Impressions: ModNation Racers

What game doesn't get better with a bit of customization? Gamers love infusing a little bit of their own personality into their games; whether it's changing your character's appearance in Mass Effect, making your own adventures in Neverwinter Nights or just editing all the names in the latest Final Fantasy to swear words. LittleBigPlanet's entire business model is based on selling customizable costumes which don't affect gameplay -- and it works. ModNation Racers -- Sony's newest entry to their Play, Create, Share genre -- looks to take the idea even further.

In ModNation Racers every part of the gameplay experience is customizable to the Nth degree and the DIY features seem really quite powerful, from what we were shown during the extended demonstration. While LittleBigPlanet allows you to dress up your Sackboy with new costume parts and facial features, ModNation Racers allows you to move, rotate and scale these individually, as well as changing the color scheme of individual items, or the entire costume, in order to keep everything color co-ordinated with the click of a button.

The style of the game, and the characters in particular, is based off a modern art movement called Urban Vinyl Toys. Artists start with a basic character shape, as you will in ModNation Racers, and then layer details on top. In doing so, countless artists can create hugely varying designs, despite starting from the same basic idea. The same principle is present in ModNation Racers, as you're given countless features to add to your character, some of which have 3D elements and some of which are more like 2D stickers.
%Gallery-64898%

The art style itself is very cartoony, with bold colors and lines. It's a shame Home wasn't designed by United Front Games -- it might have turned out a lot more fun. Perhaps in the future, when the ModNation brand has been proven, we'll see these characters acting as our PSN avatars. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, Racers has only just been announced and we've yet to talk about anything even remotely racey.

Of course, the karts are also completely customizable and, using the Urban Vinyl philosophy, all start off with the same basic chassis. This didn't seem limiting, however, as the two lads from United Front showed how varied the karts could by creating different cars, trucks, and even a vehicle made out of a cardboard box. They were keen to say that what we were seeing was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of customization options in the full version. We have a feeling they'll keep feeding us more after the game is out, via DLC as well.

Finally, character and vehicle customizations complete, we moved on to the real meat of the game -- the track builder. Unlike with LittleBigPlanet -- despite them making similar claims -- the level designers for ModNation Racers use the in-game track designer to create all the levels in the game. With the game devs themselves playing the game in such a way every day, they are constantly adding new tools and features so that not only they can make the levels they want, but so that you can too.

Levels are made using themes. Think of these as related collections of items, tools and features. The theme they showed off at E3 was the countryside theme, but expect many more to be in the full version, each with unique components. The demonstrators insist that the themes are so varied that you'll be able to make "just about anything you imagine." A bold promise.

The track editor is really quite powerful. You layout your original track by simply driving around a blank area, though the devs said you could start with the environment first if you like -- there are no barriers. Once your basic track is laid down you can go in and tweak it, add shortcuts, change the environment, add background features and powerups, etc.

This is all done using "brushes," with which you can paint in roads and background elements like trees or entire towns. With these brushes you can lay the broad strokes and then individually edit specific elements to your liking. For example, the developers created a hilly area covered with trees and, elsewhere, a village surrounding the track. They decided they didn't like the location of an individual tree, so they moved it amongst the others and proceeded to take a single house in their procedurally generated village and scale, rotate and move it however they liked.

It's this ability to focus down and concentrate on an ever shrinking section of your track, perfecting it as you go, that will allow you an incredible amount of freedom in the game. Once completed, your level can be uploaded to be rated, downloaded and edited by others. At any time, as you're building, you can test out the track and immediately you're in there, racing against automatically generated AIs. No waiting, no loading.

We could talk all day about the level creation tools they showed us, but suffice to say they're exhaustive. Change the texture of the track to vary driving styles. Create mountains and lakes, either to drive over or just as scenery. Edit the time of day, weather and ocean height in real time. Stick a bunch of sheep in the middle of the road to drive over. Some tools and props will be made available as you progress through the singleplayer game, just like in LittleBigPlanet.

It's hard to imagine that a kart racer could impress us so much -- notice we say nothing here about how the actual racing part of the game plays, it's very similar to every kart racer you've ever played -- but the level editing and the potential that ModNation Racers gifts the player really excites our creative side. Even despite realizing how many copies of Mario Kart levels we'll be seeing a week after release.