Monday 28-Dec-2009 7:56 PM Game designer gives detailed dev diary ModNation Racers sits in Sony's 'Play, Create, Share' line of games, with a heavy emphasis on its track and character creation tools that let gamers make any course they want. It's a bit like LittleBigPlanet for racing games.
Game designer Mat Thomas expalined, "When we started working on ModNation Racers we knew we couldn't simply create a basic physics system to deliver our core race experience. We were also weary of the fact that unlike many racers, the player in ModNation Racers will also be focused on weapon play.
"Very early on in development we experimented with extremely tight handling (akin to driving on rails) and a much more physical race experience. What we soon realized is that when the handling model is tight, there is not much fun in the race experience, it was essentially too easy and likewise when the user is spending a lot of time concentrating on just keeping the vehicle on the track with a more complex handling model then this doesn't leave any mental power to experiment and use weapons.
"So as you may expect we ended up with something in the middle which offered us the physicality and emergent feel that for us makes this feel like a true next generation karting title. What we found is that this made the handling very much pick up and play, and easy to understand but at the same time offering depth you'd expect in other racers."
A localised European beta of the PS3-exclusive cart racer, ModNation Racers, will go live in "early 2010", Sony has revealed.
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