The Lego video game series has touched pretty much every major tentpole franchise out there at this point. From Marvel to DC to Jurassic Park and onward. But probably none other has become more tied to it than Star Wars. There’s been a ton of Lego Star Wars titles, with another one coming next year in the form of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. With every film already being covered pretty extensively, what does developer Traveller’s Tales have in mind for another trip to the well? Quite a bit, it seems, as the company hopes to make the game an accumulation of everything they’ve done so far.
In an interview with GamesIndustry, game director James McCloughlin breaks down how the team has slowly added new content and features to the games, and how The Skywalker Saga will, in many ways, be the next step. It will be a more open-ended experience, where you can tackle planets and episodes in any order with improved combat. McCloughlin sees it as the most ambitious Lego game yet.
“We now have a greater toolset to evaluate play through analytics and user testing that just wasn’t as readily available fifteen years ago,” he says. “We can now very easily target sectors of play and enhance the areas we know get the most traffic, to help make the entire experience great from start to finish.
“One of the challenges of a game this size, with this amount of freedom is we don’t know what order everyone will play it. This adds more importance to how we develop and elevate the game. Freedom is a massive part of modern games — since the days of the cantina [in the early Lego Star Wars games], we have designed and developed over-world spaces from Middle Earth to Gotham City all with different challenges and hurdles to overcome. This game should be an amalgamation of all of what we have learned so far as a studio.”
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga will release in 2020 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. You can also check out our own interview with McCloughlin for even more information about the game in the meantime.