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Sup homies.
Though I’d let you all know what Lego Universe is all about. It’s marketed as an MMO and not an MMORPG for good reason. The game plays a lot like all the other lego games out there like star wars etc. It’s a basic platformer, with a few puzzles. The combat is handled by tapping the left mouse button 3 times to perform your current weapons 3 hit combo…. that’s it.
When it comes to equiping your character with weapons and armor, they do increase stats that are mostly meaningless. You get your health meter that is measured in hearts. My character has 4, meaning he can take 4 hits. You also get an armour stat that will take damage if you have any before health. This can be upgraded through different armor sets in game.
You also get imagination storage, which can be upgraded by finding a magic block in each zone hidden away. Imagination is used to do anything constructive in the game, so when you need to get to a high ledge and there is a few blocks lying around near the bottom, you need to tap into your imagination store to get the job done.
The game’s missions are also pretty annoying, usually requiring other missions to be completed beforehand making some untrackable chain due to the lack of a misison interface. You literally need to go to a zone, pick up a mission that sends you to another zone 10-15 mins away, get there, pick up a sub mission that will allow you to complete the first mission in yet another zone, go there taking a further 10-15 mins, complete that mission, go back to the original sub mission, complete that, then a further 10-15 mins going back to the original mission, allowing you to complete that. Keep in mind that you will have 10 missions on the go at once and the only way you have to track them is an icon at the top of your HUD with no real way to track where to go.
The game’s pretty buggy but it’s a beta, comes with the territory.
On to what I consider to be the positive points. The build interface is pretty cool. In each zone, you get to buy property. In this property you can either use pre-created modules to make models, such as castles, towns scenery etc, or you can use any of the thousands of lego bricks you have got from fallen enemy or purchased from your local brick dealer to make any creation you want. You can then assign behaviours to them to perform a task. You could for example build a dog, asign walking behavours to his legs to make it look like he’s walking, then use a guard path behavious to patrol your propery, then attack an enemy behaviour to attack people etc. Other characters can visit your property either by invite or without if it’s public.
There are also other models you can collect in the game. They are either rocket parts to make different shaped rockets for travelling from one zone to another. You only ever need 1 and it doesn’t matter what it looks like, they all function the same from what I can see. You can build a race car from pre-designed modules and race it around tracks. Again, you only need 1 and the design is nothing more than asthetic. Lastly, there are pets, which are counted as models. There are 18 in total and there is a taming mini game to get them. The mini game is easy, if not frustrating at some points. Once you have a pet, he will follow you around taking up imagination/minute. They allow you to dig for treasure at predifined spots, mostly allowing you to collect extra blocks.
And that’s it. I found the game kept me intersted whilst playing, but that’s because I’m sad enough to enjoy collecting “things” in games. If I didn’t have that geek instinct, I probably would have stopped playing it earlier. When I did stop playing the game, I was asked to fill out a survey by lego, I though I may as well, I’m a beta tester etc… The question came up, what do you most dislike about the game so far. I had many comments and various aspects of the game I didn’t enjoy. Then came the opposite question, what did you like about the game. Here I struggled. I had just sat playing it for 7 hours and couldn’t actually think what I enjoyed about my time.
To me, that sums up the game. Engaging like many collecting MMO’s before it but ultimately…… meh.
edit. I now realise that this post reads like a meandering rant. I’m sure I could have been more coherent but meh… Bob may be able to provide more info.
Well I’m not surprised to be honest. The problem here is that when you develop a game with kids even slightly in mind, the game ends up being developed with overprotective parents in mind, with virtually no regard given to what seemed fun when you were a kid, or what would make a game fun now. Either that, or the developers spent their early years glued to computer screens playing games with lines of code in DOS or whatever the fuck else might turn you into a boring bastard.
Two things were great about lego, building stuff, and wrecking stuff, so why not incorporate that in to a game? Give the builder kids their fix, with the ability to build whatever they want, and maybe sell fancy stuff to the rest of us, who run about blowing stuff up. Put a nursery area into the game for the ones who cry when they lose toys (and call it a nursery to piss off the adults), so they can play away to themselves doing wow style missions/raids, and give the rest of us a huge fuck off area like 0.0 space in eve to do what we want vs each other. Divide the game into regions based around a lego theme, eg pirates, space, crusades, or some other mechanism to prevent deathstars facing off vs men on horses, and have areas of each region where you can find unique building blocks, which allow you to add the finishing touches to your latest killing machines. The rest of the game revolves around storming castles, space stations or whatever other soverignty/protective structures you can build in your land, and just kicking ass. Lego eve in other words :), except allow control of large armies, RTS style…what’s so difficult?
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