lol username Posted December 10, 2017 Share Posted December 10, 2017 Tonight I decided to look through the web archives for an old article on the LEGO Universe website. Instead I found this... http://web.archive.org/web/20080223192059/http://universe.lego.com/en-us/ProgressLog/Default.aspx Quote December 20 BBC Newsround's Adam was invited to LEGO Universe Command Center in Denmark to try it out with some LEGO fans... Read more on the BBC website. Someone was invited to see LEGO Universe in December 2007...?! One week shy of a decade ago! Here's the important bits: Quote In Lego Universe you create your own Lego person called a mini-figure. The animation in this section is very detailed - you swing a clothes rack round to pick your outfits from a huge range of styles and colours, and he taps his foot while you customise him. I'm sure I spotted an Indiana Jones outfit too! Then we entered the 3D virtual world. We were allowed to explore a castle in a valley filled with purple fog. Everything was made from the famous bricks - which you will be used to from the Lego console games. A weird black goblin was hanging about. When we hit him with a hammer he collapsed into a pile of bricks and power-ups. We could see all the other players running around at the same time and could chat to them. Character creation never changed much, and yes, Indiana Jones's jacket was in the game even up until beta... But the author is describing the Vanguard Outpost! It has to be the earliest description of the game itself ever released publicly; the Vanguard Outpost was the first world ever created for the game. Man, 2007...! We don't have any screenshots or video of it, but there's some small scraps left over from it even in the final game, and a good amount of concept art. You can read and see more here: http://legouniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Vanguard_Outpost http://legouniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Sergeant_Maxx http://legouniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Sentinel_Guard http://legouniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Vanguard_Vendor http://legouniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Grumpy_Darkling We also have some descriptions of it from concept artist Jerry Meyer... First, these news articles from May 2008, though the art featured in them is from 2007: http://web.archive.org/web/20090322083816/http://us.universe.lego.com/en-us/newsnetwork/Story.aspx?id=74127 http://web.archive.org/web/20080628191538/http://universe.lego.com/en-US/NewsNetwork/Story.aspx?id=74149 No specific names of things were being mentioned at the time, but the "giant city" = Nexus City, and the "shard/spike" is a Maelstrom Shard. Vanguard was an early name for the Sentinel faction (and the name of the Paradox faction was Thunder back then, too). And a more detailed description from the Imagining LU blog... Quote 3. The Vanguard Castle, or otherwise known as the Order of The Shield complex was our first area we tried to develop and present to LEGO what was called a "vertical slice" of gameplay. Unfortunately everything except the terrain was 100 percent LEGO. You can imagine the amount of geometry the computer had to process to get a scene to render out. This was actually an interresting time because this was when we really got to see the incredible models that the LEGO User Partners (LUPs) produced for us. The LUPs were all offsite LEGO modelers that would produce digital models, and then email them to us after we emailed them concept art. Vanguard was supposed to be the intro map for the game. An opening cinematic would show normal, happy life in a castle setting; and then suddenly a maelstrom projectile rips through the large castle building and creats a huge crater in the courtyard. Immediately you are thrown into a crisis situation. The story obviously changed quite a bit since then. 4. And yes, that last image was an early concept for Nexus city. The idea was to incorporate every LEGO building theme into one melting pot of a city surrounding the tallest tower, or Nexus Tower. The wall surrounding the city was an extension of the Vanguard outpost--the forementioned castle. This was also where we would introduce a lot of the City play set elements. It seems like as many times we tried, we could never get the City sets into the game. I think the most interesting thing about this world is that it's strikingly close to the tone of the final game. You could easily pass this art off as being for something in a post-launch update, Sergeant Maxx's design would be right at home in the final game... Even the logo the game had at the time was more gritty and tough looking. (Fun fact: While the logo texture for the login screen was updated several times, the texture for the shadow beneath it was not. So there's still a trace of that logo in the final game!) In the end, LEGO Universe may have gone through a long, strange development, with several shifts in tone... But all things considered, ended up surprisingly close to where it began. ... Unless you count the even earlier ideas for an all-city game, which didn't make it that far before NetDevil found BrikWars, and decided to change directions entirely. Quote The biggest one was Lego Universe, where they were doing the standard Lego single-IP thing and making a game about City and nothing else. Then one day they found the BrikWars painting, projected it on the wall, and said "Everybody stop. Let's scrap the game we were trying to make and make this instead." http://rayhawk.livejournal.com/439433.html Quote If you remember the really early previews, the game was originally going to be just running around in a Lego City theme. Then they saw BrikWars, scrapped the whole thing, and started over. They tried to hire me right on the spot, but I was busy on a different MMO project. (That one never ended up getting launched; I should have taken the Lego job first chance I got.) But since they couldn't get me, they just turned BrikWars into part of employee training. Everyone working on Lego Universe got a day-one orientation presentation about What Is BrikWars and Who Is Mike Rayhawk. Then two or three years later, my previous project wrapped up and I was free to switch over to Lego Universe instead. Day one, just like all the other new hires, I had to sit through the What Is BrikWars and Who Is Mike Rayhawk presentation. It was a surreal experience. http://brikwars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11548&p=303203#p303196 emily, Shadowblaze and aidenpons 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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