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Building the LEGO MMO
Gamasutra has a lengthy interview with NetDevil's Ryan Seabury, creative director for LEGO Universe, which is due to launch next month. He talks about some of the difficulties in graphically optimizing a game with so many discrete, interactive objects, and mentions that they'll be keeping an eye out for inappropriate contructs to avoid problems similar to those that cropped up with Spore. "One thing we can say is when you build models you have your own property, and you can share that if you want to. If you share something publicly, it will be monitored by a human before it's seen by other people." Seabury also explains their desire to keep the game simple, using players' creativity as a driving force, as well as NetDevil's decision to stay away from a micro-transaction business model.
"As a comparison, a two by eight LEGO plate brick, a very simple brick, is about twice the polygons of say, a World of Warcraft avatar."
Eh?
Ur doin it wrong?
Maybe they're not, and I'm sure that they know what they're talking about after such a long dev cycle, but that just doesn't seem right to me.
Hey, I played lego heaps when I was a kid - and we had no chat, or public areas to share the creation in. If the game is close enough to the real thing, the censorship will be a non-issue. Of course, I doubt it will be - tactile sensation and physical objects aren't replacable by images.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It's hyper-censored in the sense that everything is checked before it's let loose on the general public. But it's not meant to be extremely restrictive.
Except that it is. The chat system is so restricted that it's almost impossible to communicate. It's actually forbidden to say phrases in chat that actually appear in chat generated by the game itself! It's so bad that I feel it's dangerous to children's development. I'd rather have it uncensored, than have children think that this kind of out-of-control censorship is an acceptable model.
... and then they built the supercollider.