Welcome to the beta!

A super exciting thing happened today! The beta trial went live to thousands of people, mainly via eurogamer.net. In fact, I believe you all briefly brought down their site! WOWZERS! At the moment the feeling in the office is somewhere between unbounded excitement and mild panic – personally I think I’m losing my mind (in a good way!) Had to bash out a few songs on our newly acquired office copy of rockband just to de-stress while the beta downloaded in the background! just had our first few playthroughs with some of you people and with some of the levels that have been published.

What AMAZES me is how good the first ’sketches’ of levels are. it took our testers at least a few weeks of heavy create before incredible levels started appearing. and now something cool for you all to think about: you’ve only seen the first 3 levels :)  Remember, this is a *beta* to test our servers, NOT a demo. Can’t stress that enough! So, what’s is so cool for us to see, is that you haven’t even seen the amazing story mode yet, which serves as inspiration, and yet the levels going up are already interesting. I can’t wait to see what y’all do when you see the full game, and start cranking out levels.

Also, since it’s a beta, it’s already quite an old build. We have some cool new stuff that’s been in our private test for a few days, I won’t give it all away but there are things cooking such as 5-star ratings, (much) better performance and less lagginess, better online stability, better UI for publishing, faster downloads…. so in a way playing this version is simultaneously exciting and an odd throwback to a couple of weeks ago.

Finally, to everyone who has supported the game, played the game, left comments, posted levels, and really got into the spirit of LBP, understood it, and well, enjoyed it, it makes me incredibly proud! Thanks for all comments and constructive feedback, we’re listening and we already have *stacks* of stuff lined up for the beta, and the full release. If you liked the first 3 story levels, the other 50 odd levels are going to blow you away :)  HOORAY! I AM SO EXCITED!

ok I’ll stop now.

 FINALLY PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT BETA KEYS: 

PS sorry but beta keys and their distribution are actually entirely in the hands of Sony. Mm have no control over this, so we can’t help if anyone wants to get on the beta trial, I am certain (100%) there are more keys coming SOON but we’d recommend checking the playstation forums and all the usual places for news. In fact, even Mm hasn’t received our own full set of keys yet – we’ve only got about 10 between us all so far! (ok so we can play the game anyway, but, y’know, in case it makes you feel better!)