I’ve been playing LittleBigPlanet 2 for a couple weeks now, and I’ve loved every second of it, as you can read in my review which went live on Friday. In that time I played the game before writing the review, I had occasional multiplayer connection issues and dealt with the sporadic load times when playing community levels, but never experienced any bugs or glitches. But, of course, as soon as I published my review something happened that hadn’t before.
Over the weekend, I stumbled upon a nasty pod glitch like the one encountered by YouTube user Xulap in the video embedded up top. When I turned on the game and loaded into my pod area, three-fourths of the screen were blocked off by the “My Earth” planet that was supposed to be in the background but had somehow glitched out and popped into the foreground. I could open my Pop-It and see my Sackboy if I moved him to the far right side of the screen, but the planet completely obstructed my view of the pod control pad and I was unable to access the terminal to…you know, actually play the game. That’s a pretty serious bug, wouldn’t you say?
After fiddling around with first restarting the game and then trying to delete and reinstall the game data altogether to no success, I checked online for a fix and found that this glitch is pretty common, and has been since the game was in beta!
Media Molecule, I love you guys, but how could you let a known bug from the beta go unfixed for the launch of such a high profile game? Sure, the user fix is quick and painless — if you encounter this glitch, simply pull open the XMB from within the game, sign out of your PSN account, and then log back in and all should be back to normal — but it is inexcusable for a glitch of this magnitude to make it into the final code, especially when it was discovered in the beta (and the game was delayed to allow for more dev time!). Hell, that’s supposed to be the purpose of a beta test; to test the game and get feedback on things that need to be fixed or polished before it’s finished.
I’ve only encountered this bug once so far, and it only prevented me from playing the game for maybe half an hour until I figured it out, so I’m not that upset about it. But I sure hope a permanent fix comes soon so it never happens again, even if it is easy to manually work around. Once was enough, thank you very much.