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One title that Sony was trying to keep the wraps on a bit, not announcing it until their press conference, is Mod Nation Racers - a highly customizable cart racer that uses a realistic physics engine. This game has a similar feel to Little Big Planet, and is being touted as being in the "Play Create Share" genre, as well. I don't know if that should be considered a genre, but that's another editorial altogether.
In Mod Nation Racers, you can customize your character, your vehicle and the tracks. According to the developers, this is the first racing game that allows you to do all three of these.
When customizing your vehicle, you'll always be starting with the same chassis. The developers explained that this sort of starts on a level playing field, and that it is actually quite amazing how different the cars can end up, given the fact that they all use the same chassis. The differences in the cars contribute to different handling aspects, so you can get a unique "feel" to your car as you build it.
As for editing the tracks and environments, the tools for these operations appear to be easy and intuitive to use. The track is built by driving where you would like the track to be. Starting with an open field (in one demonstrated example), you simply start driving off in some direction, turning where you want to have turns, and using the right analog stick, raising and lowering your elevation as you like. To complete your track, get back to where your track started. At this point, if you like, you can actually race on the track. Or, if you want to tweak the track, you can change the type of road (dirt, pavement, brick, etc.), the width, and even the banking, with simple-to-use tools from the toolbox.
Terrain can be manipulated just as easily, with Quick Terrain tools that let you raise hills and mountains with a paint brush-like tool, and place forests of trees or villages of different houses with the same type interface... but, you can go back and edit the terrain pieces, even at the individual tree level. Or, if you prefer to use a more surgical, albeit slower, method, you can place each object individually. One extra reason that placing by hand takes longer, other than the obvious, is because buildings "painted" onto the terrain with the Quick Terrain tools face the track, but hand-placed terrain items are oriented manually. According to the developers and what I saw, you can get fairly complex tracks. There will, of course, have to be a limit to the complexity, which is why Mod Nation Racers will feature a complexity meter, like Little Big Planet.
For those who would prefer to create the environment before laying the track down, you can take your pick. You can start with the track, or with the environment, if you desire. Track is "King" in this system, however, and the track stays where you put it and is not affected by terrain editing if you edit the terrain after laying down the track.
As in Little Big Planet, music will be an important part of Mod Nation Racers, but Sony is not yet talking about music in the game.
The developers stated that some of the assets will be available immediately, while many of the assets will be unlockable. They also indicated that they, "Have very cool plans for DLC," ...to be announced later.
Custom tracks can be played against others online. The developers are not talking yet about DRM issues at this time, but they are leaning towards making tracks highly accessible to others, which may mean that they end up allowing others to use tracks that utilize DLC that they haven't purchased. This actually would make sense, I think... it would serve as advertisement of those pieces of DLC, encouraging players to purchase them so they could use them in their own creations. |
