Multiplayer cut from LittleBigPlanet PSP

LittleBigPlanet might be bringing its “Play, Create and Share” mentality to the PlayStation Portable, but in the transition from console to handheld, a little bit of the “play” element has been reduced. According to Sony, the PSP is capable of doing multiplayer, but not while also handling LBP‘s physics system.

“The one thing we’ve lost is multiplayer,” explains Sony’s LBP producer Mark Green. “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.

“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.”

The good news is that the jumping has apparently been fixed somewhat for the PSP version, with Sony Cambridge working on improving the handling of the Sackboys. Quite how successful that fix has been remains to be seen.