Building an MMO - Brick By Brick

We're taking an approach that's basically an accessibility curve. If you start with the simplest thing, that's probably the LEGO Star Wars games that Traveller's Tales built, you walk up to a pile of bricks, hold a button... and you're not doing anything creative, but the conceptional experience you're walking away with is that you built the bridge to solve the problem.

I think that's great, because it captures the magic of LEGO coming together in the way that it builds things - and everybody can do that, it's simple. That's the starting point. From there, what we're going to layer on top of that as far as LEGO Universe goes is the next step, which is modularly designing something.

So you can build a rocket which will take you to different places - you'll be able to customise that from different models that you've found and collected, and put it together. That's also simple, and pretty much anybody can do it.

Then the next step up is free build, or brick-by-brick - literally design something from the ground up with elements you've collected, and that starts getting a bit more complicated, so we expect to see some fall-off there. Because is it different to putting LEGO together in real life, right?

It's a magical thing, and when it translates literally to the computer screen it's not quite the same experience - so what we're trying to do is look at ways to keep the mini-figure connected to it, so it doesn't lose its emotion, and feel like a boring 3D application in which you're moving things around. The mini-figure is involved in constructing things, and we're making a lot of effort on that.

Beyond there you can get even more complex and bring your creations to life - that's the whole vision we have. Not only will you be able to build models that look cool, but they actually do things, and people can interact with them. Of course, that takes a whole other level of thought.

You look at something like LittleBigPlanet, which I think is a fantastic game, and really cool, great styling - but I think they jumped from playing the game, and then you have to create an entire level. It's overwhelming a little bit, there are so many things. When you talk about level design you've got to think about the entire player experience, so with the modular building steps on the way up there we're going to try and focus you into worrying about one object first that does something - and not the whole landscape that's out there.

We're trying to keep that accessibility curve, so once you're comfortable designing objects that are interactive, then you take the next step into a deeper complexity rating.

Definitely - I haven't met a person yet that doesn't like LEGO.

I think a lot of people are excited about LEGO Universe - because any of us that grew up with LEGO, you have a fond memory of it. It's always a positive childhood thing, and here's a chance where there's an MMO - there are things for you to do in there. There are probably a lot of people, even people who don't have kids, who'll probably pick it up and play it for that reason. It's cool to start with to make yourself as a mini-figure... but then to develop that character, get all this gear and do cool abilities with them, start creating a place that's your own and build your house and whatever else...