LEGO Universe: The MMO

Posted by: rasp1 on: 01/27/2010 08:57 AM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

At the Winter CES 2010 NetDevil and Lego announced they were making a new MMO. This MMO is LEGO Universe. Will this game be awesome, or a flop? Its LEGO, it can't be that bad. But look at this preview of the game.

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The LEGO Universe MMO starts out with you building your character. You scroll through the preset characters, find the you, and customize your to you get it just right. From the logo on their chest. You can also create more than one character.

Of course no game is complete without the LEGO touches. When you pick the character you are going to use he jumps around in joy, while the others avert their eyes, and kick the ground.

The game will be heavily sanitized from the designs to the names that you pick for your character or Avatar. Any thing that you pick will go through a moderation process for approval. This is because the main target audience is boys 8-13. But they are trying to make it accessible by 'kids of all ages.'

I'm here, wanna play?

You will be able to run around and build things within the space, and the characters that you talk to and face are filled with 'creative spark.' There is no blood and no death, just the spark moves to another body so to speak.

The world is being taken over by Chaos, and it is up to you to fight this darkness. You do this by defeating enemies, building new structures. This increases the imagination meter, and you help imagination spread throughout the land. Just don't go trying to name the darkness...

Let's Build

The game runs with the major themes that run in the LEGO toys. Pirates, Medieval, Space, and robots. In MMO fashion you gain power by picking up weapons and accessories. The lands are populated by the LEGO themed animals, and you increase your imagination with exploration.

Some things that you build don't give you choices in building like small landscape items and infrastructure like bridges. You say build, and it builds. Larger more complicated objects like cars, space craft, etc you can change elements about them as you build them. Porsche front, and Yugo rear end, no problem, the sky is the limit in that.

The developers did build any item from the game in the real world using LEGO's to make sure they could be built like that. This way, you see something in the game that you like, slap it together once you are done playing with your spare LEGO's.

You will also be given a little area to call home. This space will be free form in the way that you can build stuff from scratch to populate your homestead. Your world will be your world.

Something for Everyone

While the game is aimed at young boys, it is like many Nintendo games, cartoony but playable by all. The minifigs all wave, dance and fight. They have minigames, puzzles, and quests that NPC's give you.

And like Nintendo games, they do give something for adults to draw them in, while still giving kids something to play with as well. Just like in the console LEGO games you can run around and collect blocks to build with and earn imagination points. Play the little minigames, but the big thing is they have included a programing language into the MMO.

You can create NPC's and program them how to react and how to do things. One of the developers show cased a mushroom patch on a hill. The behavior of them was changed to hop when an actual players walked through the garden. An elephant was made to patrol a spire. It will be nice if they make it to where you can make minigames and other elements of the game that can be included.

The game feels like the current LEGO games, and plays like it, so if you don't like it you probably won't like this. Also, there will be no licensed sets available at launch, ie Star Wars or Harry Potter. But they haven't said no, so it might a for pay expansion later own.

This game will come as a boxed game, but you can download it. It will also require a monthly fee be paid to access it, much in the same as WoW. NetDevil and LEGO haven't announced a launch date as of yet, but said it will be sometime this year.

Tagged as: LEGO Universe, LEGO, MMO