The LEGO Universe team has been toiling on their MMO-for-all-ages for years, but have they created a family-oriented game that also appeals to the older gamers? Read on to find out!

During my childhood, I can remember spending hours over at my grandmother’s house, tinkering with her enormous boxes of decades old LEGOs. I would build and build, creating enormous four-color towers of epic proportions, only to have my younger brothers smash them to bits with their Ninja Turtle action figures. Over the years, my love of LEGOs has waxed and waned, but nothing has caught my attention more than the recent glut of LEGO video games, especially the upcoming MMO, LEGO Universe.

Recently, the ZAM staff had the chance to chat with the developers at Colorado-based NetDevil Studios to check out some of the long-awaited details about this “game-for-all-ages.” As I entered the demo room, with a hint of excitement, LEGO Universe’s Creative Director Ryan Seabury directed my attention to a wall-mounted viewing screen where the log-in area for LEGO Universe was being displayed.

Immediately, my eyes were drawn to the simplistic, yet strikingly funny action going on around the log-in box. The production values were exceptional: A dragon and knight chased each other in the background while a vanilla minifig stood in the foreground, directing the player’s attention to the log-in fields.

“This is the first MMO based on the LEGO play experience, and the first time we’ll bring lots of different LEGO worlds together into one game,” Seabury stated. “Even in the log-in area, we want this game to be playful and fun, so there’s a lot of interaction going on.”

As an example, Seabury had the demo driver click on the password input area. Immediately, the LEGO minifig in the foreground covered his eyes. “It’s a clue to all of the kids playing the game; your password is secret. You shouldn’t be sharing this with other people,” Seabury commented.

Once players have logged in, they’ll have four character slots to use to create their character. Slots that don’t have minifigs already put together on them will glow with what Seabury described as the “creative spark.”

“The creative spark is really like the soul of the minifig,” he explained. “The creative spark can never be extinguished, so that means you can never actually die in the LEGO Universe.”

The character creator, much like everything else in NetDevil’s MMO, is meant to be fun and engaging, but not too time consuming. Parts for your minifig can be clicked, randomized, or spun to select which styles you prefer, providing an experience that’s a bit more interactive than simply moving sliders or clicking a check box to be an elf or a dwarf.

Yet compared to a lot of MMOs on the market, the number of customizable options available to LEGO Universe is enormous. Minifigs have been around for decades, and the number of accessories built for them is probably staggering. Thankfully, Seabury and the NetDevil team realized that the initial options needed to be limited or the players would spend all of their time in the initial character creation screen.

“We’re actually limiting the number of initial options quite a bit, because the starting screen is about setting your initial identity,” Seabury explained. “Once you get into the game and start advancing your character, you’ll have hundreds and hundreds of accessories to choose from.”

After creating our character and naming him “Redpantsman,” we jumped into the world with both of our blocky feet and set out on our adventure into LEGO heroism. After the unveiling of an epic backstory, where gamers are told that their main mission is saving imagination from the forces of chaos and destruction, every player’s journey begins on a spaceship that’s being sucked into a maelstrom.

Your immediate goal, of course, is to get off the spaceship and safely away from the space anomaly. During our demo, in San Francisco, we were joined by a few other developers playing from Canada and Colorado, showcasing the fact that the game was actually being played on a live server (based in Miami) with a handful of other participants. Chat is enabled in LEGO Universe, although they’re approaching the dilemma of open chat strategically; they want to provide a safe environment for players, but they also don’t want to limit friends from conversing with one another. Thus they’re employing a degree of social networking strategy into the game; they’re allowing friends to have more open conversations with each other than a stranger to another stranger.

The spaceship, in many respects, acts as an interactive tutorial for players, much like what most single player games employ these days to get gamers straight into the action. The players on the spaceship were given tasks that led them through particular gameplay encounters, whether that was smashing a breakable crate with their minifig fists or jumping on platforms to recover a piece of spaceship. Along with the gameplay elements, players are also given their first few achievements to whet their appetite for more.

According to Seabury, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of achievements that players can earn throughout the content in LEGO Universe. The first achievement our player earned was the basic smashable achievement, given to him after breaking up his first crate. “Just like in the Traveler’s Tale LEGO games,” Seabury said, “players can break lots and lots of stuff in LEGO Universe to earn points, coins, power-ups, and…in our case… loot.”

After finding our first loot (a rocket module that we used later), our minifig talked to a particular NPC that unlocked our “power of imagination.” While that may sound fairly inconsequential, imagination in LEGO Universe is actually a stat that players use. Imagination powers a character’s abilities and their quick build potential, so it’s an incredibly important statistic that allows players to unlock different areas as they progress through the game.

As the final portion of the spaceship tutorial, our minifig character had to don his “thinking hat” and actually create a spaceship so he could escape from the doomed ship he’s currently on. When players put on their thinking hats in specific build areas, players enter a location that is safe from enemies and gives them a chance to – not only catch their breath – but open up their minds to build actual LEGO models.

Now in the tutorial, our LEGO model was fairly simplistic – a three piece rocket ship that could be found via creates throughout the level, but other building areas ask players to use their own “creative spark” to put together items that can be displayed for other characters in the world. Of course, a heavy dose of moderation keeps the more perverse adult elements out of LEGO U, so parents need not worry about too many exposed private parts dancing about their children’s LEGO world.

Once we escaped from our spaceship, the NetDevil developers whisked players off to their first world to actually fight some monsters. According to Seabury, there will be lots of individual LEGO Universe worlds that will be explorable at launch. The NetDevil team plans to continue to create and introduce new content regularly, so veteran players won’t get stuck playing through the same content over and over again. During the demo we saw four unique worlds with areas for high and low level players alike.
From what we saw in the demo, combat in LEGO U will be active, and somewhat similar to LEGO Star Wars, Batman, etc. Like those games, players can opt to use melee or ranged weaponry, but the devs still included a few touches that ring of massively multiplayer online games.

For example, the equipment a player is wearing helps determine the type of character they’re trying to be. The game is classless, so donning armor and a longsword allows them to act as a melee fighter and their abilities, which appear in a hot bar on the bottom of the screen, will coincide with those sorts of activities. Equipment also determines special attacks and provides players with other abilities; like stealth.

However, players can certainly mix and match. If you choose to, your minifig might end up wearing wizard robes, a pirate hat, and wielding a katana all at the same time. A vast assortment of weapons and equipment can be found in each LEGO Universe area. Everything, from pirate hats to pith helmets to katanas to muskets, was all on display. We even witnessed a “Fish on a Stick.”

Again like the other LEGO games on the market, players will be able to restore their health and imagination – and collect coins - by killing enemies, opening chests, and destroying objects. Like almost all MMOs, players will be able to buy items from in-game merchants, but unfortunately, Seabury did not discuss the idea of auction houses being included in the game.

Aside from the actual LEGO building areas in the game, one of the most intriguing elements we saw were the in-game pets. Although Seabury admitted that pets were going to be only a small part of the game at first, they’ve obviously managed to become a highly sought after portion of the LEGO Universe gameplay. Players can tame certain animals in the game to acquire them as pets, and some examples of pets that we saw were lions, elephants, alligators, turtles, buffalo, triceratops, warthogs, and Doberman dogs. The whole pet system operates off of a singular animated skeleton, so pet parts can be manipulated and players can make their own unique pet creations.

Pets won’t just be shoved aside either; they will be featured prominently in solving puzzles, reaching new areas, and finding hidden items. Pets might dig up a hidden treasure or jump on a launch pad button to help a player reach a new area. On top of that, since NetDevil has created a single skeleton pet system this allows them to easily create and implement new pets, so new pets will be added frequently.

At the end of our demonstration, I was shocked at the sheer amount of depth that had been included in the hour-long presentation. While LEGO games have always been “easy to learn, difficult to master,” the NetDevil crew has taken that to a whole new level. LEGO Universe is stuffed full of content that gamers will be striving to collect from the moment they enter the game. Pets, gear, blocks, achievements, time trials, point leaders; all of those things are part of the LEGO Universe project.

And that’s not all. Seabury hinted at a number of concepts that hadn’t really been fleshed out in the demo and dangled them like a worm on a fishhook. When I asked him why players would even want to create another character in LEGO Universe, Seabury simply smiled. “There are some decisions that are a bit more permanent later in the game,” he replied. “We’ll make sure to talk about that more when the time is right.”

Let’s hope the time is right sooner rather than later. I only have so many LEGO blocks that I can build with, and I’d much rather put together some virtual versions instead.