Does ModNation Racers’ Update 1.02 Solve Its Loading Woes?
I can easily say that ModNation Racers is a very good kart racing game that offers great user-creation tools that are easy to use and the actual racing mechanics are fun with a lot of stuff to do both offline and online, so when we saw the lengthy load times that came with it, it was kind of like having a delicious cake with icing that is extremely thick and too sweet. To give you an idea of how long these waits have been for the past two months, getting into a career race took about 45 seconds and a number of other parts of the game typically required about 10-30 seconds to load, so you could see why update 1.02 was highly anticipated amongst the ModNation community. Besides the loading times, I’ll also cover the other enhancements, but those are all probably secondary to the loading time for most of you.
Just to be clear upfront, this is all based on a series of unscientific tests with my copy of ModNation Racers and on my 60GB PS3 that I got in 2007. Since I didn’t play the game last night, I just put my disc in, turned down the update to get the times I got for pre-patch loading, and then quit back to the XMB to start it up again to download the update. I also did a second set of times after turning off my PS3 and turning it back on again just to make sure that my times weren’t influenced by any bugs that my system can have when on for a few days. To get an estimate for the time it took for an online race to load, I used Giant Bomb’s Thursday Night Throwdown video for ModNation Racers to get a time that seemed pretty close to my hazy experience of online races around the game’s launch. Also, I used my iPod Touch’s clock/stopwatch app for time measurements and I’m not going to claim that these times are representative of anything but my own experience that I’m hoping is at least a common one.
The first load we measured was the introductory load that dropped you into the ModSpot hub, which after the update was changed to a small menu that lets you go directly into the Career race menu, Creation Station, and the ModSpot. We went to the ModSpot and it took 65 seconds to get the hub that was the most surprising result of the bunch. Online multiplayer saw a nice drop with getting to the start of a race taking 30 seconds on the Giant Bomb video and 25 seconds to get back to the lobby, which dropped to 20 seconds and seven seconds respectively. The only other area that had a major difference was coming back from a Career race to the Career race menu, which dropped from 20 seconds to 12 seconds.
Every other area of the game with a significant load time stayed pretty much the same after the update. The load for a Career race still took about 45-50 seconds and is a bit ridiculous compared to most racing games out there. Loading into the Creation Station, where you would go to create new Mods (characters), Karts, and Tracks, still was at about 15 seconds as one of the smaller loads that we saw. We also measured the load time to auto-populate the simple tracks I created that was at 12 seconds before and 13 seconds after the update and exiting back to the Creation Station took 15 seconds both times. Exiting out of the Creation Station back to the ModSpot took 25 seconds each time. In the end, the claim United Front Games made on the PlayStation blog that all of these loads would drop by at least 50% seems to be a fallacy right now.
Luckily the rest of the update has some interesting and useful fixes for some of the other issues that people have had since the launch. The difficult career mode now has a second casual difficulty option for those that have had trouble with later races along with tweaking three challenges that were deemed to be a bit too hard for people to complete. The online multiplayer has received some stability tweaks for races to try to get rid of lag and dropped races along with the ability to invite friends to XP races to make it easier to play with friends. They’ve also tweaked the lobby system to help streamline the process of getting into a race along with fixing a bug for the Hot Lap mode that should make it hard for people to cheat to get impossible to beat times.
While this update comes with a lot of tweaks that will help make the online multiplayer in ModNation Racers a much better experience for most players, the fixes for the load times were the highlight of this update and it is an unfortunate dud for my case. I would love to hear word from the other ModNation Racers owners out there in the comments about their experiences since I’d like to know that this at least worked for some of you. We’ll have to see if United Front Games has any other ideas on how to fix the load issues in a future patch. The game is still fun to play online and off, but this update was a bit of a downer.
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