Secret World Dev Rebuilds Lego MMO

[Karloff]

Secret World Dev Rebuilds Lego MMO


340 million minifigs inspire Funcom's latest MMO.

Lego's last MMO went down the toilet back in January, but there's at least one developer who still thinks the franchise is salvageable. Funcom, makers of such MMOs as The Secret World and Age of Conan, has taken on the Lego challenge, and announced its partnership with Lego Group today.

Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas enthusiastically welcomed the deal. "This is source material we all know and love," he said, "and we simply cannot wait to get started working with the Lego Group on realizing this exciting project." The announcement didn't go into great detail about the MMO itself, but cited Lego's massive range of minifigs - 340 million due to be produced in 2012 alone - as reason to celebrate the new franchise.

The massive range of minifigs didn't save Lego's own attempt at creating a branded MMO. When Lego Group decided to pull the plug, stating that not enough players had switched from free-to-play to paid subscription, 115 jobs went along with it. Funcom's experience in the MMO field has been mixed, much of it again down to money issues. Age of Conan went hybrid back in 2011, incorporating both free-to-play and subscription elements, not unlike Lego Group's failed offering; yet-to-be-released The Secret World is on subscription only, for the moment.

No word on a release date for the new Lego title.

Source: Eurogamer [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-06-28-lego-minifigures-mmo-announced-by-the-secret-world-dev]




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[LegoDudeGuy]

Lets hope Funcom does it better than Netdevil.

The main reason it flopped in my opinion is that it lacked a reason to keep playing after you beat the content, which you could easily do with the free 30 day subscription it gave you when you bought it. What was their to do? Deck out your minifig, keep building on your plot of land? Not very compelling reason to stick around.

Still hope this succeeds!

 

[cerebus23]

and minecraft has only a billion different mods, meaning you can run a game for you and your friends and do whatever, seems to me minecraft itself is a reason why a lego mmo is not needed at all, we have a multiplayer game thats freely moddable, you can download custom maps to explore and build on, you can create you own maps, and most importantly of all minecraft does the whole build stuff with blocks better than lego ever could.

only thing lego could bust out out all the licenses they hold for special skins and sell them that they have a ton of.

but i rather see someone build a 300 meter high portrait of some character that looks killer than pay lego to look like batman or something.

 

[oldtaku]

We need to be able to freebuild. That is all. Somehow they missed that last time around.