Confirmed for release on April 5th, 2022, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga will hold enough new mechanics and features to make it well worth the wait. IGN’s February 2022 Fan Fest, revealed plenty of exclusive content panels, including a behind-the-scenes look at the highly anticipated LEGO Star Wars game. Jonathan Smith, head of production at TT Games provided an in-depth overview of some of the features to look forward to this spring.
The Skywalker Saga retains similar ideas from early LEGO Star Wars games but started entirely from scratch. Smith explains how the team at TT Games has learned from over a decade of creating LEGO Star Wars games, taking a step back, and implementing new things they wanted to try.
“What would be the best way to bring this action to life?” Smith said he asked this question when developing never before experienced ideas for the game. Since all nine movies in the Star Wars franchise are included in The Skywalker Saga, TT Games had a huge canvas to work with. A major part of the game will be exploring the open planetary environments players will find themselves in. This makes the hundreds of ways to traverse necessary, from the land speeders in Mos Eisley to Luke Skywalker’s iconic X-Wing in space.
The Skywalker Series will be available to play through most consoles such as PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Interestingly enough, co-op is an option, though an online multiplayer option does not appear anywhere in sight. Good news for friends or family at home though; Smith mentions a straight split screen rather than a restrictive dynamic one. Splitting the game in this way may come in handy to those who are set on duos covering enough ground for 23 planets. Depending on which episode is chosen, levels will progress through that storyline but there is plenty to do on the side. Similar to the golden bricks that sent players hunting the nooks and crannies of each map, TT Games freshened this approach with Kyber bricks instead.
A galaxy map makes it convenient to fly to each planet once unlocked and land on one of 28 different landing zones. This means gameplay will occur in outer space per level and not just exclusive to primarily space game modes. The all new game map and datapad then become imperative for information and tools throughout the game.
“4 years of scrupulous and incredible attention to really get the most out of the characters that are available,” Smith says in reference to the hundreds of people who have been working on the game for so long. Over 300 characters are playable and those plastic LEGO pieces were rendered to look better than ever before. It helps that next-generation consoles are part of the equation to support these visuals and effects that were not possible in the past. Smith raves over the look and feel of the game. “It looks spectacular and it gleams where it should but it also feels still lego.” He says. TT Games held on to the nostalgia of playing with physical legos. “It’s a feat of technology, aesthetics, creativity and hard work.”