Phil Harrison's GDC keynote - Home, LittleBigPlanet & more

Mostly meet up and chat. Probably play some arcade games, pool, or some other small game like some card games or something. It's just nice to know that you and a group of your buddies can all live near each other in a neighborhood.

 

No, I don't have sisters, all brothers, but I do have female cousins. My family used to have a rather large sandbox, for us to play when we get together. There were about 25 of us kids, sure the girls like to play kitchen and cooking and us boys play soccer. Cooking sand wasn't fun and playing soccer on sand sucks.

We tried different things; different games but nothing were fulfilling. That was until I came up with the game of build, destroy and conquer. We would divide our self into two teams and each teams would build a large sand castle/barrier by packing sand into a large containers (like making bricks) and stacking them, divide the 50 plus soccer/volley balls allotted to each team among members and prepare limited water bombs. After putting on our swimming goggles we would start throwing balls at the opposing team sand barrier trading blows, once those are half destroyed came the water bombs. The sides with all the team members wet lost. But by that point winning or losing don't matter anymore, we would be exhausted from all of the activities and fun fulfilled, afterward we would just chilled in the swimming pool. From that point onwards, this was what we did when we get together.

Well, MUDs don't normally get full like a sandbox. You got to destroy it at some point if things get full or you want to build better things.

What make you think we don't admire at what we build before we destroy it even if the thing only made up of sand? We enjoyed building them, we enjoyed destroying them, we also enjoyed the conquering bit.

Take your coders example, you build your codes by programming, you removed/delete codes that are erroneous or don’t work, to conquer the problem.

Again, it’s a sandbox; I wouldn't have enough sand or space to continue building stuff without destroying it, even if our family sandbox was the size of basketball court.

Curiously you take your stuff this seriously when inside a sandbox as a kid?

Heck even in the sandbox of that Playstation Home, my rules of build, destroy and conquer still apply.

Build -> decorates your space, add people to friends list, etc.
Destroy -> takes stuff down for redecoration, remove non active friends from list, etc.
Conquer -> try to look the most hip/cool/ or whatever your fancy as your goal.

That's the objectives of sandbox, I though of this stuff when I was 6-7 years old, I thought it comes naturally for every kids.

 

As seen here in this walktrough from GDC: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/9861

 

Is there only one big place where all Ps3 users worldwide can meet, or are there multiple servers around the world. I think it would be great, if there were multiple countries/cities and you could travel between them via airports for example. Of course you could buy some souveniers from other places and make your home city jelaous with your unique clothes

 

very cool

not sure how much I'd use it past the initial "oh wow" phase, but I can see a certain faction, living there.

 

I think the walkthrough makes it more personal than the trailer (and answers a few of the questions raised here), and i hope my apartment wont be to costly, obviously i need a pool table

 

Apologies, I may have missed this in the back & forth going on since the keynote.

Any clarity on Media Molecule's relationship with Sony? Have they gone 2nd party or was this a one time contract for LBP?

Also was there any further discussion of user created content? The bi-directional thingy is something integral to "Game 3.0" according to Big Phil isn't it? Was there any indications of further games to come?

EDIT: An answer, of sorts, to my 1st question.

 

Also what about the supposed announcements regarding the indie/homebrew/linux scene?

Did Phil mention anything regarding this area?

 

I would like to see Home integrated with the "Afrika" game. That would be pretty neat if you could seamlessly flip through different environments, sneak up on some animals and possibly share that experience with friends online.

In Project Entropia stuff you buy slowly degrade so you need to renew them at certain intervals and that is basically the business model behind that game. I hope Sony does not adopt that model, I wonder if they will allow a second hand market for furniture and stuff and they will take some percentage of the transactions.

I hope they will let you create your own furniture and stuff as well, that would allow a pretty creative environment.

 

I think he mentioned something about "premium user created content".. whatever that is...

 

I completely totally utterly love LBP.

Fran in Rome

 

Some stuff in Home you get for free. Some other stuff you have to pay for. Some stuff you get access to when buying certain games, like a Heavenly Sword T-shirt etc.

 

Here it is, directfeed video of FULL LittleBigPlanet presentation [18mins]
174mb - http://download.gamevideos.com/9860/gv.com.GDC2007LittleBigPlanetFullDemoRun_640x360.flv

Can anyone give me download link for HOME footage as well?
http://gamevideos.com:80/video/id/9861

 

More:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6167059.html?action=convert&om_clk=latestnews&tag=latestnews;title;3

 

Me too. And a great show from Sony. About time.

Home is huge, but I think MS is working on stuff like that too (seeing how everyone on Allards team had to read Snow Crash). It sure puts some pressure on MS's Live pricing though.

Good stuff.

 

http://download.gamevideos.com/9861/gv.com.pshome.fulldemo_640x360.flv

 

Wow

Finally getting a chance to see the videos now!

Home is so slick looking. It far surprises my expectations.

Little Big Planet! Wow that is something really really special! You don't get to see the reveal of a game that powerful often at all. Those people who were actually in the audience are so lucky.

 

God bless you!

 

The key part in what you said was 'i think" meaning you aren't certain. For one thing 8 - 16 players would not take up 300mbps of bandwidth. If you've optimized you packet size correctly the size of the packets will never change. They're lots of factors invovled in how big the server packets are at maximum load and how many updates you get from the server per second.

Yes there are 32 player peer to peer games out there and no, dedicated servers are not a "must" for games like those at all.

 

That's utter nonsense. I've seen a massively multiplayer game with over 100 players handled over a dial up connection. It depends how the data and game is structured. Don''t use Geo W as an example since we've already seen examples of more players using older version of the unreal enigne before. Also the 8 player limit was a design decision as has been noted numerous times. Again LAG isn't somehting that is automatically fixed by having a dedicated server. Network conditions can NEVER be predicted.