Dreams, the game creation engine made by the studio behind LittleBigPlanet, released just over a year ago and its players leaped into the possibilities with abandon. Now, the community is creating games that would look right at home in a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X showcase, and we are extremely impressed.
It's the photorealistic creations that really get me. At the start of the tutorial for Dreams, it introduces you to the basic building blocks of game development, and the assets that the community has collected are all available to place in your project. However, there's a chasm that's as great as the Grand Canyon between picking and choosing cool dinosaurs or foliage or animations, and gluing these pieces together to form a coherent collage that players are able to walk through for their own enjoyment. And this example, I really won't do them justice just by describing it with my words. Have a butcher's at badrobo82's work on Reddit:
It looks impossible, right? It looks impossible that this could have been crafted by only one person on software running on a PlayStation 4. Yep, that's not even a PlayStation 4 Pro. This is one entire generation behind where we are right now. The comments under the post are all in awe too, and lots of people would like companies like Nintendo or Sony to ring this individual up and give them a full-time role with one of their teams. "Naughty Dog Artist, is that you?" joked LordReiden. "Man, this is breath taking. Uncharted vibes." Really, if Uncharted 5 is half as glorious as this vista, then both Naughty Dog and Sony will be rolling in the dough for decades.
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Funnily enough, some have accused the creator of only pretending that this is possible in Dreams, and that they're really using a computer program to synthesise these eye-popping worlds. That theory is all very well and good, until you consider that badrobo82 has shared their work with the community and you're able to download and enjoy these experiences for yourself... exclusively in Dreams. Is this the DFS sale, because those are some real armchair scholars offering their two cents. As well as the rainforest locale, badrobo82 has made a moody autumnal forest, a strange city that looks a little like a dark Neo Seoul from Cloud Atlas, a peaceful bamboo grove, and they've even uploaded their shapes that create volumetric light and fog for other creators to use. Go forth and chill out, my friends.
Featured Image Credit: Badrobo82 on DreamsTopics: News, PlayStation