New-gen platforming gets back in sack – thanks to The Missing Ten.
There’s a truism in the games industry, similar to that one about canines and their owners, that developers tend to reflect the type of videogame they’re making. Visit a studio making a first-person shooter and you see straight faces and tired eyes that look like they’ve seen some stuff, man. Visit Sumo Digital, tasked with delivering Sackboy to PS4 pastures via LittleBigPlanet 3, and you’ll see warm smiles, a faint Blue Peter vibe, and – of course – beanbags.
But it goes beyond that. Design director Damian Hosen and lead designer Jonathan Christian have infectious enthusiasm for their new game, and can’t help but keep showing us new levels, new ideas, new creation tools – as if all this fresh material will overflow if they don’t find and outlet for it. “We have a high number of really creative designers who sit prototyping with the tools, and so much of what we have is unexpected,” Hosen tells us. “Our team is always making new ideas, always playing them, and only the best ideas survive. It’s an interesting creative climate, really. So many ideas are decent, but they just don’t make it.” And even if you’re not sitting on brightly-coloured, non-conventional seating as you play it, LittleBigPlanet 3 conveys the exact same imperative for creativity.
Joining Sackboy on his fifth outing (don’t forget those handheld versions) are Oddsock, Toggle and Swoop, three new controllable characters with radically different abilities and physical properties. This much you know. You saw their anarchic tumble from one side of a level to another at the game’s E3 announcement this year. But what really stands out after a few hours of hands-on with Sackthings old and new is the staggering – look at us – staggering level of variation packed into LBP3.
Examples would help, right? Playing as Sackboy alone, we drift through zero-gravity areas of deepest darkest Americana, using the Pumpinator power-up to blow or suck floating objects into advantageous positions in a fashion that would make Isaac Clarke proud. We jump through Velociporters which teleport us hither and thither like the burlap plaything of GLaDOS herself. We race through an exploding casino. We fall through a device that turns us into ten teeny-tiny Sackboys that we then control all at once as a herd. At certain points during that sequence of events we forget all about those three new characters, frankly. Clearly the studio isn’t entirely dependent on them for new concepts. Just as clearly, it isn’t in short supply of ideas for each one either.
Let’s start with Oddsock. Look at his warm, smiling face and know that the two of you will become fast friends. His ‘thing’ is wall-running and jumping, à la N++’s ninja. Because there’s something enjoyable about those mechanics on an absolutely base level, you’re wishing for evermore fast and flowing layouts
when you’re in control of Oddsock. Levels designed for him (okay, we’re taking a stab in the dark regarding Oddsock’s gender there, admittedly) also showcase the game’s extra special depth.
Previous entries in the franchise had three ‘layers’ sitting between the camera and the background. LBP3 has 16 of them. Sixteen. Rather than clutter up the level by placing objects on every layer, the design team stick with two playable layers; one in the background and one in the foreground. The upshot is that you’re no longer simply running from left to right, but instead leaping and sliding between upstage and downstage too.
Oddsock transitions between layers primarily via satisfying wall-slides which present themselves while you’re travelling at speed and are desperate to keep the momentum flowing. But there are also bounce pads which fling you between layers, and cable car-like lines in the sky you can traverse by grabbing onto objects attached to them (our minds are already hatching a Bioshock Infinite platformer based on the latter).
Happy sack
There’s a great deal of scope for creators to play around in this extra space, and LBP3’s own level designers have crafted moments approaching genius here. You know those sublime moments in Rayman Legends when you jump into a set of Mousetrap-like machinations that hurl you back and forth around the level, somehow making you feel like a boss regardless of your relinquished control? LBP3 is full of these. Some are so convoluted we genuinely laughed.
Toggle is a different proposition entirely. His face says “I have no idea what I’m doing,” but much like Wayne Rooney he’s endowed with a kind of physical intelligence which transcends his rudimentary appearance. Tapping o transforms him from a lumbering giant to a zippy little mite, so in an instant he can be either the strongest or the quickest character in the game. Levels in LBP3’s story mode built for Toggle are slower paced than Oddsock’s, and infuse the platforming with puzzles – so of course, the background music sounds a bit like Poirot and levels are decked out like Agatha Christie’s dreams.
In his heftier form, Toggle’s weight pushes down pressure pads that might open a door somewhere else, or might simply work as a spring that propels him through the air when you switch him tiny. While small, he can skip along the surface of water – turn him heavy and he’ll sink like a gregariously smiling stone. Changing size is the solution to every puzzle, so it’s remarkable that Sumo’s still able to tie up your brain for a few seconds while you mull over your next move.
Bringing up the rear, Swoop the sackbird is the only new character we’re not totally sold on yet. Perhaps it’s those sinister beady eyes, but more likely it’s the simple fact that flying around levels isn’t as enjoyable as hot-footing it across them. Again, the variety ol’ Swoopster offers as a character is laudable – his avian powers make traditional platform design staples such as fall hazards irrelevant, but for some reason our caveman brains don’t respond to his lithe dives between circular saw blades in the same way they do to his mates’ abilities.
Four play
Now, press your hands firmly against your skull as you consider this to avoid blowing your mind: as always, LBP3 supports fourplayer co-op, which means its levels must accommodate all characters and their various physical traits in a way that presents a roughly equal level of challenge and enjoyment for all. We only tested one full fourplayer level, but we play a few bespoke multiplayer areas in twoplayer and like every other corner of LBP3’s enormous toybox they feel completely distinct from one another and past levels alike.
Remember that Velociporter from earlier? In one level we find it attached to an airborne vehicle that one player (let’s call them ‘Player One’) operates while another (‘Ian’) jumps into it and is thrown out of a portal the other side. The dastardly twist here is that unless Ian enters the Velociporter with enough velocity (by falling into it from a height) he’ll fall to his death upon popping out of the portal on the either end.
Just stop and take a moment to consider the endless griefing potential at Player One’s evil fingertips. By nipping out of Ian’s way after he jumps, for example. Or swooping up towards him to minimise his exit speed. Over and over and over again. Poor Ian.
You might be wondering how this ridiculous array of activities gels together as one coherent experience, and you’re well within your rights to do so. The danger Sumo Digital faces is of presenting you with so many shiny novelties with every passing minute that the game gives up a sense of progression or narrative. Not so – everything we’ve seen so far suggests that against all odds, LBP3 does knit together. That’s partly down to an all-star voice cast (who we can’t mention by name yet, although a certain Mr Fry’s involvement has been confirmed publicly by Sumo), but also down to the inclusion of some surprising RPG elements.
The macro view is broadly similar to old LBPs – a planet dotted with badges indicating locations. Previously there were big badges for story missions, and smaller ones indicating challenges. Sumo introduces hub areas to the formula which contain several story missions and challenges, now called ‘Quests’. Within your Popit menu is a mission tracker which displays discovered missions and will even add a quest marker to help you track down particular ones. In short: it’s all gone Skyrim.
Touching cloth
We’ve never been maestros of Create mode at OPM, but that might all change thanks to the inclusion of a new Adventure/Create hybrid mode. Falling somewhere between tutorial and outright game mode, with just under three hours of content it guides you through the Create tool via a set of puzzles and challenges. Happily, many of these involve destroying Sackbots in increasingly sadistic ways – beats reading a tutorial menu. Further motivation comes from what we’ve seen built with apparent ease – the T-rex gun which shoots golf balls from its mouth to the sound of a loose cough probably earning the overall most impressive award.
If we entered Sumo’s Sheffieldbased HQ with doubts – focused mainly around Media Molecule’s diminished involvement, if nothing else – we left them there and departed grinning much like sugar-addled toddlers. Its undoubted quality comes in no small part from a group known as ‘The Missing Ten’.
Put yourself in the outlandish moccasins of a prominent LBP community content creator for a second, and imagine your surprise when the ten most prominent, most ‘hearted’ creators from said community just up and vanish, all at once. No more levels. No more vibrant ideas – absolute radio silence. Around two years ago now, exactly that phenomenon occurred.
Why? Because those ten community creators had all been hired as LBP3’s level design team. “It was a learning curve in two directions, really,” Hosen tells us. “The creators were experts in LittleBigPlanet creation, but had never made a full game before. And for people like myself who are traditional game designers, we’d never worked with a team such as that before. Very, very talented people.” The good news is twofold: community members who’d assumed The Missing Ten were actually dead and had built memorial levels in LBP need worry no longer, and Sumo’s inspired decision to hire them just might lead to a series entrant that can stand above its forebears.
Format PS4/PS3
ETA 21 Nov
Pub SONY
Dev Sumo Digital