Building with Lego is a time honored tradition. No matter what your age or gender, you’ve worked with these plastic blocks to create some sort of masterpiece. Or, at the very least, a Lego knock-off. It taps into something deep inside, allowing a person’s imagination to run free. Digitally, we haven’t really had the full freedom to express ourselves with such things. There are Lego games, but building is often automated and only requires someone to hold a button until it’s done. Lego Worlds is the first game where people are going to really virtually play with the blocks as they did in real life. It’s just a shame that it’s so late to the party.
The thing about LEGO Worlds is that it’s doing something that a number of games already allow. Lego may have been the original tools we used in the real world for bringing ideas to life, but other digital titles filled the void while Warner Bros. and Traveller’s Tales put out things like LEGO Star Wars and Harry Potter . Minecraft and Terraria, followed by similar titles like Starbound, filled our needs.
Now that Lego Worlds is here on Early Access, it feels as though it will struggle to find a place. Yes, there’s the appeal of playing with digital Lego and using them to make masterpieces. Especially since the game promises to eventually add “sets” based on real-world ones into the title as time passes. But there’s also a sense of having to start over fresh and reestablish, when people have already sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands, of hours into similar games.
It’s immediately outpaced. The Early Access build of Lego Worlds doesn’t have all of its content yet. There isn’t even a means of interacting with other people within the realm of the game, sharing creations or visiting others’ brickscapes. When someone sees that, it doesn’t matter that eventually those features will be there. Games like Minecraft, Terraria , and Starbound are already past that point. It’s easier to jump in where communities are thriving.
And it may only get worse. Minecraft is up to version 1.8.6, with Mojang putting out updates at least once per month. Sometimes more. Terraria’s updates have grown less frequent with age, but a major June 30, 2015 upgrade to version 1.3 looms on the horizon. Lego Worlds has only just begun, and one has to wonder if it will spend the rest of its “life” attempting to catch up to similar games, copying their accomplishments and offerings so it can lure customers in by saying, “Hey! We can do that too! Only with digital Lego instead of textured cubes and pixels!”
I suppose the basic idea is that it’s difficult to look at Lego Worlds and think that the concept is nice, but also a little disappointing. The promise of something that could be great is there. It definitely has potential. But the thing is, Minecraft, Terraria , and other such games are already here and meeting our needs. Especially since they’re so much further along and offering so many additional features. Lego Worlds could prove to be something worth tooling around with eventually, but it’s difficult to look at it as something amazing, revolutionary, and that needs to be immediately acquired.