Apart from the numerous games and franchises that the Lego franchise has spawned, with crossovers among different fictional universes, a new entrant in the gaming department of the LEGO corporation has been released, called LEGO Worlds. And it promises Minecraft-like innovation, with the wonders of the LEGO universe.
The game was actually first announced last year as a direct competitor to Minecraft. The game has been made by experienced hands, since the developers, Traveller’s Tales, were the ones behind the LEGO Star Wars series of games as well. So, they probably know what they’re doing and by the looks of the trailer, the game looks just as majestic and explorable as we had imagined.
The plot is quite simple here – there is none. Instead, players are put into this open environment which consists of numerous procedurally-generated worlds that are made out of LEGOs. These worlds can be manipulated in any way that the player wishes and they are also quite interactive as well. The worlds are made to be as dynamic as possible in order to have them populate with other LEGO models, very similar to how Minecraft operates.
There are also a number of vehicles which can be used to traverse across these worlds, such as bikes, helicopters, gorillas and even dragons. The game will also offer multiplayer support with online multiplayer as well as split screen multiplayer.
When Kotaku sat down to play the game, they found that this was basically a virtual LEGO playground, where players could literally make figures out of LEGO bricks, in-game. This makes the whole experience a lot more fulfilling than Minecraft since the LEGO spirit can really be utilized here when searching for items to explore and creating new and unique structures. Of course, there are also quite a few prizes to find as the player explores the worlds and unlocks new hidden items in the process.
The game was first announced last November and will be making its debut on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as well as Steam, shortly. At $29.99, it will provide unlimited hours of gaming fun. Players are definitely going to draw comparisons among Minecraft and LEGO Worlds, and will probably call LEGO Worlds a duplicate, but they will still end up playing it more, because it is just that good.
It’s finally good to see LEGO come out with a game that actually shows what LEGO is about. About time, LEGO.
No matter what its developers say, there’s no escaping that Lego Worlds bears uncanny similarities to Minecraft. Of course, Mojang’s sandbox build-’em-up itself taps into the same simple pleasures of building whatever the imagination wants afforded by real Lego. This cyclical influence, along with two years of early access experience on PC, has allowed TT Games to craft a title that, while familiar, also stands on its own. Well, mostly.
For one, Lego Worlds has a story. Not a terribly complex one – it taps into the ‘mythology’ of the Lego movies, presenting players with the end goal of becoming a Master Builder, following a spaceship crash in the game’s opening moments. It’s scant plot material, but it does give players some direction, and a nice contrast to Minecraft’s sometimes daunting wilderness.
There’s more complexity to the worlds you’ll be exploring too. Rather than one near-infinite mass, Lego Worlds is split into biomes, each with their own challenges and resources, and drawing from real Lego toy sets. Exploring these environments will introduce plenty of recognisable gameplay mechanics to anyone who’s played the standalone Lego games – destroying objects to gather studs; easily dispatched foes to smack the plastic out of; simple quests to complete.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Unfortunately, not all biomes are available instantly. Access to new areas is awarded through collecting the now-familiar Gold Bricks, earned through completing tasks. This is the awkward trade-off that sits at the heart of Lego Worlds – it wants to give players the freedom to do whatever they like, but also guide them; to give access to all its features while using progression mechanics to reward completing missions.
Where matters get substantially more complex is in how you actually build and reshape the biomes once you’ve unlocked them. Lego Worlds packs in thousands of objects to build, but you uncover plans for them rather than construct at will, building them brick-by-brick. These often factor into quests, with characters asking for certain structures to be built or items delivered, but they can be placed or used ad-hoc. However, to add an object to your catalogue you’ll generally have to scan an existing version in the world, meaning the game feels padded as you run around committing everything to record.
Worlds feels fiddly, too. With a radial wheel of building tools to choose from, and an increasing library of menu screens for object designs, it can become frustrating trying to find the exact thing you’re looking for. With categories and subsections, TT Games has done a commendable job of trying to make the extraordinary volume of objects more accessible, but there’s still an almost overwhelming volume of stuff to wade through.
Vehicles prove a highlight too, something that, mine carts aside, Lego Worlds’ chief competition doesn’t have an easy analogue for. From Lego staples such as cars and boats to deep-earth mining drills and even dinosaurs, tearing around a biome without a purpose is still fun.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Ultimately, Lego Worlds isn’t as ‘pure’ a building sandbox as its rivals, but its also not as well-polished and focused as the likes of Lego Star Wars or the Lego Marvel games. Straddling the line between the two, this will pick up some fans of either, but doesn’t yet feel competent enough to take their places.
Hopefully, Worlds will prove more engaging as the game is refined – despite leaving Early Access, TT Games has plans to keep the game updated, and more user-created objects filter into the ecosystem, but for now, it’s likely to be the reserve of hardcore Lego fans more than anyone else.
To help address some issues introduced after the release of 1.42 on Tuesday, 4J Studios has released Minecraft update 1.43 for PlayStation 4. Here’s the bugs it fixes:
Fix for MCCE-4226 – Wrong LOD showing for non-block item icons in the UI.
Fix for MCCE-4227 – Nether portals sending players to the wrong portals.
Fix for seeds always appearing as “0” in Load World menu.
Fix for MCCE-4321 – Player may fall through the block below them when jumping in a confined space e.g small tunnel.
“We’re currently working on a bug fix update to address issues found in the last update,” 4J wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Thanks for your patience.”
An ETA for the update on other platforms wasn’t given.
Discussing the recently released Fallout Battle Map Pack, 4J Art Director David Keningale said:
We tried out various different scenarios to see how they would look as Battle maps and we could quickly see Fallout would fit really well. But we knew we couldn’t just take anything from Fallout’s open world and hope it worked: Battle maps have to be pretty self-contained. By contrast, we did think about doing things in a Vault but we felt it was too enclosed for the way that Battle plays and you might get lost in the tunnels a little bit too much. So we decided to take it above ground and condense some of our favorite areas from across the series.
The Fallout Battle Map Pack is available for $1.99 USD/£1.99 and includes three maps: Libertalia, Capitol, and the General Atomics Galleria.
[Source: 4J Studios (1), (2), Minecraft Forum, Minecraft] Read more at http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2017/03/03/minecraft-update-1-43-live-ps4-addresses-issues-1-42/#2LDGxKpshcvvQ0dt.99
Mojang’s Sisyphean quest to port all the features of the desktop version of Minecraft to the Pocket Edition continues. The latest update, 1.0.4, brings in NPC villager trading stalls and a new set of skins for the Biome Settlers. A bunch of other fixes and tweaks have been added in to smooth out gameplay and generally tidy up. The 1.0.4 update is now live on the Play Store, though it might take a day or two to roll out to your specific phone or tablet.
Trading with villagers in Minecraft is more or less the same as it is in any RPG: players can trade with specific characters to swap goods for money or vice-versa. Most villagers specialized in one particular resource, with more options unlocking as the player trades more and gains reputation with the specific merchant. The rules for which villagers can sell which resource are surprisingly complex – check this wiki article for the full breakdown.
The Strangers skin pack is a collection of vaguely horror-inspired outfits for the blocky settlers. They’re available in the in-game store for two bucks.
The other big change is that the Pocket Edition and the Windows 10 version of Minecraft are now compliant with the standardized add-on format. Existing add-ons on your custom servers should still work, as they’ll be automatically converted to the new format. In addition, the add-ons can be used to modify sound effects, music, and the core user interface.
Here are the rest of the smaller changes:
The models for the Shulker and Ender Dragon can now be edited using Add-Ons
Husks are now a little bit taller than Zombies
Baby Villagers now have adorable, larger-sized heads
Addition of CDN for downloading optional content, reducing game file sizes
Added low render distance options for older devices
Clicks are now registered when quickly right-clicking items in the inventory
Field of View will now increase properly when sprinting and Field of View is set to max in the settings
The Nether Star can no longer be destroyed by explosions
Capes will no longer appear when wearing Elytra
Fixed the hitbox on Stone and Wooden Buttons so they can no longer be stepped on by players and other mobs
Zombie Villagers of different variants now keep their professions when importing a world from 0.15.9 or earlier
Destroying a painting no longer destroys the block behind it
Ridden mobs (e.g. Spider Jockeys) can now be pulled into Minecarts
Villagers will no longer wander too far away from their Village and run slower when attacked.
Achievements no longer unlock in Survival if Behavior Packs are used
Several achievements fixed and will now unlock
Several texture issues fixed
Several crash issues fixed
The game no longer needs to be restarted before a shader pack is applied
Villagers will no longer do farming work if they’re not a farmer
Villagers are less greedy and will no longer immediately pick up items thrown at them. They’ll even throw food for other Villagers
A whole new building world, we sit down and chat with associate producer Chris Rose
After nearly two years of development, Lego finally has its very own sandbox building game called Lego Worlds on Xbox One, PC, and PS4.
Considering the Lego brand is so heavily associated with making and creating and the company is hardly new to the world of video games, it seems odd that we’re now only just seeing a creativity-focused game like Lego Worlds being released.
We sat down with the game’s associate producer Chris Rose to ask just why it’s taken developer TT Games so long to enter the open world building genre, how the game stands apart from its competitors, and what we can expect to see from it in the future.
We decided to get the obvious question out of the way first, and asked Rose how he feels about the natural comparisons to Minecraft – the unparalleled gaming success story that, at least initially, took its cues from the Lego toys.
“It’s not just Minecraft” Rose told us “there are a lot of building type games out there now […] we understand that we’re always going to get comparisons to all of them.”
It’s interesting that Lego has allowed the creative building game market to become so busy before entering the fray itself. But according to Rose this was simply a matter of waiting for “the technology to catch up” with their plans.
Though this wait has allowed Minecraft to become arguably the market leader, Rose says it was a wait that was for the best as it’s allowed TT Games to develop their game in a way that helps it to stand out.
“I think some of the biggest differences is what we call the terrains,” said Rose.
“Things like the brick resolution. What we mean by that is obviously a lot of the building games are just cubes, giant boxes and cubes, where we’ve kind of waited for technology to kind of catch up with us a little bit and we’ve got lots of slopes and more natural looking formations as a result.
It’s paid off really well, I mean, the terrain generation has been the single biggest challenge and yet the most rewarding thing to see in action so that’s a really big difference. The world’s definitely a lot more natural than maybe we could have done a while ago, so it’s good that we’ve waited for the tech to catch up.”
Though it seems odd to think that something tied to the Lego brand would wait to achieve more natural rather than blockish shapes – the words “Lego” and “block” are basically synonymous – Rose is right in saying that it helps the game visually stand apart from its main competition.
Make ’em laugh
Not only that, he says the Lego brand always has its distinct sense of humor behind it.
“I think what’s good is that we’ve kept our humor. It’s one of our biggest things. Every time we make a game we say: where’s the humor? A lot of the character and creature animations are very funny.
“The ostrich in particular. When someone rides on the back of that they do a sort of [makes a bobbing motion] so that kind of humor was there. We’ve kept it like a normal Lego game but we’ve also made enough differences from the other building games out there to make it stand on its own, even within our own game library.”
Having seen the game in action for ourselves, we definitely can confirm it’s not just a Minecraft copy. It’s very distinctly “Lego” in its humor, color palette and general spirit and we agree with Chris when he says “it’s a brand that has changed so much and yet hasn’t changed at all.”
So, though it’s definitely not just another Minecraft build, did TT Games take any inspiration from existing building games when it was developing Lego Worlds? Not really, says Rose.
Self-inspired
“To be honest one of our main inspirations was one of our older games itself. Lego Indiana Jones 2 has a level editor which was our kind of first foray into creation. It was one of the things we always said: how can we be more creative in the game? So we had Lego Indy 2 with this really cool level editor.
“Obviously it was limited because we’re talking [the PS2 console generation] so there’s only so much you can do without effectively running at maybe two frames a second.”
This was, however, he says “a really good first step” and another reason behind TT Games’ decision to “wait for the tech to catch up.”
“Generally speaking we’ve not looked too much at what everyone else is doing. We’ve just kind of know what we want to do. We’ll say ‘we’ve always wanted to do this so let’s do it.’”
Community collaboration
Of course something notable about Lego Worlds is the fact that it’s not just about what TT Games wants to do. The game has been in development for two years and for a large chunk of this time the game has been in Steam Early Access.
It’s unusual for such a big title to be open to the gaming community for such a long period of its development, but TT Games insist it was a good decision.
“It’s been great” said Rose with genuine sincerity, “It’s unusual for us to put ourselves out there so much. It’s taken a bit of risk; people can be quite brutal on the internet so it’s like ‘okay well let’s see what this is like’ and actually, to be honest, they’ve been awesome. We’ve had a really really good community of people come along.”
They’ve had an impact on a huge number of things that are in the final release version of the game, too.
According to Rose, they’ve influenced huge elements such as the game’s camera.
“The game camera completely changed, effectively. We added a first person view and we’ve never done that before, really. Certainly not to the kind of scale where you’re able to run around the entire environment.”
Then there are the smaller and more fun things the community has added. “We’ve got things like dinosaurs. People asked ‘where are the dinosaurs?’ And we said ‘that’s a good point where are the dinosaurs?’ So we put them in the game.”
Interestingly they also forced certain parts of the development process forward. Name, online multiplayer: “ Initially the idea was that it was going to be the last thing we added to the game when we came out of early access but [the community] were just ferocious for it so we thought let’s take a step back and do the multiplayer mode.”
The multiplayer mode at the moment is four player on PC and two player on console. The reason consoles have a lower player capacity is largely out of practicality and though the number might increase in the future it’s not certain just yet when.
“Console player numbers will stay at two players for now. We haven’t done it in a long time so we want to make sure it’s good and then we’ll look at expanding it later once we’re happy with the connection speeds everyone’s getting.”
Future facing
Expanded multiplayer isn’t the only thing that could be added in the future, either.
“‘Even though the game is finished in a sense it’s not finished” Rose told us. TT Games’ plan is to release the game and after a month or so step back in and say “okay, what’s everyone saying? What needs fixing? What can we add? There’s a wall of ideas at the moment.”
Could Lego Batman or Lego Harry Potter be among these additions? It doesn’t look likely at the moment.
“There are a lot of IPs for Lego and we’ve tried to keep this very core to Lego so it’s just our own themes at the moment like Ninjago and City Creator.”
Though the game is out for PlayStation and Xbox now, it’ll also be coming to the Nintendo Switch in the future. Unfortunately, there’s not much to say on that front just yet.
“We’ve only just started so it’s still early. Very very early so we’re not really in a place to comment on that at the moment.”
“I have played a Switch – I played Lego City on the Switch and loved it. But we’ve only really just started looking at the Switch now so again it’s time to step back and say ‘right we’ve got this other thing to look at now.’”
Though Lego Worlds has now been released, it seems like the creation will continue for TT Games for a while to come. But that just seems in the spirit of the thing.
A very small list of fixes have made their way to Minecraft: Xbox One Edition today, with single fixes to three separate MCCEs. The changes have been detailed in the change log that’s been released with Content Update 40:
Fix for MCCE-4226 – Wrong LOD showing for non-block item icons in the UI.
Fix for MCCE-4227 – Nether portals sending players to the wrong portals.
Fix for MCCE-4321 – Player may fall through the block below them when jumping in a confined space e.g small tunnel.
The changes are live right now for the Xbox Edition of Minecraft.
