LBP Karting Gives the Genre the Full Play, Create, Share Treatment - Preview
by Karl Koebke , posted on 08 June 2012 / 3,624 Views
Modnation Racers will forever be one of my favorite karting games, but even though it was meant to be a part of the “play, create, share” ideal from Sony it was never able to totally live up to it. You could make all kinds of tracks and karts, and drivers, but they were still always tracks and karts, and drivers. It didn’t have the kind of creative freedom that LittleBigPlanet had set the bar at since it wasn’t able to break outside of its own genre. LittleBigPlanet Karting (LBP Karting) looks to fix all that. It’s not a karting game with a LittleBigPlanet skin; it’s a LittleBigPlanet game that happens to occur on karts.
When I first played LBP Karting on the show floor I was a tad underwhelmed. Sure, all the elements were there for a fun karting game: drifting around corners to get a short boost, weapons to take down your competitors, and that constantly changing leader landscape that can only happen in kart racers, but there was nothing that felt like a true LittleBigPlanet game. Sure, you drove around in little cardboard cars with Sackpeople as drivers in a felt garden theme track, but that’s just a karting game with a LittleBigPlanet aesthetic. I won an adorable little Sackboy plushy for winning the race but I was still underwhelmed.
That all changed when I got a chance to look at the real LBP Karting at a demo with one of the producers. The first thing I saw was a bit of a battle mode which was the standard you expect, but what came next was truly impressive. Switching to one of the minigame levels from LBP Karting’s campaign there was no racing or battles in sight. Instead the kart was used to drive to eggs which the sackboy picked up and threw into a scoring zone. There was a dinosaur on one side of the arena which guarded its clutch of eggs with blasts of fire to add a bit of challenge, but the crucial LBP element was there: you don’t have to stick to the conventions of kart racing.
You don’t even have to stick to the conventions of how the karts handle and feel either. The next level I saw was a top-down RC racing-based level in which the karts’ drifting abilities were taken away and the handling was changed to more closely match that of a remote control car. You can even change the camera perspective to make a fast moving two dimensional game more akin to Sonic or Trials HD than your standard kart racing game. Really, the only limit is that there isn’t a running animation for sackboy, so he can’t jump out of the kart. Lastly I played through a more standard racing level based on the spaceship from LittleBigPlanet 2, but the sections that required a grappling hook made sure I didn’t forget that this wasn't just a standard Karting game.
After that I talked to the producer about all the different capabilities in LBP Karting that make it different from the studio’s previous effort: Modnation Racers. The first important note is that there aren’t themes for the levels like there were in Modnation Racers that only gave you access to sets of items for creating your track. This was a necessary evil because of the autopopulate function that they worked into Modnation Racing track creation. Regardless of the reason it was in the previous games, though, you have full reign to put whatever you want in LittleBigPlanet Karting. Want to put a Japanese pagoda in the Swiss Alps? Go nuts, my friend. The ability to drive around your kart track while creating is still there, but the complexity of LBP Karting means that there’s no way you could autopopulate the track with items and window dressing.
Lastly I asked him the question on everyone’s minds: what about the load times? Anyone who has played Modnation Racers (even those of us who loved it) knows that the load times can be quite horrendous. This was done so that downloading levels could be basically instant. Instead of containing all the information about the track, the files only contained the positioning information for all of the objects and the PS3 would have to remake the level using those coordinates during the loading screen. It was a great system for fast perusing of a large number of tracks and downloading any that even seem remotely fun but once you had to actually load that level it could be incredibly dull.
Compounding this loading time issue was the number of transitions that required loading times while playing. If you get a new part for your kart during a race the standard way to check it out would require at least two more load times. Luckily the developers are aware of these complaints and have taken them into account. I was told that the download times for levels were still basically instant but I noted that the load times were about the same as a standard LittleBigPlanet 2 level. It’s a stark contrast to the sometimes unbearable Modnation Racers load times. The system is also streamlined so that there are fewer load screens while you customize your levels and karts, and I never noticed a framerate dive or graphical hiccup.
LBP Karting is looking to be exactly what I want from a title with the LBP namesake. A Karting game featuring sackboy would probably be enough for a fun game but it wouldn’t be a real LittleBigPlanet. So be ready for a fun karting game when this game comes out later this year, but more than that, leave your mind open for the different kinds of experiences that LBP titles always bring. I for one can’t wait to play the first Crash Team Racing-based RPG ever.
