Comparison to LEGO Universe

[whumps]

I was one of the few actual paying customers of LEGO Universe for the year or so that it was a thing. True story. That project was an indispensible volume on how to fail with an mmo game. I blame two things: The pay model and the fact that Travellers' Tales didn't develop it.

Anyway, this game seems to be a reasonable facsimile for that game, perhaps with more blocky, stylized "violence". Two questions: How big is the online community, and what makes this fun? And are there griefer/troll issues online? Ok, that's three questions.

[Hugums]

Online community is quite large, I'm gonna say 10 thousand active players or so. Trolling is an occasional issue but a well moderated server will have no problems at all. The thing that makes this game fun is that it's just a great toybox for building. Anything you can imagine you can build and with free add-on brick packs you can get even more expansive. Plus the weapon and gamemode add-ons that are available expand the gameplay infinetly. It's also a little like minecraft in that you need to set a goal to accomplish, wether it's build the next massive amazing build or to use the ingame coding style system, called eventing, to make the next great interactive experience. If you want to go to a Death Match server and shoot people up that's certainly available, and if you feel like Roleplaying in a family or as a dragon there's probably a server that can cater to that too. It's a great game, I spent twenty dollars on it six years ago and still play it to this day. Best twenty I've ever spent.

[jamesster]

Hey. I played LU from the start of alpha testing in 2009 to its final day in January 2012. Blockland and LU are very different games, I wouldn't try comparing them to one another - LU was an MMO, Blockland is a sandbox game. With that said, I've had a lot of fun with Blockland, and encourage you to give it a try.

Oh, some fun history - Blockland's original freeware version was released in 2004. Its creator, Eric Hartman/Badspot, showed it off to LEGO at a convention sometime in 2005, and they offered to buy the game and hire him as a developer: http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=4374.0 As you can read there, the deal fell through (LEGO backed out of it), and the LEGO elements were removed from Blockland so Badspot could make the game commercial.

Now here's where things get interesting - it was in October of 2005 that LEGO contacted NetDevil about making an online LEGO game. That game became LEGO Universe. LU was finally released in 2010 after five years of development, and was shut down merely fifteen months later. It's now almost 2014 and Blockland just got onto Steam.

Now, I'm not saying for sure that LEGO ditched Blockland for NetDevil/LEGO Universe, but when you compare the timing of everything, it's really quite uncanny. But regardless, LEGO Universe died out quickly and Blockland is still going strong. Your move, LEGO.

[Franc]

^ I just want to say you just owned LEGO.