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.
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?
> 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.
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?