[PS3] Modnation Racers

I think it's merely different tastes at work here. If you only like no frills racing, then there's probably not much to master except to stay on course and avoid disruptive attacks. But if you're into sabotage and creativity, then you will see and enjoy the added dimensions.
 
patsu said:
I think it's merely different tastes at work here. If you only like no frills racing, then there's probably not much to master except to stay on course and avoid disruptive attacks. But if you're into sabotage and creativity, then you will see and enjoy the added dimensions.
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Dont get me wrong i love Kart games and using items creatively, the problem is when the items are cheap and unfair. Mario Kart SNES was a perfect example of good item balance, MK Wii just went too far and made for a much more frustrating game for it. Its easy to say that different people have different tastes but while thats true i dont think we should just skip over obvious flaws in game design even if some like those flaws.
 
So does ModNation Racer have a "cheap" weapon ?

I think the original question was why do 2 reviewers have 2 opposite opinions of the game.
 
Not sure, will have to read through some reviews. I susspect the answer is that the items themselves can seem cheep, but the need to save up items for the more powerful ones and the ability to use up an item for defence may mitigate this.
 
A Gaffer posted about ModNation racing skills:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=21194223&postcount=836

The AI can definitely race on your tracks, and there are certain features such as "bread crumbs" which create shortcuts that the AI will recognize and exploit. The AI actually starts test racing your track as soon as it becomes a complete loop in the editor.

Also, I felt that the controls were great. There's a bit of a learning curve as the cars have a bit more weight to them than your average kart racer, but the end result is that it takes a bit more skill to drive and it's more satisfying. It only took me about 30 minutes or so to get used to things in the beta, but it feels like you're driving an actual vehicle instead of sitting on a cloud and gliding over a track like other games.
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The tidbit about AI breadcrumb is interesting too. Earlier on, the developers spoke a little about the difficulty of implementing AI that will react well to open ended levels. Unlike LBP2, I think the Modnation Racers' bots do not require user programming. So the breadcrumbs provide shortcut hints to the enemy karts.
 
How is it possible that the load times are like forever?!
There are even youtubes around, demonstrating the loading times...

I mean, some of the devs should have recognized that it loads a little bit long, no?
 
From what I read, it's inconsistent (different builds ?). One of the reviewers mentioned long load time but they never went beyond a minute. [size=-2]I'll know in due time[/size]
 
Looking at a YouTube vid, the load times seem to be of the order of a minute at every load, so getting into a game involves a minute boot, a minute to the game. a minute to the level, sort of thing. There's certainly a lot of waiting around.
 
The problem is that acceptable loading times is a rather basic "feature" if you'd ask me, something fundamental for me!
I want to play the game and not watch some loading screens...I herewith praise all games without loading times during gameplay at all!!
 
That review bothers me a little. I'm not looking for something that my wife and son need to spend 30 minutes learning, for kart racing, especially given those loading...issues.
 
Developer interview with United Front:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/108/1089225p1.html

IGN: What's the experience been like reading reviews for the game, now that they're starting to come out. Has anything surprised you?

Dan Sochan: For the most part we've been really happy. We've seen review scores that have been quite high, lots of 9's, which is great. We've seen some comments about the load times, which is something we're aware of. It's something we're working on. It wasn't an oversight on our part at all. The way that our technology was built we were able to keep file sizes really, really small for transfer times of less than a second or a second and a half. We didn't want it to be so that you and I go online and you want to try a track I've built that's 50MB and then have you have wait five minutes to download it. That immediately became an obstacle in sharing so we created a file system where everything is built dynamically and on the fly. Everything is essentially a series of coordinates to things that are saved. The challenge with that is we're building an entire world, an entire character, an entire kart, and 12 characters online, all on the fly. There's a lot of compositing that happens with the stickers and all the different parts. Because of that, there are longer load times, but that's something we're working on for one of our first patches, to improve that and get that down significantly.
Click to expand...
 
I thought that may be the case with Modnation. You aren't waiting for a file to load directly from disk to memory. The game is literally rebuilding the levels each time they load.
 
Brad Grenz said:
I thought that may be the case with Modnation. You aren't waiting for a file to load directly from disk to memory. The game is literally rebuilding the levels each time they load.
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You beat me to it. So it's procedural content storage then? If that's the case they could keep a prebuilt cache in the HD to speed up level loading.
 
I almost posted I thought it was building resources, but then thought that any racing is loading in assets and placing them according to cordinates etc. The only particular overhead seems to be the characters and karts. I guess each style and deco needs to be loaded, which would be a fair bit of disk searching. Very low latency flash storage could alleviate these sorts of issues in future designs (another reason to include flash in next gen hardware!). I dare say mmendez that they do cache built assets as restarting a level is suposed to be quick according to the Eurogamer article.

This also suggests that the complexity of content will affect load times, and if players keep everything simple (same car and character) load times could be affected. Maybe worth someone (DigitalFoundry) trying that out.
 
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/05/14/modnation-racers-ps3-demo-hits-psn-may-18th/

I’m happy to confirm that on Tuesday, May 18th, the ModNation Racers Demo goes live and you can finally sample the over-the-top kart racing action and deep creation tools the critics have been raving about.
...

There have been concerns online about long load times in the final game and while even though UFG improved load times since the beta, they are looking into further optimizing the game via a post-launch patch!
Click to expand...
 
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