LEGO Universe producer Ryan Seabury sat down with us last week to talk about the future of the massively multiplayer online game. Seabury says that a core group of 50 LEGO users have already started messing around with the game, building in-world models and adding to their own private game maps. Some of that content may even make it the final game when it launches sometime in 2009.

As they work on the game, Seabury says that NetDevil is trying to identify what is "really core LEGO play" and not create a directed adventure like you find in the Traveller's Tales games. In fact, he hopes that the game could get people to do the same in the real world. Right now, it seems that lots of kids buy the pre-packs to make the models found on the box cover. Seabury says playing the game inspires he and his child to actually take their virtual creations and make them with real-world LEGOs.

Seabury also talks about how LEGO Universe will compare to LittleBigPlanet and Spore when it comes to user created content. It's a chunky, though interesting interview if you have the time.

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On it's surface LittleBigPlanet is a very unique game, a highly-stylized title packed with evocative smiley-faced character and oozing charm. But for some reason I can't shake the feeling that deep down it is in some ways reminiscent of Spore.

I think both games are playing around with the concept of user-created content, of delivering more a system of creativity than play. In fact, the folks that I've spoken to from both teams say things that could be about either game. They both talk about giving gamers a pallet of creativity, of broadening the user experience by handing over control of the game to the gamers.

The chief difference I see between the two games is that they've approached the idea of shared creative control from opposite sides of the same coin.

In Spore you're given a game and the tools with which to populate it. In LBP, from what I've seen, you're given characters and the tools in which to create their world.

At least that's what I thought, but when I floated that past the LittleBigPlanet guys earlier this week they totally shot it down.

"LittleBigPlant allows you to create your own characters and world," Kareem Ettouney, Media Molecule art director, explained. "And it doesn't stop there. You can animate your own creations, you can make them speak to you.

"That exceeds just the aesthetic."

Ettouney, like Wright, believes that user created content has the potential to push the medium of gaming forward.

"At the end of the day people have so much to say, to do, to express," Ettouney said.

Mount & Blade is like that quirky girl who sits behind you in art class - you don't talk to her because you're afraid the much-hotter girl who sits next to her won't talk to you if she sees you talking to the quirky girl. The much-hotter girl in this case is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with its uber-amazing graphics and wide-open story land of medieval fantasy fun. Mount & Blade, like that quirky girl, has very little to do with Oblivion beyond the fact that they're the same gender. It too, is a wide-open adventure for PC, but the similarities stop there as Oblivion persists in creating epic fantasy while Mount & Blade focuses on recreating realistic 14th century life.

Scared off already, huh? Shame on you; the quirky girl always has a great personality.

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Before my hands-on time with Guitar Hero: World Tour the other day, I got a chance to sit down and share a beer with Neversoft's project director for the title, Brian Bright, a rather personable fellow who knows the entire history of the band Sisters of Mercy, which makes him okay in my book. Since we were sitting there discussing music anyway, I figured I'd ask him if he was worried at all about the competition. Well, first I asked him if he was concerned about Konami's Rock Revolution, which he said he'd never seen, neatly summing up exactly how much competition they're bringing to the genre.

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Blizzard's team doesn't care for the term "killer app", used to describe a program or product — in this case, a certain MMO — that single-handedly shaped the market around its platform. In fact, when we asked about World of Warcraft's unshakable hold on the massively multiplayer biz, game director Jeffrey Kaplan was humble.

"I don't believe that WoW is untouchable", he said. "I completely believe that a game could come out and be more successful than WoW. I'm hoping that we're working on it right now".

Designing and developing any MMO, Kaplan said, simply distills down to a series of choices. "I think a lot of other companies have had great opportunities to do what WoW has done... usually for whatever reason, they miss the mark".

"I actually feel really bad, a lot of times, when new MMOs come out and don't do really well, because I'm not thinking of it from a business perspective. I know what it's like to be a developer on a team that you believe in on a game that you just love, and for some reason, you don't get enough time, or someone makes a bad decision... everybody's making a lot of small choices, and when those go wrong, your game ends up not successful".

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When I met Jay Wilson today, Blizzard's lead designer on Diablo III, I opened our conversation with two loaded little words: Art direction.

I didn't need to say any more, of course, because Wilson already knew about the fan-fit I was referring to. "It's a complex issue", he said. "It's been a big issue online, but for the most part, the response we've gotten has been very positive. We've got petitions, a few people on forums [who are] very loud, but it's really more of the 'squeaky wheel' syndrome".

"Certainly, internally there's no doubt. I would tell people who don't like the art style that probably, getting the art style was the hardest thing".

But there's a careful method to all of it, Wilson explained:

Wilson said that what we see now is the third iteration on the Diablo III design. As with many of the decisions the developer makes, much of the art design issue was based in gameplay principles.

"Diablo is a game you play for, hopefully, hundreds of hours, and one of the rewards is a variety of different-looking environments". People looking back on old Diablo, he said, may have a selective memory. "People remember the Act I dungeons... but they kind of conveniently forget the green fields of Act I, and all of Act II... and it's palaces, its bright deserts".

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We now know that World of Warcraft will get achievements added in when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion comes, and when we sat down with Blizzard today we got to discuss them, learning about some of the kinds of actions and behaviours that will earn you those achievements.

"We've wanted to add them for a long time", WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan, who is as enthusiastic in person as he appears in this picture, told Kotaku. "I'm a huge fan of achievement systems in other games; I love Xbox's system, and I also think Steam did a really good job in introducing achievements. We always talked about it for WoW... [since] players are always measuring themselves against other players".

Why the decision to include achievements, then, with such a heavily status-based leveling system at the core of WoWs mechanics? Big difference, said Kaplan: "With levels, you're gaining tremendous character power... skills, abilities, access to more items and areas... with the achievement system, we really wanted it to be a history of your accomplishments. Not gaining character power through it... we wanted it to be a reflection of your character's power".

So how does it work? Squirrels ensue:

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Innovation, we want innovation! That's the clarion call every year, isn't it? Reviewers often levy harsh criticisms on sequels and expansions that don't sufficiently change the standards set by their predecessors, and games that seem too obviously to be imitating the successful mechanics of other titles can get dragged through the mud.

World of Warcraft game director Jeff Kaplan has a different perspective, though. When we spoke to him today, he said, "I don't want to undervalue innovation, but there's sometimes the wrong focus on innovation. I think you innovate when you need to... and I also think the best innovations are things that people overlook and don't even recognise as being innovative".

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The development talent at Blizzard now has a new publisher and parent in Activision Blizzard. If you ask the developers, they're enthusiastic about the change. "All game development is still completely within our Irvine headquarters", World of Warcraft game director Jeffrey Kaplan told Kotaku during our sit-down today. "There's no outside influence at all in the development of Diablo 3, StarCraft 2 or WoW".

In fact, Blizzard sees an upside to being hitched to the Activision star. "They have a lot of expertise in the console area, where we're very-headed in addition to PC and online", Kaplan said.

"Activision's point of view is, there's a lot of trust in Blizzard and what we do. Activision's just trying to figure out how we work and try to learn from us".

But Activision's an ambitious company. CEO Bobby Kotick has talked in the past about monetizing massively multiplayer environments, competing with iTunes, even evolving pricing models for consoles. Does Activision have the power to change the way Blizzard monetizes WoW, if it wants to?

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When's Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King expansion for WoW coming out? When it's done. So how does that jive with previous Blizzard comments by COO Paul Sams that suggest the company plans to release a new expansion every twelve months?

Today, Kotaku spoke to WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan, who was able to offer some clarification.

"That is our goal, and sometimes it gets taken in a weird direction", he said. "Like you're failing [if] you're not releasing an expansion each year. It's probably going to be a long time before we get to the point where we are releasing an expansion each year".

Kaplan explained what the team would rather focus on:

"Our goal is to make an awesome experience, and obviously we felt that Lich King needed more time to get to where it needed to go", he said.

So while Blizzard is still aiming for annual expansions, "We're never going to slim down the content in order to make an annual date".

Kaplan told us that the developers who work on content and patches are the same team members who work on expansions. Those developers, he said, are "core to the quality of both the patches and expansions, and we aren't going to sacrifice the quality of one or the other just to get an expansion out".