As part of their marketing strategy, most MMO’s try to wow us with dramatic visuals and pithy one-liners like “Build an empire!”, “Build an army!” and “Build a unique character to…blah, blah, blah.” After all, they are trying awfully hard to get us to sit up and notice them right? However, you couldn’t really get much better offer than the slogan “Help build a universe!” And when you’re already big enough to have been hard not to notice for years then you’re already halfway towards success when you do launch an MMO. Enter… LEGO Universe.
Yes, it’s not your typical MMO – but then LEGO has never been your typical toy either. And let’s face it, those of us who are old enough to afford a regular multiplayer online game subscription were already buying into the idea for a LEGO MMO when we were desperately trying to authentically replicate a Tie Fighter using just red, blue and yellow bricks – we just didn’t know it at the time.
//HoC
Related posts:
MMOYeti:
mmosymposium:
WodgeFTW:
MMOSres:
An interesting idea, but not sure it's one for me. Can't see the immersion factor being too great from my point of view.
Not for me either.
I give it a week before someone makes a 38 storey phallus…
As a native of LEGO's homeland, Denmark, this toy was a huge part of my childhood. I remember having loads of medieval-LEGO and space-LEGO and would build everything out of these small colorful plastic-blocks….*sigh* great days! *sniffle*
Although I've always been very fond of LEGO, I never really saw the appeal in all those LEGO-themed videogames. I know some of them were well recieved critically, but my immerson factor is also at an absolute zero when it comes to LEGO-videogames. The whole idea of LEGO is to build, create and play and no LEGO-videogame has yet to offer this IMO…well, until now…perhaps.
I know I won't be a subscriber to the LEGO MMO, but that doesnt mean that I'm not very positive towards it's release. If the developers are gonna implement the posibility for the players to build and create without too many limits, then the adding of a gameworld to play in could make this exactly what LEGO needs to converge their toys with the digital world without changing the core-idea's behind the toy, and without putting out some actual new real-world toys with way too expensive technology inside.
On paper this almost sounds like what active MMO'ers have been wanting for years…without the images of cluncky lego-blocks ofcourse
I very much doubt that I will be a subscriber either, however as a creative person I have often felt the frustration of not being able to contribute something to the physical structure of an online game world in some way or another, e.g. unique models, objects or textures etc. So the idea of potentially building the very game world around the player using LEGO blocks or anything else does have an appeal. I'm certainly going to keep an eye on how LEGO Universe shapes up and it is something a little different for the MMO genre so I'm keen to see whether by breaking the usual 'recipe' they can succeed.
//HoC
I'm totally bummed out because they pushed back the release of the game
They said something along the lines that they don't want to release it at the same time that they are releasing new toys.
I guess this gives more time for extra content.
They were already saying that they'd like to bring it to consoles now as well.
It seems most MMO's have the release pushed back, I'm still waiting to see if Darkfall is released in a few days as they said. It's already been pushed back a bit.
If it means the end game is a bit more polished it can't be a bad thing.