allgeektout

I had the opportunity to see a demo of LEGO Universe, the upcoming LEGO-branded MMO, earlier today at CES. They gave me a pretty good look at the game, and what I should expect when the game comes out.

The demo they showed me started in a spaceship that has been damaged by the “maelstrom”, a storm of negative energy that plays the villain in this game. It introduces the players to some of the concepts of the game – how to move around, collect “imagination” (more on that later), smash things, and build. A lot of these concepts feel similar to the LEGO games from Traveller’s Tales – which they should, since they apparently meet with the Universe team 3 or 4 times a year to exchange ideas.

Building is an important part of any LEGO game, and in Universe, it takes three forms – quick build, modular building, and brick-by-brick building. Quick building is similar to the offline LEGO games – you hold down a button (in this case, the CTRL button) and the pieces fly into place. Modular building is introduced early on as a simple way to build – by taking pieces of a whole set and putting them together. Then, brick-by-brick building is exactly what you would expect – where you build a LEGO set one brick at a time. Based off of what I saw, the system is a bit fiddly, but it’s pretty easy – you just drag the bricks on to one another. To build something, you need to put on your “thinking cap” and use your “imagination”, the latter of which is the mana equivalent in Universe.

Instead of leveling up, how powerful your character is is dependent on the items that you can collect. You can get more items in various ways – as loot dropped by bad guys, by accomplishing achievements, and by exploring and finding secret areas. Classes, too, are dependent on the items you have equipped – instead of traditional classes, you can be everything from a pirate to a ninja, from a wizard to a plumber. You can get help from pets by taming them, although it also takes imagination to summon them.

Since Universe is geared towards LEGO fans as young as 8, the team has taken a lot of efforts to make the game kid-friendly. For example, though your minifig can get destroyed, the “creative spark” that powers it never dies. None of the people in the game are actually bad, just negative thoughts that infect people. It has some of the goofy humor that we’ve come to expect from the LEGO games. And the game makes itself as easy to learn as possible, with buttons clearly indicating what you need to push when, continued long after the tutorial in case anyone forgets.

One of my favorite parts is the fact that kids can have their own bases where they can build and decorate it however they want – building their own adornments, using pre-built ones, or customizing some that are provided. They even have a way for kids to program the behavior of what is in their base using a interface modeled after LEGO Mindstorms – but with more flexibility, since you can do things in a computer game you can’t do with a robot. Then they can invite their friends in to show off what they’ve built.

What Netdevil and LEGO haven’t announced is the price, but they have decided that there is going to be a monthly fee. Since kids and their possibly not tech savvy parents will be playing this, they’re staying away from micro-transactions, since it would complicate the experience too much. Instead of DLC, the new content in the game will be provided by the gamers themselves, after being moderated. I’m personally looking forward to playing the game, even though I’m a little bit out of the age bracket. The game will launch in the second half of this year, but beta sign-ups will begin on the site soon (they were accepting sign-ups on the show floor).