Pyramid Head said:
exactly. theres a lot of games like it already, I fail to see the innovation.
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Saying little big planet is a platformer plus level editor is like saying Braid is just a Mario game with Prince of Persia's time rewind thrown in.
Yes, those two things accurately describe facets of what you do while playing Braid, but they also fail to describe the overall experience of playing Braid, and are even potentially misleading. It is the overall experience which makes the game worthy of being called innovative, the way that all of the elements come together and make a game which is much harder to imitate than, say, the small innovation of adding leveling up to an FPS, or more actiony battles to an RPG -- those are things that can be immediately integrated into any game, and nowadays they are -- they are evolutions in the formula. But Braid can't be described by the formula Mario+X=Braid, because it's just too innovative.
Maybe we should call Braid a more-serious-adultish-mario-in-animated-watercolor-time-manipulation-and-outside-the-box-puzzles-and-secrets
-which-are-the-real-point-of-the-game style game.
But that gets ridiculous, and still doesn't address the fact that the core gameplay is elusive if you're looking for more of a mario game or more of a puzzle game.
In the same way, we don't usually call Mario an acceleration-and-powerup-based-platformer-with-zaniness-and-enemies-with-cranial-weak-spots.
We just call it "Mario," and other games that play similarly we call "Mario-like."
The point of all this is that, yes, you could call LBP a four-player-offline-online-physics-based-platformer-with-total-world-and-character-customization-in-a-player -created-persistant-online-world-with-mmo-like-developer-updates-and-three-stooges-and-shooter-elements style game.
But calling it a physics based platformer (which you may or may not like) with a hackneyed level editor tagged on is misleading. For one, no one has done a level creation game on the scale of LBP for consoles, with the possible exception of the RPG maker games. The control scheme is daunting. More importantly, the creation mode of little big planet is totally unique. This is coming from someone who’s made levels or games for Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Morrowind, Starcraft, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, Myth 2, and many RPG makers.
LBP isn't really like level editing as I’ve known it -- it's more like throwing a bunch of materials together and making a huge machine. Everything in the game can be thought of as basic physics problems -- all of the things that would normally have programmer-y names like triggers and height maps and scripts are instead renamed into things that have obvious meaning in the physical world: switches, bolts, magnets, even emitters. This is particularly true because there aren’t a lot of variables to manipulate in the background. In an RPG or RTS level editor on the other hand, you spend a lot of time editing background variables in menus because the genre of game demands that there be things like statistics for enemies, spawn points for everything, and all kinds of other behind-the-scenes numerical stuff.
In other words, that old awesome book The Way Things Work is a more useful users manual for LBP than most level design books.
That’s the brilliance of making the game a platformer -- when you think about, platformers, even with no scripting, actually offer some of the best gameplay that’s ever been invented. Sure, many people might prefer an RPG by a mile, but RPGs are all stitched together by scripting – there’s no gameplay without it, just a guy walking around a bunch of empty space. Same goes for an RTS, a bunch of guys following a mouse pointer around empty space, unless of course you’re playing multiplayer. That means that the minimum requirement for making levels in the game, both in terms of time and experience, is way less than even something like warcraft II, let alone Neverwinter Nights. Even if you just thrown a bunch of materials to climb on into a level, the core gameplay of a platformer is still there.
And the final secret to Little Big Planet is that you can’t really separate the playing experience from the creating experience, because of the way the whole game has been designed. One of the main motivations for playing is collecting an arsenal of physical things you can throw into a level, and creating itself actually feels like being in your level – with the push of one button you can instantly walk around your creation just as a player would, no separate level editor program needed. On top of that, so many people create levels that the online experience isn’t just about playing or creating, it’s about both, and many people play with the eyes of a creator. Anyone who’s done level editing before knows how different it feels to play a game once you’ve spent some time with editor, and LBP is the ultimate example of this, because everything in the game is so physical and overt.
This is why we call it “Little Big Planet” and “innovative as hell.” Not “platformer-with-level-editor.”
Sorry about the length..
Alic
