LittleBigPlanet 2 might have been on the drawing board earlier yesterday, but I’m sure that marker board has been wiped clean and schematics showing big server problems with LittleBigPlanet has been drawn in its place.

Last night I downloaded my preorder costumes and stickers then jumped into LittleBigPlanet to go online and play some levels. I was sure I’d be able to find lots of folks online even this early given that people like me who had preordered the game were able to pick it up on Saturday. I’d spent five or six hours over the weekend jumping joyfully through a few levels of the game offline and hadn’t even opened up the level making tools yet. Just being able to voice chat and make jokes with my brother James while we work together to reach some stuff out of reach to a single sackboy would be great.

What I found was a nearly complete meltdown of the online portion of the game.

My best guess from the frequent freeze-ups of the game in the out-of-level portions of the game — the pod, level selection, anywhere the game wants to send and receive information to and from the servers — is that the servers just couldn’t handle the utter and complete walloping they got from ordinary day-one users. Attempts to download levels took too long to wait through. James tried connecting to me a couple of times to join in a level I was playing with online play enabled and failed.

That said the game software itself held up well. The console didn’t lock up and require a hard reboot and I was able to back out of every wait I encountered. It could definitely have done more of the server access asynchronously to avoid hanging the game for short stints and given more feedback as to what was happening than a little animated Earth icon in the corner but I’m sure once they conquer the server issues all those problems will melt away. In the end, though, our own Joe Fourhman echoed my frustration in a PSN message: LBP FAIL.

I decided to play offline for a bit, plodded through the server-tangled pod menu back to the level I’d been stuck on, and managed to stay stuck after three attempts of three lives each. I left in frustration — the critics are right some platforming sections are just really hard — and went back to my replay of Grand Theft Auto 4 to cool off.

A little while later I got a message from James that things had improved so I booted LittleBigPlanet back up and yes, they had improved. The servers had been turned off.

I’ll try again tonight if time permits and will let everyone know what happens. Maybe they’ll figure it out by tonight, maybe I’ll keep trying to sprint through the GTA4 story to get that Gold Trophy for completing the story mode in under 30 hours, or maybe I’ll return to the highly engaging 8-player co-op of the Resistance 2 beta.