Brilliantly, if you build something you really like in the game, you’ll be able to hit a button and have the required blocks shipped to your house in the real world, enabling you to construct physical replicas of your unique digital designs. All for a price, of course. The result is a learning curve for creativity that starts with the familiar, no-effort construction of a LEGO Star Wars and ends with a kind of building block version of Second Life for kids.
That’s another LEGO expectation: LEGO Universe is a massively multiplayer game that 8 to 12-year-olds are expected to play. It should ultimately be enjoyable to those of us who are older, sure, but children need to be able to understand it. To make sure everyone can, NetDevil is doing a few things. First, it’s talking to Traveller’s Tales, which is an expert at making games kid-friendly. Second, it’s bringing in kids and adults every week to playtest their latest version. If that’s not enough, every three months or so the game also goes to LEGO’s ‘inner circle,’ a briefly mentioned, shadowy cabal made up of 5,000 of LEGO’s biggest fans.
In practice, this means a massively multiplayer game with no unfathomably complicated four-hour raids, instead focusing on shorter missions and more of them. It means no levelling, character progression instead happening by way of collectable items that either empower, customise or both. It means combat without numbers, the action instead based on the bashing and smashing we’re familiar with from, again, those Traveller’s Tales games.
For now, NetDevil is still keeping some things to itself. Ryan promises a narrative that makes sense of how the worlds of ninjas and pirates and astronauts combine, but all they’ll currently tell us is that it involves a fight between the sides of chaos and creativity, with the player fighting firmly on the side of the latter. The screenshots suggest there will be vehicles – and there are some hints that you’ll be able to build your own – but they’re not discussing those yet. Most importantly, while a subscription model is planned, there’s no word on a price.
Yet, we can’t help but be excited. LEGO Star Wars was the perfect juxtaposition: a kids’ toybox of silly little men reinvigorating the staid rubbishness of Star Wars. Now the MMO is about to get its own much-needed injection of colourful bricks.
Sep 28, 2009
