Yes I know there wasn’t a discussion yesterday. This was yesterday’s one, but I scheduled it for July 1st. Apparently I can’t read. Anyway here you are.
As I mentioned yesterday ModNation Racers has seen a lot of play in my flat recently. As a quick tangent I’d like to point out it’s a maisonette which is a type of flat, not a house. It hasn’t even got a real ground floor. Any way, ModNation Racers. As you can probably tell by the title of today’s discussion today it’s the creation aspect of ModNation Racers I really want to talk about.
To put it simply the creation in MNR blew me away. The simplicity of the creation of carts, mods and tracks hides a surprising amount of depth in what you can actually achieve in the game. LittleBigPlanet, MNR’s cousin in the Play. Create. Share. genre, certainly had an incredible depth to it; the creation of microprocessors in the game shows this. The issue that most people seem to have with LBP was that it threw you in at the deep end pretty quickly when creating. In MNR there doesn’t seem to be a deep end, just a shallow end the size of the Atlantic.
When we first saw MNR’s creation antics back at E3 last year I wasn’t convinced that it would be anything more than a toy. As the beta launched with limited options we got some indication of what was possible; the mods and carts that were coming out were pretty cool. However I still remained to be convinced about the track creation until shortly after the games launch, when Davs (or djhsecondnature in a virtual space) informed me that he’d been playing with the track creator and had built an homage to Mario; he’d recreated Waluigi Stadium. From that point on I became incredibly impressed with the results that such a simple editor can produce.
Of course creativity in games is nothing new, just Sony’s Play. Create. Share. meme has taken it to new heights and MNR has really opened it up in terms of accessibility. In particular sports games have had creation modes for a long time, but they have always swung between the two extremes or being either incredibly simplified or incredibly complex.
My younger brother would happily spend hours on the SmackDown! series of games getting a character to look exactly how he wanted and building the perfect moveset. I’ve never really had the patience for that; I don’t even have the patience to use the create a finisher mode in SmackDown vs Raw 2010, and that’s just stringing together a series of presets which takes about five minutes. Hopefully once I get to try creation in MNR for myself I’ll enjoy that a lot more than I do the sporting alternatives.
What are your thoughts on creation in games? Is ModNation Racers as good as it gets? Is the depth of LittleBigPlanet more in line with what you want? Or do you dislike creation all together, should it all be done by the developers?