Lego Creating Multiplayer Online Game

An anonymous reader writes "Players of Lego's new MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) are tasked with a mission: help save imagination from the dark forces of evil. The bad force can be kept at bay only by users' 'imagination and creativity,' said Ryan Seabury, the creative director for the game and founder of Louisville, Colorado-based NetDevil, which is developing the game for Lego. Players cannot be killed, but they can be reduced to a pile of unassembled bricks. The idea is to play the game and collect bricks, which will allow users to build more interesting models. Lego Universe, will launch in the second half of this year and will be a subscription-based service (price not disclosed)."

Blockland is similar, but more interesting

[sopssa]

In recent months I've been playing Blockland [blockland.us]. It has the similar lego/blocks aspect in it, but frankly it's a lot more interesting than what Lego MMOG sounds like.

Basic gameplay idea is that you're a small "lego" guy. You don't need to collect the blocks, you can just select them from menu and build whatever you want. You can do this with friends in multiplayer too.

But what's more fun is that the game has great support for scripting, macros, minigames, weapons and vehicles. There's tons of mods and user-created content. Different servers also all have different kind of gamemodes as they're all build by the players. There's the normal deatchmatch, tdm, ctf, zombie survival, portal games, racing and jail and city building RPG's. Some server owners concentrate on making a beautiful place (it's quite amazing what some have done) and some fun mess-around places.

Because of Blockland, I feel like Lego is seriously missing something here. It's not really that fun for long to just collect bricks and then build with them (actually the collecting part sounds awful already). In Blockland most of the gamemodes are accompanied with the building part. Some of the dig digging ctf/tdm servers are truly great, as it allows you to dig tunnels under everyone even as far as to the enemies base, or you can build better defences to your base or even surround the capture-the-flag point with a bunker.

Lego was earlier in talks with Blockland authors to make it a Lego MMO, but looks like they went the more boring route :(

Re:Blockland is similar, but more interesting

[RobVB]

Sounds like Garry's Mod [garrysmod.com] with bricks.

Re:Imagination? Please.

[British]

The Lego Star Wars sets showed a direction of reducing over-specialized pieces. Sure, there's going to be a unique Yoda figure, etc, but the vehicles, etc weren't that bad. They could have gone overboard with specialized pieces for wings, etc, but didn't. Take a look at the Imperial Shuttle. Looks real nice.

Obligatory Zorg.

[tim_darklighter]

"Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Now take this empty glass. Here it is: peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is destroyed...

[Pushes the glass off the table. It shatter on the floor, and several small machines come out to clean it up]

...Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life."

Re:Blockland is similar, but more interesting

[pcolaman]

Actually the Lego MMO was talked about as having event and trigger scripting similar to that found in Little Big Planet, so your fears may be unfounded (yet to be seen one way or the other).