In March, Warner Bros is bringing its sandbox title Lego Worlds to console after nearly two years in open development.
The PS4 and Xbox One versions – with Nintendo Switch to follow – overhaul controls and add in story elements, but remain a Lego fans digital dream: a massive palette where almost anything imaginable can be built out of Lego, without the threat of stepping on a misplaced brick.
WIRED speaks with Chris Rose, associate producer at developer TT Games, on Lego Worlds‘ differences to certain other brick building games, lessons learned from releasing the game on Early Access, and whether Lego Batman will be making an appearance.
WIRED: How do you feel about the inevitable Minecraft comparisons?
Chris Rose: It’s not just Minecraft – we get compared to all the different building games, I’ve heard just about every comparison out there! I’d say the biggest differences we’ve got would be the brick resolution, which improves the terrain. A lot of sandbox games are what we call voxel-based, so cubes, or smaller cubes making up larger cubes. Generally speaking, they’re set to a few shapes, and that’s how you build the world around you.
We were adamant we wanted to make sure the worlds were as natural looking as we could get them, using slopes and bricks of all sorts of shapes and sizes. We felt, being Lego, there’s no ‘default’ – every brick is as relevant and useful as the next one, so it was important the terrain looked like it included as much Lego as possible.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Then we have the active vehicles, things like drills and steamrollers; tools like bazookas to blow up huge chunks of terrain; creatures like dragons and T-rex that you fly and ride. I think we’re at the point now [from Early Access] where people have finally recognised that actually, Lego Worlds is a very different game. The only similarity to other builder games is that, well, you can build stuff.
How does the difference in Lego brick shapes meaningfully change the experience?
It lets you create at a different scale. If you’re building something that has a lot of roundness to it, you have to make it quite big when you’ve only got cubes available to you. We’ve given you the shapes to make objects on a much smaller scale. If you want a bigger scale, you can do that anyway, but it means you don’t have to do huge recreations of stuff – you can build 1:1, or slightly bigger or smaller.
We’ve also added tons of door and window types. It sounds pretty simple but a bank vault door is pretty big – you want to make sure it feels weighty as well, like you can’t easily destroy it.
You launched in Early Access on Steam in 2015. What have you learned in that time?
First and foremost how much people wanted this game to be made. We knew people would like it, but we were blown away by how positive people were towards it. Even the negative reactions weren’t full blown “we hate this” – they were reasoned complaints that made sense. [It gave us] information to take on board, so we could reconsider some of the decisions we’d made.
[For instance], the UI has changed four times in the past two years, and one of those never even saw the light of day. We hated it, it wasn’t good enough.
Mainly, we wanted to try out new stuff. Because we were in Early Access, we were in an environment where you can use some trial and error – people are a bit more forgiving when you have that approach.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Bringing the game to consoles, how have you adapted the more precise controls of mouse and keyboard?
We’ve iterated the controls four or five times, with all sorts of tests – bringing kids in, public tests, and feedback from the community.
We’d supported controllers [on PC], but with mouse and keyboard you can get in close. My approach was that [in any form] a pointer should act like a trackpad. I used to exclusively play Worlds in Early Access on a trackpad. I thought the [controller’s] thumbstick should behave in a similar manner, so we used that as a focus. The pointer behaves in places like you’d expect a mouse to, just a very slow mouse, but the actual building tools themselves are finely tuned so they don’t shoot off or snap bricks out of place.
You’ve announced you’ll be allowing players to share their Lego Worlds creations – how will that work?
It’ll be involve sharing models more than whole worlds, because the world data size is massive. We don’t want to over-do it and eat up people’s bandwidth usage. We settled on the models as they’re a lot smaller – some of them are only a few megabytes. The idea is you’ll use a tool in-game to copy what you want to capture, go into a micro-editor, and when you save it there’s a tick box to upload it to our servers.
Will you allow world sharing if there’s demand?
I wouldn’t say it’s inconceivable [but we’ll see] if we get enough feedback. What we have said is that when the game is out we’re going to do something very similar to what we did in Early Access – every once in a while, we’re going to step back and absorb the information, listen to what everyone is saying.
We’ll do that for the release of the title, as we’re effectively starting over with more people involved, with Xbox and PlayStation players coming in. If people turn around and say they want to share their entire world, then we’ll figure something out.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Will user-created content be cross compatible between formats?
The model file is Lego’s own system. If you have the LDD tool – Lego Digital Designer – there’s a filetype called LXFML. You could build something on the PC version now in LDD, import it into your save file folder, and it’ll work in the game. Obviously you can’t get into the directories on console, but it’s still LXFML that we use, so shared models will be cross compatible.
Lego games are almost synonymous with licenced characters – will other properties be coming to Worlds?For now, we’ve taken the approach that [i]Lego Dimensions was the mash-up. We’d like Worlds to sit in its own bubble for a while and be free of those IP approaches, or being tied into all that. We’re trying to focus it very heavily on the Lego themes – City, Creator, Minifigs for characters – and we’ve found that’s working quite well. Some people are asking us “can we get a Star Wars pack, an Indiana Jones pack, a Lego Batman pack?” It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s just that we think we’ve done those in other ways, so we don’t want to over-do it. It’s nice to have a game that isn’t tied into any other franchises.
Lego Worlds launches on PS4 and Xbox One on March 10; the Nintendo Switch release date for the game has not been revealed.
Though previously available on Windows Phone 8, Minecraft developer Mojang dropped support for Microsoft’s older mobile OS back in October of last year.
Minecraft: Pocket Edition’s arrival on Windows 10 Mobile now means those who’ve upgraded will also finally catch up on major updates that they have missed out on since, including Achievements and support for Realms, add-ons, and texture packs.
A Minecraft in every phone
The ultra-popular brick building game coming to Windows 10 Mobile may as well just be a formality at this point, with the game already selling over 100 million copies and counting, and the handheld Pocket Edition and console ports outselling the PC original almost 2 to 1.
That said, it’s still amusing to think that one of the latest systems to just now get in (or rather, back in) on one of gaming’s biggest, best-selling brands is Microsoft’s own, considering it owns Minecraft after purchasing Mojang for $2.5 billion back in 2014.
Thankfully for owners of the previous version, anyone who purchased the game for Windows Phone 8 will be able to download the Windows 10 Mobile version at no additional charge.
Today is Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire‘s last day of crowdfunding, and it has passed some big milestones. Fig announced that the PC, Mac, and Linux role-playing game is the most successful campaign ever for the crowdfunding site, right now achieving over $4.2 million with about five hours left to go. Fig also noted to GamesBeat that this is the first crowdfunded game to pass $4 million since 2015, with Shenmue 3 (6.3 million) and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night ($5.5 million).
Both of those game’s were on Fig competitor Kickstarter. Unlike Kickstarter, Fig allows for equity backing, which could give people a share in a game’s profits. Before Pillars of Eternity II, Psychonauts 2 was Fig’s most successful crowdfunding campaign. It raised over $3.8 million.
The original Pillars of Eternity raised $3,986,929 on Kickstarter in 2012, making it the No. 4 game in Kickstarter history. Since then, Obsidian chief executive officer Feargus Urquhart helped start Fig. This is the first Obsidian project to appear on Fig.
Obsidian is famous for its RPGs, which includes hits like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and South Park: The Stick of Truth.
The big, recently released Star Wars mobile game is getting its first wave of new content.
Netmarble is updating Star Wars: Force Arena, its head-to-head strategy battler, on iOS and Android today. This patch is the publisher’s first major attempt to bring changes to the game, and that means a shift in how seasons work, new units, and an upgraded user interface. Force Arena plays a lot like Supercell’s 2016 mobile hit Clash Royale, but it features hero characters like Han Solo and Boba Fett that players control and use in conjunction with grunts like Rebel soldiers and Stormtroopers. Updates like this keep the game running smoothly, but it should also potentially bring lapsed players back to the game and get them spending money on the microtransactions.
One of the biggest changes to Force Awakens is how its reward system works. These balance tweaks will increase the likelihood that players will get powerful units that can compete at a higher level. New units are the other major tweak. Force Arena now has an Aqualish Engineer and Wed Treadwell Droid, which can each repair turret units for the Rebel Alliance and the Empire, respectively.
“We are happy to announce an upgraded reward system into Star Wars: Force Arena, which will give players more gold packs and leader cards,” Netmarble chief marketing officer Seungwon Lee said in a statement. “The two new characters will bring in more strategy into the game as we expect more players to enjoy and have fun and play with their favorite Star Wars characters.”
Additional changes to Force Arena include improvements to guilds, trading, and the tutorial.
Developer Mojang has updated Minecraft for Windows 10 Mobile, and you can get it for free if you already own it and update your Windows Phone 8 device to Windows 10 Mobile. In this version of the game, players can access important new features like achievements, the update that adds Minecraft’s The End region, and the Realms multiplayer functionality. That support for Realms also means that you can use your Windows 10 Mobile smartphone to log into official Mojang servers to play online with you friends on iPhone, Android, or Windows 10 PCs.
“We stopped shipping Minecraft updates for Windows Phone 8 back in October last year,” Mojang developer Marsh Davies wrote in a blog post. “Of course, players can still carry on building and exploring their worlds as they always have, but, to get access to the newest Minecraft goodies, DLC, and other fun stuff, you’ll have to upgrade to the Windows 10 Mobile version of the game.”
This is a small part of Mojang and Microsoft’s efforts to bring all of Minecraft under one code base. The game still runs on separate foundations when it comes to the original PC version, the console versions, and the mobile versions, but the company has made a lot of effort to bring all of the mobile versions into parity. Moving ahead, the companies have a long-term plan to further join together the various offshoots of Minecraft across platforms.
Swedish National Land survey has put its maps on Minecraft to promote its work
Since December 2015, anyone playing popular sandbox game Minecraft has been able to build their worlds on the actual map of Sweden.
Lantmäteriet, the Swedish National Land survey, launched the country’s maps as Minecraft-friendly downloads to increase interest in geospatial information and open data, particularly among younger citizens.
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Tideström introduced the idea of a Minecraft Sweden in August 2015, and the complete map of Sweden and individual maps of each of its 290 municipalities were released to the public four months later. “For a governmental department, we completed the project very fast,” said Tideström. Lantmäteriet had a small internal team working on the project while the map data was converted to Minecraft by outside consultants using FME mapping tools.
The maps have gathered over 19,000 downloads to date, but Tideström believes their reach is far wider through the visibility of the project and the use of the maps in various other projects, such as a competition for schools to design a future city in the municipality of Kiruna.
“We were surprised that municipalities and organisations have started to use Minecraft as an actual planning tool for city development and have a dialogue with citizens,” said Tideström. “It is an easy way to translate maps into 3D, which makes it far easier for people to see how their city will look.”
The project, which cost an estimated kr400,000 (£36,000), has also received an accolade from the IT community, winning Digital Project of the Year at the Swedish CIO Awards.
Sweden is not the first country to recreate itself in Minecraft. Denmark and Norway have previously had similar projects, but Tideström said Lantmäteriet has gone a step further with the granular data the maps offer, from roads and lakes to forests and grasslands.
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Lantmäteriet used the earlier project in Denmark for benchmarking, namely in opting for downloadable maps instead of a server-based approach. “In Denmark, they had an open server so people could log in and play,” said Tideström. “They had big problems with houses being torn down by players.”
The Swedish maps are available in 8×8 metre resolution (each Minecraft block is equivalent to eight meters). While this means small file sizes for downloading, the maps are more suitable for roaming the landscape than building detailed houses. To address this Lantmäteriet has so far launched four municipalities in a higher (1×1) resolution to enable more creativity.
“In some areas, schoolkids have built the whole centre of a town so it looks like real life, with the right textures and colours,” said Tideström.
Tideström said the Minecraft project hasn’t faced any major technical issues, but it has had an impact on Lantmäteriet’s approach to IT projects. The agency is now encouraging more experiments and fast deployments in addition to traditional large-scale projects.
“We realised if we would have taken this project through our normal process of driving things, we would have released it in 2018 or 2019,” he said. “We are now looking into how we can change this prioritisation and act faster with the deployment of ideas.”
