (and oh god has there been hype), I’ve watched tons of videos from the (almost public) beta, but I really don’t understand what they’re trying to do with the game.  I understand that there’s a single player “story mode” that’s about 50 levels long (so we’re talking Super Mario World-esq), and I understand that the rest of the game is based around level creation and sharing, but honestly?  I just don’t get it.  I don’t think it’ll work.

As a long time PC gamer, the replayability of many of my favourite games (notably early online FPS games like Quake and Tribes, and RTS titles like the original Total Annihilation) was made by the community of hardcore devotees spending seemingly all of their free time developing mod’s and add-on’s, but I get the feeling that that kind of attitude to interactive game design has slipped by the wayside as the barrier to entry has risen.  We’ve moved from a point where the tools and the inclination for homebrew modding was there, to a world where the tools vanished, and as a result, the inclination to produce a polished add-on for a game seems to have died with them.  The PC homebrew crowd had and still has a little bit of that us-against-the-world mentality that made homebrew development so fun.

So what’re they doing with Little Big Planet?  They’re placing the tools and the caring sharing attitude right into the hands of the players.  Excellent!  I love that.  But do people really care anymore?  The 2008 console market is a vastly different place from the homebrew lands of mid-90s bedroom coding, so I’d imagine it’ll be more difficult to get gamers enthusiastic, however, creation is addictive so they’ll capture an audience that way.  Once we’re at this point however, I’m just not really sure that people will really want to play a bunch of largely mediocre 2d platform traversing levels.  I’m sure someone will do something amazing, I’ve seen some really interesting proof of concept stuff (the shadow of the colossus level that was doing the rounds a week or two ago springs to mind) however I’ve not really seen anything I’d describe as breathtaking.  Sure it’s a bit quirky and cool, but is it actually a great, compelling game?  Recent experiences with games that are based largely around user created content haven’t exactly been positive (I’m looking at you Second Life, barely a game…).

Maybe I’m missing the point.  I love 2d platform games for what they are, I’m just not sure that a game focused around disjointed downloadable experiences without any kind of special mechanic or cohesive body is really as compelling as it used to be.  I can’t see how LBP can stand up to games like Braid (as an obvious example), which actually offered something compelling and new to the genre.  Braid succeeded not because it was a platformer, but because it was clever and featured compelling narrative.  The big success stories of the last few generations of gaming (in my mind at least) have been the ones that introduce interesting narrative, the Mass Effects, the Fahrenheits / Indigo Prophecies (the first half of at least), The Longest Journeys.

I can see the joy in LBP revolving around its simplicity.  It’s a great looking game for sure, and maybe the distilled Micro Machines style fun of a console level creator are something that’s been missing from the casual market for long enough for it to be massive, but I just don’t really see the justification for the hype at the end of the day.

I hope people care enough to create something brilliant inside the sandbox Little Big Planet gives them, but I think I’ll sit on the fence until I see something really great happen before being drawn in by the hype of this one.

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As a side note, I’m working on a full sample implementation of Peer to peer networking in C# .NET 3.0+ that should be done in the next few days.

Information on how to correctly use the WCF PeerChannel in an Enterprise environment seems really lacklustre and we’ve been fighting our way to a really practical implementation at work.  I should have some sample code ready in a week or so with any luck.  We’re currently using similar code as the core of a distributed, push-based system in production, and whilst it’s had it’s quirks, they’re being ironed out in the sample.

Suffering so you don’t have to!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 7:40 pm and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.