ModNation Racers: Road Trip features almost everything but online multiplayer.

It's a shame because we were really impressed with the game at a recent hands-on event, but the absence of online multiplayer is a real kick in the nuts. What good is a kart racer without online competitive play — especially in a series that's all about showing off your character and kart?

The backlash has been so bad, that Sony San Diego's Erich Waas was forced to hop onto the PlayStation Blog yesterday to clarify the game's online support. Waas went on to outline a bunch of features that the game will include at launch — and it honestly sounds really great — but the lack of online competitive multiplayer is still very much an elephant in the room.

Thankfully, Sony San Diego's taking the comments from fans on board, and is considering a future patch to reinstate multiplayer into the game.

“As a gamer, if I saw a game I was looking forward to playing didn’t have a feature I wanted, I’d be bummed too,” Waas commented on the PlayStation Blog. “I didn’t expect everyone to read the blog and agree with me or for the blog to smooth over strong feelings on the matter. My intent was to explain the position the development team took when designing the feature set.”

He continued: “All this said, the development team is looking at online head-to-head in a patch. This wouldn’t be available day-1 of the PlayStation Vita launch but it is indeed something being researched as I type this.”

All's well that ends well, then? Maybe. You should really go read up on the features that ModNation Racers: Road Trip will include, because it genuinely sounds rad. We especially like the sound of travel points which reward you for, well, travelling in the real world. Y'know, like, going on a real road trip. But still, no online play is just straight up weird.

We're big fans of the ModNation series, so we hope Sony can put things right.

[source thesixthaxis.com]