LittleBigPlanet PSP senior producer Mark Green has said that his team omitted the multiplayer component from the upcoming platformer in order to get it to function efficiently on Sony’s handheld.
Speaking with Eurogamer, Green noted that although multiplayer functionality was lost, the game still packs a punch, featuring all major elements found in the console iteration. And, while techincally possible on PSP, multiplayer would have ultimately consumed far too great amount of processing power, compromising the game’s physics system.
“The one thing we’ve lost is multiplayer. You’ve got full physics systems, you got full create mode, you’ve got all the aspects of LittleBigPlanet – you can upload, download, ad-hoc share with people – but we haven’t got multiplayer," he said.
"It’s a trade-off. The system is physically capable of doing multiplayer, but perhaps not with the full physics system. On the technical side of things you lose a third of the processing power or a third of the system memory just to do multiplayer at all. With those limitations we couldn’t achieve it."
"The PS3 had those three planes you could move around on, but the first thing we asked Media Molecule was whether we could reduce that to two, and they were like, well, most of the levels we built can be played with two anyway, so that’s not a problem," added Green.
He also revealed that the team at Sony Cambridge have improved the jump mechanic for the PSP installment, an element that was criticised in the original PS3 game.
Stay tuned for more coverage on SackBoy’s portable outing here at PSU in the near future.