Dreams had a lot of missed potential, and I think a part of it was due to a misplaced audience: many players, including yours truly, came from LBP and its very beginner-friendly level creator. I could get Media Molecule wanting to move on from LBP and that they were busy with Dreams, but I still wish they had a (stronger) supporting role to help Sumo Digital leave the series on a much better note.
Roblox came from the depths of nigger hell. It genuinely makes me so sad. It is basically a form of child slavery in the modern era that's masked behind colourful games for small kiddies.
Or shit based on child porn games.
I understand wanting to do other projects and not wanting to be "the LBP devs" for the rest of time, but Media Molecule sacrificed a great franchise for Dreams. I don't blame Sumo Digital for the state of LBP3, but it just isn't the same without MM.
True. There was no financial gain in LBP, if you wanted to create a level you did it for fun. And moderation, while not perfect, was waaay better than Roblox (which is not a hard thing to achieve). I didn't have voice chat as a kid (my parents were smart about that) but I rarely came across someone using a mic. I think there was an option for that? Now I don't remember. Anyway, I've seen my fair share of creeps on the internet growing up but LBP was one of the safest places I had been.
I think I played a little bit of it maybe once, I don't have the move controllers anymore.
I feel the same way. I had a lot of high hopes for it. There was a lot of cool projects including someone creating a deathmatch mode from Halo 1 and I believe someone was recreating Simpsons Hit and Run at some point in it.
For starters, I slightly misremembered the name: it's Five Nights at Sackbotic's. Anyways, I was able to find archives of the levels, some of which have been re-uploaded on Beacon: the single-player version and the multiplayer version... twice. Apparently, there was a prequel and another sequel, and Solid_Wires, the creator of FNAS, made other horror levels.
The problem with Dreams is that it was way too complicated for a game builder. The game itself is incredible as a development kit, arguably better than most PC development, but that runs into the issue that it is a development kit on par with Unity without any of the practical applications of Unity. Learning Dreams means you are stuck making free-to-play titles that only PlayStation users can enjoy, whereas if you learned any other development tool you are opened up to a wider base and revenue potential. The project would have gone far better if it was just a dev kit rather than a game, as everything wrong with the game is it being a console-locked “game.”
Moderation and UX in Dreams was also terrible. There was no real way to get content noticed in-game as systems were built to keep the already popular creations at the top. The most popular creations were things made in beta from start to end.
In fact (for LBP1), unless you had the Creator Pack 1, a free DLC, you couldn’t make connectors and gadgets invisible! Anyways, this is the thing I love about LBP: all of the story mode levels are (generally) made with the exact same tools that players have access to.
Even the things you can't get access to normally you can just hack into your popit and use. I remember fucking with all that since there were levels that handed them out to you.
That's Sony in a nutshell. They've done it almost every gen now. They have a franchise that sells well, they have no idea what to do with the next gen and it dies. Before Sackboy there was a period of around the mid-late 2000s when the monkeys from Ape escape were Sony's mascot for the PlayStation. And before that they used Crash, even if they didn't own him like the other characters. That Astro-bot character they've been using seems to be the PlayStation's current mascot, though I wouldn't be surprised when the ps6 comes out, they'll ditch it for something else.
Yeah, my save corrupted pretty much every other month. Even years after the game launched in 2016-17 I'd lose my save at random. The only reason to play LBP3 was so you could play the multiplayer levels from the earlier games on PS4.
No, but I remember playing this one with friends back in the day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX4wsQsePwo
Fuckkk I remember bullying some kid to the point of crying on PSN with one of the those Mortal Kombat levels. It was a gummy bear themed one, where they'd painted the characters green and stuck a sticker of sackboy dressed as gummy bear on the head.
LMAO I remember that Gummy Bear one! I recall each sticker is unique, as in each Sackboy has a different expression.
The problem is, what that is was a shitty game engine. It gave the user's too much freedom and made it hard for amateurs and casuals to create something fun. At its core LBP was a physics based platformer. You had a base to work off of. Even someone after fucking around with the creator for an hour could create a decent prop-hunt or bomb-survival level to play with friends. And with the sharing aspect of LBP, you could steal assets from others levels to add into your own saving the headache of even making any of the basic logic for something like a timer bomb or those human mech things that appeared in lots of levels. What makes stuff like LBP and Mario maker work is that there isn't a steep learning curve, it's pretty easy to get the gist of things after a few hours or so and the game has a core genre to build your levels around if you're not that creative. I played Dreams for like four hours and no clue what I was doing. The multiplayer levels I tried were browser game tier. There wasn't anthing that stuck out as great about the game.