Post by #HEEL Dark Lord on Oct 12, 2009 18:03:36 GMT -5
October 12, 2009 - You're finally going to get the chance to put your money where your mouth is. After years of lamenting the "lame" and/or "limited" stories THQ sometimes puts into its wrestling games, WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 is giving you all the tools to make your own epic adventures complete with text, Superstars, cutscenes, and more so that you can upload them to the servers and share them with the world.
For the first time, someone's going to be able to download your work and crap on it like a lot of you do with the actual game each year. Ah, what a time to be alive.
After putting a few hours into the Story Designer, I have to say it's pretty awesome -- both because of the seemingly endless amount of content it's going to give you for free as well as the fact that it's pretty simple and intuitive to jump into and crank out a goofy angle.
When you choose to start a new story, you're presented with January's calendar. Every Monday has a Raw on it, every Tuesday an ECW, and so on until the last Sunday of the month is packing the Royal Rumble. Now, you can click on one of these shows to begin building your story, but you're free to use the shoulder buttons to jump to another month so that you're leading up to the pay-per-view of your choice and so on.
When you find the day and show you want to start with, you'll jump in and need to choose if you're creating a scene or a match. Matches are detailed but pretty self-explanatory. When it comes to the match type, you'll have access to all of the bout types in the game, but things get deeper from there. In Match Conditions, you'll adjust the difficulty, the arena, and match rules while choosing if there's a victory scene or not. You're also deciding if the player has to win to advance the story, lose, or if it doesn't matter. You can make is specific so that it's win by count out or lose by DQ but you're free to leave it completely open if you like. You can even set up to three people to run-in. When you get around to picking the competitors, you can choose anyone you've unlocked, decide if he or she gets a manager, and then tinker with the starting health the grappler has when it comes to his or her head, body, arms, and legs.
Why would you care how a participant is feeling before entering the match? Well, because you can beat the living crap out of them in the scenes you put around the match, silly!
There are more than 100 customizable scenes in SVR 2010. If you haven't been following IGN's reports, these are preset segments where a specific thing happens but you can put whichever Superstar you want into the action. These range from a speaker orating at the podium to someone walking to their car to an old school promo in the back. On top of that, there are more than 25 locations to set these scenes in – places such as each brand's locker room, the general manager's office, and every arena in the game.
Although you're likely to see the same actions again and again, what keeps this fresh is that you get to craft everything around these scenes. Each event is broken up into segments, and you can drop in text for each part and assign it to Superstars so it pops up while they're on the screen. You can even pop in and move the camera wherever you want it – zoomed in, way wide, etc. – add some music, and go in and tweak facial animations so that the participants are looking a certain way.
In short, as already stated, this system is awesome. There are animations of people pushing each other, people getting flowers from one another, people begging for forgiveness, people being found unconscious, people getting carried out on a stretcher, and so much more. The cast of characters you can use includes every Superstar you've unlocked in the game, but there's also people you'll never get to play as – people such as the ref, Lilian, and the ringside doctor. Want Tony Chimmel and Jericho to be best friends so that when Triple H hits Chimmel with his car Jericho's got a main event feud? Go ahead – literally, the sky's the limit here.
You can adjust the length of these segments, slap on the end of show logo, and pipe in sounds more that 290 sounds that range from Superstar entrance themes to "You suck!" chants to "Shhhhh!" reaction noises.
For me, it's this mode that makes WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 stand out from the versions that have come before it. After covering LittleBigPlanet user-created content for the better part of this year, I know how amazing this stuff can be, and I can only imagine the stuff you players are going to come up with. I know I'm going to put up a bunch of goofy stories with no real point (see our video gallery for examples), but to think of how you fine folks are going to push the idea of what this thing can do with created characters, in-depth tales, and so much more boggles my mind.
Now, these stories can go on for ten years -- yes, you could have a decade of Mickie James feuding with the Bella Twins -- but there are some restrictions. One story can only use 50 scenes. This means that if you're trying to tell a massive, multi-part story, you should think ahead as to how many backstage arguments and in-ring contract signings you are going to have. Beyond that, your match count is "limited" to 450 bouts and you can only put ten of your created Superstars into any tale.
Personally, all of the weird, cookie-involving stories I want to tell are pretty specific, so the restraints really don't concern me, but I can understand how people planning on uploading opuses will feel the pinch. As someone who's incredibly interested in playing your stories, the easiest way around this that I can see is to plan ahead and upload your tale in chapters.
One thing I've noted in other previews is that the load times on the PlayStation 3 version of SVR 2010 are nonexistent, but they are a bit more like the old days with the Story Designer mode. Don't get me wrong, the loads are understandable and they aren't terrible (about 7 to 14 seconds), but they appear between each segment or your story, so if you're peppering in short scenes, they can get annoying when you compare it to how quickly everything else loads.
They broke his legs!With the release of WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 so close, my dive into Story Designer has done nothing to quell my desire to lock myself in a room and play the wheels off of this game. Even without the in-ring gameplay improvements and upped presentation value that we've talked about before, Story Designer would be enough to get my blood a-pumpin' – and it should have you all fired up, too.
For the first time, someone's going to be able to download your work and crap on it like a lot of you do with the actual game each year. Ah, what a time to be alive.
After putting a few hours into the Story Designer, I have to say it's pretty awesome -- both because of the seemingly endless amount of content it's going to give you for free as well as the fact that it's pretty simple and intuitive to jump into and crank out a goofy angle.
When you choose to start a new story, you're presented with January's calendar. Every Monday has a Raw on it, every Tuesday an ECW, and so on until the last Sunday of the month is packing the Royal Rumble. Now, you can click on one of these shows to begin building your story, but you're free to use the shoulder buttons to jump to another month so that you're leading up to the pay-per-view of your choice and so on.
When you find the day and show you want to start with, you'll jump in and need to choose if you're creating a scene or a match. Matches are detailed but pretty self-explanatory. When it comes to the match type, you'll have access to all of the bout types in the game, but things get deeper from there. In Match Conditions, you'll adjust the difficulty, the arena, and match rules while choosing if there's a victory scene or not. You're also deciding if the player has to win to advance the story, lose, or if it doesn't matter. You can make is specific so that it's win by count out or lose by DQ but you're free to leave it completely open if you like. You can even set up to three people to run-in. When you get around to picking the competitors, you can choose anyone you've unlocked, decide if he or she gets a manager, and then tinker with the starting health the grappler has when it comes to his or her head, body, arms, and legs.
Why would you care how a participant is feeling before entering the match? Well, because you can beat the living crap out of them in the scenes you put around the match, silly!
There are more than 100 customizable scenes in SVR 2010. If you haven't been following IGN's reports, these are preset segments where a specific thing happens but you can put whichever Superstar you want into the action. These range from a speaker orating at the podium to someone walking to their car to an old school promo in the back. On top of that, there are more than 25 locations to set these scenes in – places such as each brand's locker room, the general manager's office, and every arena in the game.
Although you're likely to see the same actions again and again, what keeps this fresh is that you get to craft everything around these scenes. Each event is broken up into segments, and you can drop in text for each part and assign it to Superstars so it pops up while they're on the screen. You can even pop in and move the camera wherever you want it – zoomed in, way wide, etc. – add some music, and go in and tweak facial animations so that the participants are looking a certain way.
In short, as already stated, this system is awesome. There are animations of people pushing each other, people getting flowers from one another, people begging for forgiveness, people being found unconscious, people getting carried out on a stretcher, and so much more. The cast of characters you can use includes every Superstar you've unlocked in the game, but there's also people you'll never get to play as – people such as the ref, Lilian, and the ringside doctor. Want Tony Chimmel and Jericho to be best friends so that when Triple H hits Chimmel with his car Jericho's got a main event feud? Go ahead – literally, the sky's the limit here.
You can adjust the length of these segments, slap on the end of show logo, and pipe in sounds more that 290 sounds that range from Superstar entrance themes to "You suck!" chants to "Shhhhh!" reaction noises.
For me, it's this mode that makes WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 stand out from the versions that have come before it. After covering LittleBigPlanet user-created content for the better part of this year, I know how amazing this stuff can be, and I can only imagine the stuff you players are going to come up with. I know I'm going to put up a bunch of goofy stories with no real point (see our video gallery for examples), but to think of how you fine folks are going to push the idea of what this thing can do with created characters, in-depth tales, and so much more boggles my mind.
Now, these stories can go on for ten years -- yes, you could have a decade of Mickie James feuding with the Bella Twins -- but there are some restrictions. One story can only use 50 scenes. This means that if you're trying to tell a massive, multi-part story, you should think ahead as to how many backstage arguments and in-ring contract signings you are going to have. Beyond that, your match count is "limited" to 450 bouts and you can only put ten of your created Superstars into any tale.
Personally, all of the weird, cookie-involving stories I want to tell are pretty specific, so the restraints really don't concern me, but I can understand how people planning on uploading opuses will feel the pinch. As someone who's incredibly interested in playing your stories, the easiest way around this that I can see is to plan ahead and upload your tale in chapters.
One thing I've noted in other previews is that the load times on the PlayStation 3 version of SVR 2010 are nonexistent, but they are a bit more like the old days with the Story Designer mode. Don't get me wrong, the loads are understandable and they aren't terrible (about 7 to 14 seconds), but they appear between each segment or your story, so if you're peppering in short scenes, they can get annoying when you compare it to how quickly everything else loads.
They broke his legs!With the release of WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 so close, my dive into Story Designer has done nothing to quell my desire to lock myself in a room and play the wheels off of this game. Even without the in-ring gameplay improvements and upped presentation value that we've talked about before, Story Designer would be enough to get my blood a-pumpin' – and it should have you all fired up, too.
