Dreams Dev Talks Online Play, Framerate, PS4 Pro Advantage, M-rated Creations, More

Media Molecule’s Dreams can be hard to wrap your head around. We know Dreams is essentially a full user-friendly 3D game engine, which sounds pretty exciting, but specific details are still hard to come by. Well, Dreams is this month’s Game Informer cover game, and, as has become tradition, they subjected Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans to a series of rapid-fire questions. Most of the 229 questions are a bit silly, but they do touch on some interesting stuff like online play, PSVR support, crossplay, performance, the game’s story campaign, and more. Check out a rundown of the important bits, below.

• Game comes with hours of tutorials, but they’ll be fun.
• 3D games will be easier to make than 2D games, but 2D is possible.
• There's a "Make it 8-bit" button
• Can make pretty much any genre of game -- FPS, pinball, collectible card game, ect.
• Online multiplayer won’t be available day one. Evans isn’t sure how long until online play – they could add it tomorrow, but it would be bad.
• Online playercount will be 4, possibly 8.
• You can’t make an MMO.
• You can make short films.
• You can put 100 levels in one map, and put four maps within a larger map – technically, your game could have 100 to the 4th power (100,000,000) levels.
• You can create unwinnable levels.
• Compatible with PSVR at launch.
• Dream Surfing mode lets you play through three interwoven levels. Kind of like WarioWare.
• Supports keyboard, but not mouse.
• Creations won’t be playable on PC or any other platform.
• You can import audio, but there’s no dedicated export feature. Will have to use PS4 Share button.
• Dreams will attempt to run games at 60fps, but if you load too much stuff into your levels, framerate will drop. Can go sub-30fps if you really go overboard.
• Levels will run better on PS4 Pro.
• You can’t make levels so elaborate they’ll crash your PS4.
• You can make an M-rated game for your own amusement, but you won’t be able to publish it.
• There will be weekly community creative challenges.
• You’ll have a Persona, and you can level up your various game development skills – for instance, you can become a level 30 animator or level 50 character designer. There’s no cap on leveling up.
• There’s a story campaign, which Evans describes as “a Media Molecule take on Psychonauts.”
• Story campaign will be “long enough.”
• Dreams beta coming this year. Stuff you make in the beta won’t be wiped for the final release.
• You can’t make money from your Dreams games.

Dreams certainly sounds ambitious – it will be interesting to see if it attracts a serious development community. The engine seems versatile, but the fact that you can’t export to PC or sell your creations may limit uptake. Why spend 100 hours toiling over a game in Dreams when you could be teaching yourself to use Unreal Engine or Unity?

Dreams drifts onto PS4 sometime in 2019.

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