Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Part of the value NetDevil must offer is a lot of versatility. Free Realms allows players to fight, train pets, race in cars, play board games, play a trading card game, complete collections, cook, and even be a postal worker. LEGO can do most (if not all) of those things, too, but it must be packaged as cleverly as SOE did to make a splash. Just as Free Realms characters change appearance depending on the job being performed, LEGO Universe characters will need to exhibit the same flair when moving between tasks. While I have run races in LEGO Star Wars, the MMO will need to let me don a special racing outfit to match the feeling of pride I get with Free Realms.

The flexibility of LEGO Universe also must include the ability to quickly switch from one type of gameplay to another as the whim strikes me. In Free Realms, I can stop a quest and leave an instance whenever I want; I’m never locked into anything. In a three-hour span while I wrote a guide and this article, my daughter must have jumped into and out of at least ten different instances in Free Realms. She could fight one or two monsters and then leave to go harvest some berries. She didn’t care that she didn’t complete the quest. She was too busy having fun.

One major way LEGO Universe can score some fun points is with its building dynamic. Allowing players to collect blocks to build their own homes and vehicles would be a terrific start and would trump the basic merchant system used for karts in Free Realms. Another option is to allow players to craft their own gear, from weapons to armor to tools.

Parting Thoughts

NetDevil may not be looking at SOE’s Free Realms as any sort of competition or as a model for success, but I think it would be foolish not to learn from the experiments SOE has already conducted. The publishing behemoth has shown that a fun casual game can be a huge hit when it is widely accessible both technologically and monetarily, it caters to a wide variety of play styles, and it offers flexibility. If NetDevil can mimic some of the elements of Free Realms, LEGO Universe could be an even greater success because of the vast appeal of the IP. Meanwhile, a decision to ignore Free Realms as something completely dissimilar with a different target demographic could make a LEGO MMO a day late and millions of dollars short.

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