Media Molecule Do a ‘Blizzard’ – and that’s a good thing!

Sony have announced that they are delaying the hotly anticipated release of LittleBigPlanet 2 to January 2011.  This game is high on my instabuy list, so I was really looking forward to it, so it’s a bit of a shame from that point of view:

LittleBigPlanet 2 is a crazy dream, a dream to allow players to make whatever kind of game they want, but also to play though a great adventure of drama and excitement, power-ups and cinematics. But like all the most ambitious ideas, it can be a considerable challenge to turn these dreams in fun games. We’ve all been working like powered-up space ninjas and we’re almost there, but because we love what we’ve made, and we love our little sack-friends, and most of all we love all our fans out there, we couldn’t let you all get together until we knew we were giving you the best experience imaginable. Which is why we’ve taken the hard decision to delay the worldwide release of LittleBigPlanet 2, originally slated for later this year to January 2011.

However all good things come to those who wait and what Media Molecule (the developers) who are creating LBP2 clearly have plans that are very ambitious and very, very cool.  If an extra few months is what it takes to make it work, then I think that is time well spent.

The would be true if it was just any game; nobody wants to shell-out cash on a game only to fight bugs and not monsters.  But this also a game that allows people to make their own content, and I know from development experience that fixing bugs can result in a knock-on that impacts on the file formats.  What I mean by this is that if they released it with bugs in, then fixing those bugs might result in people having to re-do levels games they’d created.  Which would not be good at all.

I also say this is ‘doing a Blizzard‘ because Blizzard are notorious for delaying the release of games to make sure they are happy with them.  Sure, waiting can be a bummer, but again the plus side is you know that if you do buy a game from Blizzard, your money is not going to be wasted.  Each game they do release is amazing.  Same now for Media Molecule?  I think that may be the case.

(Disclaimer: I do know some of the people at Media Molecule.)