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by debugnik 460 days ago
> They all tried with new unknown franchises.

Does Lego still have any strong original franchises, though? It seems most of their set themes are third-party licenses now, and their original themes can't hold a candle to e.g. Bionicle back when I was a kid.

Then again their most popular games were all Lego Star Wars.
1 comments
mcphage 460 days ago
They have their City theme, and offshoots. That’s still popular, and has also led to a few decent tv shows. And the video game TT made from it—Lego City Undercover—is (to me, at least) the best of the Lego games.
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debugnik 460 days ago
Yeah City is the only strong one, I just think it would take a lot of work to turn these generic themes into actual franchises capable of holding a large game studio afloat. Hence why TT mostly sticks to third-party licenses.

Undercover might have been good, I haven't played, but I'm sure originally releasing on Wii U did it a disservice. Do you think there's some design formula or lesson in it for future original Lego games?

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mcphage 459 days ago
> Do you think there's some design formula or lesson in it for future original Lego games?

I think so—the big picture design is "GTA but with Lego", and it worked pretty well. At the very least, they should be able to pull off a sequel—perhaps set in a new city.

One advantage it had over more realistic GTA games: the city was divided up into districts, and each district had a different theme, inspired by a different real city or part of the world. That works well with lego, but not as great in a more realistic setting. So leaning on the juxtaposition of different elements would show off lego's breadth as well as emphasize the toy nature of the games.

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