Very often my reaction to the news coming out of the game's industry is negative, so given the chance to reflect on the life of Lego Universe, I wanted to take the time to say something positive. Sadly, the servers supporting the game are set to shut down come January of next year.
Few things have been able to scratch my sim game itch due to their artificial limitations, but here was a game that fully embraced the idea of letting the player do things however they wanted. The game faced many issues, among them the release of MineCraft, poor advertising, and a bad translation to the free-to-play model, but the concept at it's core promised something that could have truly been great, given the time and attention it deserved.
It will be a long time before any studio outside of the indie scene will try something like this again, and I hope that when the time comes around again for an experiment that it will be both better handled and better received. The future of sandbox and sim titles lies in the direction Lego Universe was trying to drive them, and we are all set back by it's end.
Nerf Red Blocks.
Needs to have better control of characters in the game. Navigation was annoying.
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