Emma Withington reports from the LEGO Worlds preview…
In a universe full of explorable LEGO chunks, dive – crash land – into a world made entirely out of LEGO, where dinosaurs, astronauts, dragons, and Peter Serafinowicz can coexist.
Explore. Discover. Create. Together.
After two years in Early Access on STEAM, LEGO Worlds is now on the home stretch to its full release on the 10th of March. Presented with the PS4 release version by Chris Rose (Associate Producer at TT Games), it was time to see the result of this gruelling process and if LEGO Worlds has become the game you hoped it would be.
LEGO Worlds aims to set itself apart from its video game siblings, by focusing on the creative heart of the LEGO brand rather than its story driven counterparts. While there are set objectives to obtain the signature Gold Bricks, which allow you to ascend the ranks to Master Builder glory, LEGO Worlds wants to give you as much creative and exploratory freedom as possible.
Starting out as an imperilled astronaut, listening to the dulcet tones of narrator Peter Serafinowicz, you crash-land into the first world: Pirate Playground – don’t panic, there’s an umbrella to break your fall, Buzz Poppins. Essentially a starter zone, its primary function is to introduce you to the concept and gameplay features of LEGO Worlds, with simple tasks to obtain your first three Gold Bricks. As you place the Pirate King’s throne and help another scallywag to complete her idyllic farm, you spend time getting used to the Discovery Tool – aka, don’t stop ‘till you scan enough. The Discovery Tool allows you to scan and collect new models, outfits, creatures, and vehicles from across the galaxy, summon them into other worlds and, eventually, your own. There are over 1000 items to collect, not including the LEGO bricks! Once you have some brand spanking new items, you can place them nicely or fling them across the world to your heart’s content; never seen pigs fly? You have now.
After scanning your first new character model, the Pirate King, you realise the myriad customisation options that will become available to you over time. You can play as specific models as you unlock them, or you can mix and match parts – from your characters’ head to the waistband and hands!
Once you’ve collected your first three Gold Bricks from Pirate Playground, which are required to repair your spaceship ‘PUG-Z’, you can take off and explore the galaxy map. Each time you get a set number of bricks, you unlock new starter worlds – this system continues until you have traversed the set course of bricky masses. After you’ve collected 100 Gold Bricks and risen in the ranks from Learner Builder to Master Builder, you are able to ‘Create a World’ of your very own, using everything you have obtained along the way. On my travels I scanned a skeleton, and it was time to take that skeleton in my closet out for a walk…
Each procedurally generated world is unique to every individual player, while the objectives remain the same, everything else is completely random. From the location of the objectives to the landscape, this terrain is explored only by you. Controlling your space/pirate/skeleton (Spiraton?) minifigure is simple and intuitive as you free climb brick structures, hop across the terrain, or use vehicles such as the Driller to penetrate the landscape and form underground caverns, lairs, or underworld networks. For the first time in a LEGO video game there is a first person camera view, allowing for an unadulterated building experience and full immersion in your world.
You see that mountain? That pirate ship? Want to remove them to make way for something else, like, an even bigger mountain?! You got it. The Flatten Tool will do exactly what it says on the tin and flatten your landscape down to a perfectly smooth surface – if you go all the way. Of course a large rectangular land mass isn’t exactly attractive, so LEGO Worlds has nifty tools to raise and blend your rectangle into a natural formation of LEGO bricks. If you’ve flattened an area and there are mismatched bricks as a base layer – never fear, Paint Tool is here! Allowing you to paint the landscape in a variety of colours and textures. Want a volcano, or bursts of magma? You can paint on environmental effects, such as lava, which will burn your minifigure’s butt if you’re not careful.
Chatting to Chris Rose about these features, he told me about some of his LEGO Worlds escapades with overflowing enthusiasm: “I love the landscaping tools, I love the ‘Flatten Tool.’ For a long time my favourite thing to do was just keep flattening…forever. It’s really cathartic, if I’ve had a bad day i’m just going to sit here and flatten the landscape – it’s a really good way of getting the stress out! It’s hard to describe what my favourite thing is now…yesterday I was just messing with the ‘Create a World’ function, and I made a sheet of ice full of monkeys! On a day to day basis I will change my mind as to what I want to do, there is just something wonderful about the sheer chaotic nature of it.”
LEGO Worlds seems like a natural progression for LEGO, but where did it all begin? “It’s something we have wanted to do for a long, long, long time. Something creative where we tap into the real potential of LEGO. We just want to keep expanding on the creative side of things, so we said – let’s not make something that’s too focused on story, let’s make something that’s purely about the creative tools and add something on top of that; another layer to give it the adventure aspect.”
From the birth of the idea, LEGO were fully on board with project ‘Badger’, as it was then known. Think about it for a minute and it will make sense…It was the matter of feasibility that came next: “We sort of dipped our toe into building a little while ago when we did LEGO Indiana Jones 2, with a level editor in which you could make your own micro levels. It worked really well, we had a good tool – it was something we were proud of and wanted to expand on, to make something even more creative and bigger; we just needed the technology to catch up to what we wanted. The brick resolution – in a lot of building games – is just giant cubes or small squares if you’re in a 2D environment, or maybe triangles. We wanted to make sure we had the LEGO slopes, lots of different brick types naturally occurring in the world. To do that we needed a lot of processing power to draw the mesh and then draw the collisions, so you don’t fall through it straight away. We said, ‘right, we’re not ready to make this because the technology just isn’t there for us yet.’ We didn’t want to rush it out and get it wrong, you only really get one shot at this sort of thing!”
LEGO Worlds is the most unique of the LEGO games so far and has required a lot of time to trial and test the experience. As the first LEGO game to get involved in STEAM Early Access, we talked about how big of an impact Early Access has had on the development process: “It’s been huge for us. It’s the first time we’ve really put ourselves in the position where we can interact day to day with the community – putting ourselves out there a bit more than we normally do, so it was different. What we noticed was that people took to it really quickly and they understood what we were trying to achieve. We said, ‘it’s going to take a long time to get this right and we actually want to hear what people are saying’ – what do you guys want LEGO Worlds to be? It’s alright saying what we want it to be, but what do you expect?”
During Early Access the team received a portion of feedback from the technical minded, those with active suggestions for camera, UI (User Interface), textures, and so on: “A lot of technical feedback came in, which was great because sometimes it’s nice to have these people come along and say, you could do this or that better. A lot of that came down to the game camera, which has massively changed from how it was before. The UI is completely different, we went through four iterations of the UI. The third iteration we scrapped pretty much straight away – it was horrible and just didn’t work!”
Not only did they receive technical titbits, but comments focusing on where content may have been ‘lacking’ within the worlds: “From a content point of view we were asked, ‘where are the dinosaurs?’ A great point, where are the dinosaurs?! So they’re now in the game – loads of little bits and pieces like that came out of Early Access.” For the record, kudos to those who pushed for dinosaurs, they are top-notch in game and like the majority of other creatures can be used as mounts (Dragons, people!)
It is impossible to talk about Early Access without, of course, discussing the online mode: “This has had a big influence from the Early Access crowd. We always said the last thing we would do would be online, because we needed to get everything else sorted and then we could hook up the online code afterwards – but people were just so desperate to get hold of it and play with friends. We said, ‘OK we’re actually holding this back a little bit now, we also don’t know how people are going to behave when they get online.’ So we took a step back from what we were doing and decided to put the online mode in, fixed it, got it working and put it out there. Everyone in the community just went, YES! Collaborative building, collaborative quests – and we thought ‘wow, OK we were right to do this now.’ If we had left this too late we probably would have missed a trick! There are just so many things we’ve learned from the players, and some of the stuff they make is unbelievable!”
A feature that is in its preliminary stages is the ‘Brick Build Showcase’, in which the developers will be uploading downloadable creations weekly. The idea is to expand that into fully fledged community sharing – the first couple of models are from Early Access players. One of which is a giant red octopus in the clouds…Chris told me about more of the mind-boggling creations he has seen so far: “We’ve noticed there are a lot of Lord of the Rings fans who like our volcanic biome – Mines of Moria has come up a few times. There are these four guys making Mines of Moria and it’s just ridiculous – the scale! We’ve seen lots of historical structures like the Eiffel Tower. Someone made the Taj Mahal and it’s unbelievable how accurate he’s made it! We’ve also seen some really wacky structures, that are more like sculptures (big red octopus^). One guy brought his early access save file to us and it was a 500gb file because he’d been playing it so much! The only way I can describe it, is that it looked like the city from Blade Runner – it just had so much detail to it, and you think, ‘wow this is incredible!’ To see people do that and take to it so quickly, it’s just amazing – we’ve definitely hit something here!”
While the online mode is a huge boon, particularly for the PC gamer, it’s always worth mentioning that LEGO games are champions of keeping local multiplayer alive – which remains the case in LEGO Worlds and is riotous fun. Something that cropped up within the comments from Early Access players addressed the map sizes and the fact that they, allegedly, don’t self-generate past a certain point. Chris elaborated as to what this was all about: “They are fixed world sizes now and there are a few reasons for that, one is memory saving because everyone shouldn’t have to have a 500gb hard drive to get the most out of it! Originally it was so big you would never hit the end before your hard drive exploded. With this version we have a limit of 4gb save files – so we’ve taken advantage of that. It actually does fit the narrative and the gameplay a little bit more this way, with the idea of chunks of earth in space…However, the big worlds are huge, it takes a long time to traverse them, so even if they’re not ‘unlimited’, realistically you would have to do a lot to fill that world. If you are doing that, then maybe we’ll have to evaluate how big our worlds are at that point.” From what we experienced on the day, this appears as a very minor issue, if one at all, considering A: The number of worlds you can modify, and B: The size of your own world.
There are inevitable comparisons to Minecraft, which I have personally avoided until now. LEGO Worlds is categorically not Minecraft, it has a very different structure and is not as much of a crafting grind. I can live without searching for diamonds and constantly hitting upon lapis lazuli…What I mean to say is, both games have their own place in the world and, realistically, it’s impossible to say that LEGO of all things is a clone of a construction based game, which has been the heart of the property for generations: “The landscape now looks visually very different to what people would expect from any building game, on top of that we’ve got the vehicles, the creatures, the characters, and our own personal humour added in there. You’re always going to get that comparison and we already knew that was going to happen, but now people have had a chance to see it they go, ‘oh hold on this is way different – the only thing that is the same is that you can build stuff.'”
TT Games has always shown dedication to the fans of the LEGO brand, and in LEGO Worlds they have shown an extra level of care through meticulous tweaks, getting hands-on with the fans, and ensuring the game works for their audience. The result is that of a very fine tuned instrument and a lot of that is down to you, the community that helped shape the game. I wouldn’t underestimate this game by dismissing it as ‘yet another Minecraft’, as it carries all of the quirks and charms of any physical LEGO set in a digital world – the signature humour, creativity, and scale of what you can achieve. LEGO Worlds allows you to create that set you always wanted, but could never get your hands on!
Availability: PS4, PC, and Xbox One from March 10th. To be released on Nintendo Switch at a later date.
Emma Withington – Follow me on Twitter
