Lego MMO On The Way
I generally hate press releases, mainly because they make me feel dirty when I try to present their spin as any modicum of true news. However, I found something in my inbox this morning which made me grin a little: there's a Lego MMO on the way. While I could quickly see something like this going horrible rather quickly, the attitude of European developer Net Devil makes me really hopeful that this could be a really unique title for the genre:
As children around the world continue to spend more time online we are developing new and engaging ways for them to interact with our brand," said Lisbeth Valther Pallesen, Executive Vice President, Community, Education and Direct Division LEGO Group. "The LEGO brand represents construction, creativity and problem solving -- values that compliment the MMOG market. By merging the online world of social interaction with physical play, the LEGO brand is providing new experiences for children, as well as fans
Creativity, problem solving, and construction instead of endless dungeon-crawling and stupid item quests? That right there makes me absurdly hopeful for the Lego MMO.
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 6 March 2007
· Comments (4)
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Blockland is already a ton of fun with a couple friends and the goal of empire-building. Putting a big budget behind that could be an incredible thing.
I have not heard good things about Net Devil. Supposedly they abandoned Jumpgate (a decent game, so I'm told), and the next game they made was poor. Heres hoping tho.
On the one hand, the one fan letter I ever wrote was to Lego, when I was 7 or 8, and they totally dissed me. (I wrote to ask them to consider making really huge Legos so that we could make forts and stuff out of them. They wrote back telling me to not write them again because they paid people to come up with ideas, and informing me that when using Legos with other kids, I shouldn't refer to them as Legos but as "Lego(R) Bricks and Toys(tm)". Needless to say, I got right on that.) So Lego was my first encounter with the evil of soulless corporatism, and clearly they sucked even before Reagan got into office and made it okay for corporations to suck.
On the other hand, I'm still a fool for those sweet, shiny blocks of plastic and permanently smiling yellow faces. So I guess I'll see you all in Legoland, or as the kids say, "Lego(R) Land(tm)".
Unless this MMO is designed by a transcendant genius, it's going to be a soulless cash-in destined for doom. That said, I did hear that Lego Star Wars was pretty good, so maybe they've got a genius on tap who can make it work.
A lego-themed MMO is one step more challenging than any other MMO because not only do you have to come up with creative and fun concepts, but you have to make them fit the lego motif. It's just that much harder to make it good than if you were just pulling any ordinary unrestricted MMO out of your hat.