Has the TT Games Formula Gotten too Repetitive?

[Lego David]

Ever since the great success of the LEGO Star Wars game in 2005, TT games has been using the same formula for their LEGO games over and over again. You play through the story, do all the quests in the open world, and then you play through the story again in free play in order to collect all minikits and extras. With very few exceptions, this has been the format TT games has been using ever since 2005, and I think it has started to get a bit repetitive. Sure, each game is unique in it's own right, but after a while, you realize that you've been basically playing the same game, just with a different LEGO theme. 

[Agent2583]

I agree, it gets annoying very fast. I'd like to see a new concept done by them like a Racing Game.

[aidenpons]

Partly to play devil's advocate, TT has not kept their formula exactly the same since LSW1 all those years ago....

 

• Open worlds didn't exist for a long time (possibly LLOTR was the first open world, but I'm not sure) - there was an open 'level select' menu you could wander round (the Diner in LSW1), but that isn't the same as literally the world
• The addition of vehicles around LSW2 / Indiana Jones (not sure which came first) is absolutely great. Horses came around LLOTR and they're fun too.
• I often see a lot of discarded ideas - almost everything Lego the Hobbit tried new they seem to have scrapped, which is a great idea because the stuff in Lego the Hobbit sucked (build minigames which are stupidly hard to control, timing mining minigames, loot system). Only the stuff that isn't awful carries over to the next game
• The Lego Movie Videogame (not sure whether 1, 2, or both) have entirely brick-built environments, which are much nicer than the odd human-with-Lego-bricks-on-top of everything else aethestic.
• They've introduced a ton of new abilities since LSW1. Annoyingly, most of these are "press X when in character spot that accepts character with said ability,"

Also, don't forget the existence of Lego Worlds which, while it is for all intents and purposes dead, was still a totally different game from what TT usually develops. Shame it never got anywhere - it's a sandbox whereby you can build anything, but nothing matters, so you build nothing, and the gimmicky RPG aspects of fetchquests for items, taking bricks off Troublemakers, and needing to find unlockables first on randomly generated worlds which have a small chance of spawning doesn't help it out at all.

 

Also also, Bionicle Heroes is a thing that's very much not your standard TT game, and is almost a first person shooter. I really really enjoyed it, especially on my second playthrough (yes, I cared enough about a TT game to play it an entire second time) when I didn't get any upgrades. That was challenging, engaging, and fun.

 

But yes - for everything else, the gameplay is incredibly stale, consisting of using ability X on space Y with almost no entertaining puzzles, platform challenges that are awkward to control (the amount of times a double-jump has not got me where I want to go is staggeringly bad for nearly 20 years), bosses that consist of using ability X in time and place Y, an open world that means nothing with fetchquests that don't make any sense and can be completed by playing the game regularly...

... which doesn't stop it from selling well, which is why TT definitely keeps on doing these games as opposed to weirder things like Lego Worlds.

 

One of my bigger gripes with any modern TT game is the character bloat is stupendous and no way to sort between them. Can't I get a filter for "Can Double Jump?" Can't the ten variations of Luke Skywalker be packaged into the same character, but with the ability to swap between variations in a submenu? Can't I sort by "Is Part of Fellowship of the Ring?" Can't I select "Orcs Only?" Can't I search for "D e s t r " on my keyboard and the Destroyer Droid pops up? Can't I 'favorite' characters so I can recognise - or even better, jump to - them easily?

[TheDiplomat]

7 hours ago, aidenpons said:

Open worlds didn't exist for a long time (possibly LLOTR was the first open world, but I'm not sure)

LEGO Batman 2 beat it by a few months. Unless you count LEGO Indiana Jones 2's hubs, which had a lot of open-world like components to them. 

 

7 hours ago, aidenpons said:

it's a sandbox whereby you can build anything, but nothing matters, so you build nothing

Thank you for summing up why I'm mad at myself for buying LEGO Worlds when Stud.IO is free. :P

 

All-in-all, that's a great write-up of the state of TT games. Would be nice to get a LEGO game that does something both new and fun again. Some of the Skywalker Saga clips look sort of promising, but my expectations are quite low.