LEGO enthusiasts are in a frenzy with the upcoming mass retail release
of LEGO
Universe. Already, die-hard
fans that pre-ordered the game are strutting their way through the
LEGO-themed MMOG, building anything from a castle to a spaceship and
everything in-between! To gather more details on this building-manic
game (and perhaps get our hands on some blue bricks), Ten Ton Hammer
talked to Ryan Seabury, Creative Director of style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Universe,
who fielded questions ranging from PvP to endgame experiences to user
features, plus many others.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: The Assembly, Sentinels, and Venture League were the "good
guys" in the recently released cinematic. Was Baron Tifonus, who
unleashed the Maelstrom, part of the Paradox faction? If not, where did
the Paradox come from?



Ryan
Seabury: The factions, in the
timeline fiction, didn’t exist until the Maelstrom was
released. The remaining explorers started the factions. The Paradox
came from a protégé of Baron Tifonus, Vanda
Darkflame, who you see in the trailer right before the login screen.
She's sort of a ninja sorceress and she studied under the Baron and was
looking for some of the same ultimate power, but is a little less
chaotic and a little less ambitious, so she's teamed up with the other
three guys to form the Paradox.



The Paradox's mission is to get in there and understand the Maelstrom,
so they’re kind of playing with it more directly than the
other three factions are wont to do. That's why the other three
explorers brought in Vanda Darkflame. They know they want to understand
it and figure out how to defeat it, but they don't want to mess with it
directly themselves.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/87158"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 363px;"
alt="LEGO Universe"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87158">

Ten
Ton Hammer: Do you have any plans to add more storage or sorting
options to the backpack?



Ryan
Seabury: Yeah. We definitely
started seeing that become a concern towards the end of beta. There is
a bank on the schedule. I can't tell you definitively when it will hit
the release trains that go out. Hopefully, it will be within the next
few months at some point. It's definitely high up in priority. We're
trying to time it to come out with the addition of new content areas,
so it'll mostly likely come out with that and we're constantly looking
to our backlog of additional UI improvements and optimizations that we
want to make. Not just on the backpacks but also on the bricks and
models, sorting and filtering, and how you use that interface while
you’re building and while you’re adventuring. A lot
of that is going to get some focus as we keep going forward.



Like I said, we are at just the starting point. We felt like everything
was good to the point where we had a good solid core. People were
enjoying the basic experience. Everything is not perfect, but that is
where we got to start. We have to get it out there in the hands of
people and see how they really start using things in their own
environment. We’ve already seen some different patterns on
how people are building now as than how they were doing in beta. I
think it’s because it is real now. I think that when
you’re in a beta environment and you know that all your
creations are going to get wiped eventually, you’re going to
invest less time in putting things together. Now that it is out there
and real, people are shifting their play patterns a little bit.
We’re watching that. We want to keep migrating that and keep
it evolving as we go.



Ten
Ton Hammer: What's the outlook on PvP in style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">LEGO
Universe style="font-weight: bold;">?



Ryan
Seabury: PvP… we
have a really fun team. I had the chance to get in the trenches with
the team a year and a half ago on a PvP instance we were building. It
was pretty fun. It was a team based sort of attack and defense
scenario. One team had to invade the other team’s base in
order to capture things to build things back at their base. It was
really a blast actually, and this was before we had any of the
specialty kit stuff fully fleshed out. I think that where we left it at
was that it was a really fun prototype, but it didn't make sense with
the content we had at the official release so we put it on hold.



We also didn't want the focus of the official release to be about PvP.
We really wanted the theme to be a cooperative start to the universe,
so when everybody got in, we’re all working towards the same
goal of pushing the Maelstrom back and to reclaim these worlds and
start building. Then as time goes on, PvP will start to make a little
more sense where some of the factions might start getting competitive
with each other and so forth. We've got that sitting in the wings
there. We're also going to tie that to a piece of content
we’ve got planned coming out, hopefully, late next year in
2011. Again, that might shift depending on where we see it, but it is
definitely coming and it’s super fun. It’s a blast
where you have your minifigure all kitted out with lots of different
gear and you get on a team. If you’ve played other MMOGs
where you’ve built up your character with all these different
skills and you’re trying to coordinate with your team on your
strategy, you know it’s a good time.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/87169"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 363px;"
alt="LEGO Universe"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87169">

Ten
Ton Hammer: What is envisioned as being the "end-game" of this
title?  Building?  Co-op building?  Raid
content for unique gear, blocks, or models?



Ryan
Seabury: We’ve
always talked that it is a creative endgame and that's sort of our
fresh spin on the typical MMOG genre. Normally, you get caught up in
this loot grind for that one percent, two percent gain on this
particular piece of gear and then you go out and mash a hundred more
monsters with a two percent advantage. That's where I tend to
personally fall off in MMOGs. You know that the upgrades from that
point on aren’t really that meaningful, and you’re
sent back to do the same thing again and again. It feels kind of
draining to me.



What we shot for in style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Universe
is this creative endgame idea where the directed content leads you
around and a lot of it is you're collecting loot and advancing your
characters, but you're also collecting all of the bricks and models.
Then you get these property worlds and you start building on them. Once
you’ve completed a lot of the directed content and all the
achievements, what do you have left to do? Well, you’re kind
of building up your worlds. Playing around with the behavior of your
stones and coming up with your own environments and sandboxes and
entertaining your friends with whatever you make there.



To me, that is the current endgame of style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Universe.
I build stuff with the bricks that I got and I find that I’m
short, or I get inspired from something I see online on somebody
else’s property. So then I go back into the game world and
collect some more bricks. I guess there is a grind aspect to that where
you go back and play mini-games, redo missions, run around and smash
stuff to get more bricks, or buy them so you can go back to your
property. The end result of that is not a miniscule performance boost
on your stats, it’s an actual realization of a creative idea
that you had. That’s a way more positive feedback cycle
psychologically that your ideas are driving your repeat play in the
game. When you see your ideas come to life, it’s a creative
conversation that you can have when you go to other people’s
properties and you get inspired by new ideas. Then your ideas keep
coming and then you see them visually take shape in front of you.
That’s a much more rewarding scenario for me in the endgame.



How will that evolve in the future? In all MMOGs, as the years go by,
their endgame tends to shift over time. I doubt that we’ll
ever do anything like deep, deep raiding such as 20 man raids. It seems
out of the question with the game that we have here. I do think that
there will be some of that on a lighter scale. We certainly have plans
for four-man adventures that go through instanced scenarios with
puzzle-solving that could be grinded on a few times to get all of the
secrets and unlock some things. However, there’s so much to
do in the building area. We’ve talked a lot about cool ideas
like maybe linking worlds together and maybe larger worlds that people
will be able to get eventually. You have the whole co-op building
feature set that is out there to explore. I think that we’re
going to keep focusing on the creative endgame.

Ten
Ton Hammer: Is the basic look of your minifig (what you create before
choosing a name) alterable at any point in game?



Ryan
Seabury: We do have a feature
in the game that we jokingly call the "Plastic Surgeon", which I
actually think will stick, where you can go to a vendor NPC that will
allow you to go back to character create and shift some things around.
We held that out of the initial release for a couple of reasons. One,
we wanted people to stick to their core identity for a while, because
it’s already so easy to re-invent your minifigures so much
with just the equipment you’re putting on. We
didn’t want it to be this constantly shifting identity with
every single aspect. The fact that your face at least stays the same
throughout is kind of an important thing for us in retaining your
virtual identity.



We know that after you’ve played your character for a year
and maybe you want to start a new one because that one has adventured
through everything or perhaps you just want a change. The plastic
surgeon was the idea for that. You go pay a fee and change some aspects
of your face and all those core identity features.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/87171"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 363px;"
alt="LEGO Universe"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87171">

Ten
Ton Hammer: FreeBuild Mode and Behaviors are proving to be some of the
toughest and most rewarding content in the game. Are you happy with the
level of guidance and tutorials associated with building on a player's
property?



Ryan
Seabury: I’m never
happy with anything. (laughs) You always want things to be perfect.
You’re never satisfied. I can point to a number of things in
the game in that regard. That drives us to make it constantly better. I
would say that the build experience overall is probably the most
challenging aspect of the game to get together over the last few years,
because it is such a unique blend of trying to bring in a fiction into
the building and how the game design influences all of that. Because we
have these unique aspects, we are treading new ground and we did tons
and tons of iteration with playtesters onsite, and in course the beta
test, we watched how people used it.



Again, we got to that starting point that we felt comfortable with, but
I think everybody wants to see a lot more guidance in how you get
started with that. Even as streamlined as it is, and believe me,
I’ve seen it go through hundreds of iterations getting more
and more usable, I still think there’s a lot of stuff people
get hung up on and things that you wished would work a different way.
In summary, I’ll never be happy with it. There will always be
something that I’ll have wanted to do better, faster, or
easier. In fact, we’re going to be putting a lot of resources
behind the whole building experience and the whole social experience.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/90358"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 321px;"
alt="LEGO Universe"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/90358">

Ten
Ton Hammer: The style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Digital Designer
is a fabulous tool. Do you have any plans to tie the style="font-style: italic;">LDD
into the game?
style="font-weight: bold;">


Ryan
Seabury: In fact, it already
works as a developer tool. We support the same format that the Digital
Designer outputs in, so it’ll accept those files. On the
developer side, if you have a developer level account, you can directly
import from that right now. The only reason that you can’t as
a player was that there’s a couple of things that we need to
get into alignment first. Basically, the palettes need to be aligned so
that the bricks that are available in the style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Digital Designer
are compatible with what’s in style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Universe.
That palette changes so we have to work out the process. The other
thing is the user interface side of it. Again, we want the starting
point to be all about your character collecting all these bricks and
building through your character in the game. It sort of breaks the
fourth wall when you allow a feature like that to come in where
you’re bringing in something from outside of the game into
the game. We think that it has value, but the early focus is on getting
you emotionally attached to your character.



It’s more of a power user feature. It’s kind of for
those who would be disconnected from the game in a lot of situations,
but they want to keep working on those ideas that they want to bring
into the game. We want them to do that. Technically, it’s
there, but we just have to figure out a few user experience issues to
make it work for players.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Will you offer out-of-the box gamepad support, or will
players have to program gamepads through third-party tools?



Ryan
Seabury: There’s no
official support for those right now. Unofficially, you can actually
plug in a Xbox 360 controller in and control quite a bit of the game. I
think the things that don’t quite work out are chat;
there’s not really a good interface for that. I think you can
control your character, but I haven’t actually tried it in
awhile. So it’s there, unofficially, in the background, but
there are no official plans at the moment to support it.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/87165"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 363px;"
alt="LEGO Universe"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87165">

Ten
Ton Hammer: Can you release any information about future mini-games
that will be added to stand alongside the current racing game &
shooting gallery?  Will there be additional maps for the
existing mini-games?



Ryan
Seabury: We’ll
definitely keep rolling out new variations of the stuff that we already
got, so there’ll be more race tracks and more shooting
galleries. Definitely, there’ll be other kinds of games
coming online as we go. What we’re trying not to do is just
slap in something. We explored probably about fifty different mini-game
ideas, but we want to take our time and make sure that we hit the core
tenets of what the game experience is about and that there’s
a LEGO play value involved.



As an example, the shooting gallery was one of the first ones that we
developed. We did a quick implementation on it. It was a normal
shooting gallery; we had boats going back and forth. It was kind of
fun, but it felt that it didn’t fit our universe. We went
back and settled on a couple of core things, such as what are you doing
minute to minute in the game and how is that reflected in every
experience that you have? Of course, building and collecting are a big
part of that. We also asked ourselves, where does the story come into
it? So we twisted the original design from the basic shooting gallery
to making the target of the ships be the Maelstrom so you’re
actually shooting bad guys and the friendly targets can cost points
against you. That actually adds some depth to the gameplay. Are we just
smashing these ships? So you actually build models from the bricks that
you’re shooting the target into. They show up on the pirate
ship deck now. The better you do, the more bricks you get and the more
models you build as rewards. You get a little of the LEGO build
experience with that.



We’re going to take these ideas that we got and basically run
them through these same design filters to make sure that
we’re hitting all the key experience points that make it fit
within the LEGO universe. I think you’ll see more and more
types of games come online as time goes on. I can’t speak to
any specifics right now. You already mentioned PvP. There’s
already a team-based scenario that’s in there that is pretty
fun. We’ll look at a lot of different co-op, competitive, and
single-player experiences. We’re probably going to tend to
head towards the multiplayer stuff obviously because that makes more
sense. We have tons of people online, so let’s match them
together so they have fun together. You can play single-player games in
any other context. Occasionally, you want a thing like the shooting
gallery so you can space out and not worry about coordinating with
friends and just go for the high score.

Ten
Ton Hammer: Sometimes things get filtered in chat for no stated reason.
Is there a broader set of chat rules posted somewhere?



Ryan
Seabury: They are working on
that actually. They do have communication policies on the forums, but I
don’t think that it is posted under the style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Universe
section right now. I just talked to our CS guy about that stuff today,
and he said that it should be coming up pretty soon.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Any plans to incorporate guilds or private chat channels
into the social system?



Ryan
Seabury: Yes and guilds are a
feature that is technically already there in the game, but we held back
on the implementation on the UI side because we wanted to think out a
few more user experience issues on the social and safety fronts. We had
it two years ago in beta where you could create guilds. We’re
waiting to work out a few kinks in some issues before we put it back
out there in live service.



On a broader note on that, I think that I mentioned earlier that
there’s a social team. We’re going to put more
resources into that now that we’re live and we’re
going to continue to develop an entire backlog of all types of social
features. That also ties in with the building features where we talked
about collaborative experiences that can start happening. Our big
emphasis is to connect existing social networks, and we’re
going to keep building features that support that.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/90357"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 377px;"
alt="LEGO Universe"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/90357">

Ten
Ton Hammer: The Founders' Release allowed players who pre-ordered the
game to play two weeks before the official launch of the game. Are you
concerned that this will leave players at official launch left in the
dust?



Ryan
Seabury: No, I
don’t think so. It’s no different from being in the
beta for a game and having that inside information that makes you a
more confident player at the very beginning when a game releases. There
isn’t anything in the game that puts you, as a new player, at
a disadvantage to somebody who’s been playing for awhile.
Specifically, a lot of the game design choices that we made help
support that idea where a player can come in six months after their
friend did and not be completely disconnected from them.
That’s one of the reasons that we didn’t go with a
leveling system, which is pretty common in most MMOGs. Because when
you’re a level 80 character and you have your level 1 buddy
who just joined the game, well your choices are that you can go in and
sort of twink them along, which is breaking the gameplay a lot and sort
of ruining their experience, or you can make a new character.
It’s just a lot harder to connect.



We really like this style="font-style: italic;">Zelda-inspired
advancement system where there is a sort of power advancement because
your character does get tougher and cooler as time goes on, but
it’s pretty limited by what you have equipped at any given
moment. The spectrum of challenges that you face isn’t so
exponential that once you have a fully powered-up character, you
can’t have fun in some of the earlier areas with new players.
The game is much more about fun than about hard-core advancements in
stats and things like that. I hope that it comes through in the
gameplay, so it doesn’t feel like a second job when
you’re going into fight the bad guys.



My real hope is that the way we set this stuff up with the early access
is that we’re going to get a lot of super-enthusiastic LEGO
fans over the next two weeks. So far, the data has supported this that
they’re rushing to their properties and building stuff on a
greater scale than the beta players did, and that that becomes an
inspiration point for those players who come in a few weeks later.
There’s already a bunch of user-generated worlds out there.
So when new players come in after the mass retail launch,
there’ll be a lot of stuff for them to check out and see
what’s possible to do and give them ideas of things to do on
their own properties.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/90354"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 307px;"
alt="LEGO Universe"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/90354">

Ten
Ton Hammer: What has been your experience with this launch compared to
some others that you’ve been involved in?



Ryan
Seabury: Night and day. The style="font-style: italic;">Auto Assault
launch was probably a depressing one. We kind of knew where things were
headed before it even shipped. The last delay really killed our hype
level and we did a whole post-mortem on what went wrong with style="font-style: italic;">Auto Assault
and what we would do differently. A lot of those things we applied to
this project and we did a lot of things right. I’m not saying
that we did everything right as there’s always something to
improve.



I knew four or five months before we went live on Friday that the game
was good and ready. You can see it when you first took it out. That was
the first time that I took my nose out of development and poked my head
out of the sand and going out to conferences and showing people what we
had. The way that people lit up when we showed it and how it created a
buzz on the show floor, and then to have on the next day, people had
heard from the people on the first day to come check it out. Plus, how
stable the service was. We actually had, a week or two before the
server went live, 80,000 connected sim-clients connected to one
universe with no problems. That’s far more stable and
technologically more impressive than anything that we’ve done
in the past, especially when you consider that they’re doing
all these things with all the user-generated content and the safety
features layered in as well. Everybody was just super excited.
Basically, on every front, we felt very solid.



It was nice, positive momentum leading up to that moment where you go
out showing it to people and you get this positive feedback and that
feedback charges the team up. It just keeps building on itself. It was
a much more positive experience launching style="font-style: italic;">LEGO Universe.
I think it’s also the longest debt cycle that we had on any
project, so it’s nice to get something out the door after
almost five years of working on it. Like I said, it’s been
night and day. Plus, there is so much more potential in this game than
there was in a post-apocalyptic game.