PAX Prime ’10: LEGO Universe Hands-On

Oh MMOs. How I hate you so. Really I do; I just don’t understand the appeal of a game you buy, then have to keep paying for, just to do repetitive tasks with a bunch of other like-minded (read: sad) people from around the world. WoW, LOTRO, all those acronyms bore me to death. That said, I was kind of excited to try out the new LEGO Universe MMO at PAX. As a person who still brings out my collection of bricks from time to time, this finally seemed like the MMO that would change my mind on MMOs. It did, and to show just how great this game will be, I brought along a friend:

This is Tom, a minifig who I made at PAX (as well as at home, with my own LEGOs), who will show us IRL all the things you can do in the game.

The story, while not the necessary component to the experience (like most MMOs), is pretty interesting. A group of LEGO adventurers traveled to a distant planet named Crux to find the source of all imagination. Before they could get their hands on it, a mysterious force called the Malestrom destroyed the planet, shattering the imagination source. As another minifig (LEGO person) in the universe, it’s up to you and millions of others to find the shards of imagination and defend true imagination from the evil forces of the Malestrom.

The immense in-depth creation of LEGO Universe starts with your minifig. The character creation system is as rich and as deep as you’d expect from a game about LEGOs. Every minifig piece from the history of LEGO can be made, even ones that haven’t been made before. Facial features can be swapped around along with clothing and hairstyles at the beginning to make the exact character you want. As you progress through the universe you’ll also get your hands on thousands of clothing options, just like any other great MMO. There’s such a great sense of satisfaction about doing all of this in LEGO that I haven’t found in any other MMO.

The sheer amount of things to do in this game is staggering. On top of traditional MMO questing, battling, and PvP action, there’s about as many activities as there are actual LEGO activities. Different planets in the universe contain different activities, from questing and pirate ship battles to car-building and racing. Even if you don’t want to do any of those things, you can treat LEGO Universe as the ultimate LEGO simulator. For instance, you can own plots of land to build things on. What things? Literally anything you can imagine. Power generators, lion statues, lawn mowers, epic castles, James May’s house from Toy Stories, ANYTHING. Once they’re built, you can even animate them and have them move as you want around the plot. The rep I was speaking with told me that someone in the beta created an actual ninja training course filled with hazards and various obstacles to traverse. Seriously, you can’t realize how much customization is at play here until you get your hands on it.

As you go around the world you can pick up LEGO pieces to bring back to your specific plot. You can use these pieces to make anything you imagine, like LEGO bricks in the real world. As if this weren’t incredible enough, other players can come to your plots and rate your creation and go so far as to buy them off of you for use in their plots. You can spend all of your game time building epic structures and selling them to players for studs, if that’s your thing. Almost like Second Life Lite: For Kids.

Battling in the world will seem familiar to anyone who’s played LEGO Star Wars or LEGO Batman: LEGO Universe borrows from all other great LEGO games that came before it. Certain objects in the environment need to be built to interact with. This means pressing one button to quick-build the items using imagination (one of the game’s currencies), collecting and buying things with studs (the other currency), and attacking and platforming using the same systems as the Traveler’s Tales games. This was probably the biggest draw for me, as I’m someone who really enjoyed the prior LEGO games, and to basically get a gigantic version of those games is a dream come true.

A class system determines what kind of battling your characters can do. At PAX Tom was made into a top-level summoner, able to call upon giant beasts to attack his enemies. If that’s not your thing you can become a ninja assassin, using Malestrom-imbibed swords and weaponry to cause havoc. Or you can be an assembly worker, crafting tools and machinery to help you deal with enemies. You can also become a pirate, rogue, knight, and many other different kinds of fighters. Along with everything else, I was blown away with how deep customization in this game goes, even with your fighting style. Warner Bros. really put everything you could possibly want in a LEGO game into LEGO Universe.

With all the hands-on time I got with LEGO Universe, I kept asking myself “Is this worth the kind of investment an MMO asks for, time and money-wise?” At $39.99 for the basic game, and $10 a month for a subscription ($49.99 for six months, $89.99 for a year), I think I would cancel my Netflix subscription for this; as a LEGO fanatic there’s so much enjoyment I can get out of a title like this that money won’t matter to me. In terms of time, I spend most of my free time doing things a lot more boring than building LEGO airplanes that I can sell to people in a game. It stands to reason that, for the first time ever, I’ve found an MMO I’m going to be genuinely interested in, and may actually buy when it’s released on Oct. 26th.