I saw a lot of games come and go during last week’s E3 media briefings. By far, the one I feel delivered the most on sheer fun factor alone (or at least in the top three) had to be LittleBigPlanet 3 .
During the demo, we were introduced to several new characters that’ll be joining Sackboy on our next-gen adventure. Now, Blog Manager Fred Dutton recently posted a rundown of these new faces to the PlayStation.Blog. Let’s take a closer look and get to know our new partners in this hugely small experience a bit more.
- Swoop: Swoop was the first one we came up with. He has a specific purpose – Swoop can fly, and he can access hard to reach places. One of the most useful things with Swoop is that he can pick things up – objects, but also the other characters, with the exception of ‘big’ Toggle.
- Oddsock: Then there’s Oddsock, who’s a four-legged character. He’s not quite a dog; he’s more… well, he’s just an odd sock! Oddsock can wall jump and wall slide, and is really fast. Once you play the Oddsock levels and start nailing your jumps, it’s really fluid and much quicker than the familiar LBP gameplay. It’s a very different experience – we didn’t just want him to be Sackboy on four legs, we wanted him to be his own unique character.
- Toggle: Finally we’ve got Toggle. Toggle can be big, or he can be small. Toggle started off as just one character – big Toggle – but it didn’t quite give you enough combinations, and that’s what LittleBigPlanet really needs.What we like in LBP is that we want everything to be very intuitive, so when he’s big he’s strong and heavy, and when he’s small he’s light and quick – it’s obvious. When you play the game it feels really natural – you’ll instantly know where to use him, and it brings in a nice puzzle element. He also brings with him a hell of a lot of gameplay possibilities, especially when you start using some of the customisation features.”
As you can tell, a lot of work goes into creating unique and interesting characters that we’ve never seen before. XDev’s Pete Smith explains that “We’ve spent a long time working on the characters. Not just making sure that they look distinctive but also…we want people to go ‘Wow, they really change up the game, and I can create totally new experiences with them’.”
LittleBigPlanet 3 comes to PlayStation this November.