LEGO Universe Let's Talk About LEGO Universe.

[Alcom Isst]

 

Well that is a lengthy bit of my life. That length of time is my total playtime in LEGO Universe, the amount of time I spent logged in as Alcom. So I certainly played the game a lot. Yet, contrary to a lot of opinions I've been seeing, I don't recall the game being very good. It was more like I needed my virtual LEGO fix, which LEGO Universe offered but in some rather nastily diluted amounts.

As a whole, LEGO Universe felt awfully disjointed and overscoped. It was a collection of environments, combat setups, races, minigames, and building environments, none of which felt complete, fully thought out, or like it reached its full potential. Actually, the pirate minigame felt complete, but that hardly counts for anything.

My two particular bugbears were racing and the building.

Racing, the whole design of the thing baffled me. First off it didn't seem all that kid friendly. Vehicle handling had a lot of weight to it, and some of the track designs, most notably the Frostburgh and Forbidden Valley tracks, were remarkably unforgiving with the low friction of Frostburgh and the insanity and narrow paths of the Forbidden Valley track. Far more insane and downright awful was the setup of the speed boosts. Tracks were littered speedboosts, and the leader always got first dibs to them. Unless the leader made some horrible mistake, they would have a permanent lead, so most races were not just challenging, but dull and disheartening too.

Building in properties was a total mess. First there was the UI. The UI didn't label its colors which is really unfortunate because I am colorblind. Bricks in your inventory were ordered chronologically so the resulting order made no sense and was unfriendly to memorization. There was no search function, so players had to burn their time rummaging through their inventories looking for a single brick, if they even had it. Oh, and if a player didn't have it, they would have to exit build mode, leave their property, guess or recall which vendor had that specific brick, waltz through 1-3 loading screens and a load of terrain to get to the vendor, buy the brick, and return through the same terrain and loading screens. It was an absolute waste of a good builder's time. There was also the method of picking up models which had me frequently and accidentally picking them up with no way to put them back. There was the fact that the game would forget some models ever existed, usually the more complicated and difficult to build models. There was also the server-side physics of the property behaviors which were wonky on good days and dysfunctional on bad days. The result was a building system that had me building for 1/4th of the time and compensating for its awfulness 3/4ths of the time.

Most annoyingly, most of my issues wouldn't be too difficult to solve. Making the speed boosts based on a meter, redesigning the build UI, and making bricks purchasable as needed would without a doubt have improved LEGO Universe immensely and would have helped it not explode so spectacularly.

Edited June 30, 2015 by Alcom1

[BobaFett2]

I know what you mean. I get the same feeling with MMOs in general. While they can be great in the moment, they tend to be a lot less impressive from the outside.

 

LEGO Universe did a great job in terms of atmosphere - it felt like a game made for/by The LEGO Company and it integrated bricks into the "natural" landscape pretty well. The enemies were memorable, for zombie-esque characters, and everything was generally beautiful. Combat was fluid enough that you could just mess around without really thinking.

I actually really liked the racing. I did quite well at it, although it could certainly have been more interesting.

[Ben24x7]

I know I've seemed positive about LEGO Universe recently, but I can remember going back to the vendor and my property a lot, most of the time I'd run out of money and have wasted time trying to buy models when I could've spent that time actually smashing objects to collect money to purchase models.

Hell, the brick range is so limited (at least on the F2P side, I don't know if this is consistant on the P2P side) I once had to break a model into individual bricks and never again would I be able to repurchase the model.

[Shadowblaze]

About the building, there was one time where not all bricks available were even sold. To make minifigures, I had to take one really expensive gate model from Forbidden Valley, and destroy it into bricks, just to make two minifigs. A couple months later they added the minifig parts to one shop in Gnarled Forest. LU was a very, very, frustrating game to me.