LittleBigPlanet Servers Suffer DDoS Attack

A DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack can be the bane of both gamers and the gaming industry itself. Attacks are often big news as it can affect popular, triple AAA games as well as the millions of fans that play it, and while some DDoS hackers do face prison time, it doesn't stop it from being a headache. And it looks as though Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet is the latest victim.

Sony has said it has taken down its servers after fans reported that some of the features for LittleBigPlanet have been affected from a recent attack. Reports state that the hack was orchestrated by an individual person who was apparently unhappy with the way the company has treated the cute and popular series. Sony posted on Twitter yesterday confirming they were looking at the problem, referring to it as a "technical issue."

While the DDoS attack has impacted community-created content for the game, it doesn't seem to have caused issues for the PlayStation Vita port of LittleBigPlanet. It's also possible that these attacks may have affected the game's social media site, which has apparently been offline since November 2020, with the site's manager saying the reason its still down is due to "maintenance and upgrades" being done. It's entirely possible that this isn't related to the recent DDoS attacks, but fans will likely have their own theories.

A Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, sometimes called a Distributed Network Attack, occurs when a server is hit by multiple systems in order to flood the bandwidth, overwhelming the server which can cause crashes and lead to the server going down entirely. The attack can occur from multiple sources, which often makes it very difficult to counter or distinguish the attack from legitimate internet traffic flow. One of the most recent DDoS attacks occurred last March which took on Call of Duty: Warzone.

LittleBigPlanet originally began life on the PS3 back in 2008 and was met with critical acclaim thanks to its ability to allow the community to create and share its own custom levels, making it a huge hit over the last twelve years. The latest in the series is Sackboy: A Big Adventure which was recently praised on Twitter by Ariana Grande. With Sony on the case, it's hopeful that the servers will be up and running again soon, but it seems like a petty move from an allegedly disgruntled fan. All being well, maybe the company will find out who did it and bring them to justice.

Media Molecule's Dreams is a wildly ambitious game that takes the philosophy of "Play, Create, Share" from LittleBigPlanet and elevates it to the next level. Although Dreams might have much more potential and offer many more possibilities for both players and creators, LittleBigPlanet still has some things that it does better.

For some things, the simplicity of LittleBigPlanet is better, but other things require the complexity of Dreams. Just because something is more complicated doesn't make it inherently better. Dreams does a lot of things better than the LittleBigPlanet games, but there are also a few things it does worse than its predecessors.