Considering the calibre of blockbuster franchises that have received the LEGO treatment in the past, it’s no surprise to see the recent announcement of LEGO The Lord of the Rings. But LEGO developer Traveller’s Tales is wearing its ambition on its sleeve this time around, and why not? This is the first time the team has ever LEGOfied an Academy Award Winning film, after all. As Executive Producer Nick Ricks explains, “this time we’re messing with the big boys.”
Working closely with LEGO and WingNut Studios/New Line, Traveller’s Tales is attempting to make this as authentic a Lord of the Rings experience as possible, going so far as to strip out the usual babbling LEGO voices and replacing them with theatrical dialogue. Hearing Orlando Bloom’s voice come out of a LEGO Legolas (complete with razor sharp cheekbones) is slightly jarring, but it’s necessary considering the complexity of some of the included scenes, and the overall complexity of the journey.
It’s the journey that’s at the forefront of Traveller’s Tales mind. Cleverly, the growth of each character is reflected through new RPG-lite elements - characters can now carry ‘story’ or ‘treasure’ objects in a backpack and store up to eight of them for future use. Objects can improve the characters, essentially evolving them physically as they progress through the story.
There are other tricks. In order to re-create some of the trilogy's environments more faithfully, not all the game world is made out of LEGO, and in-game cinematic sequences have been more or less recreated shot for shot. “There’s so much fantastically framed cinematography and brilliant camerawork,” says Ricks. “We can’t improve on that, so we just need to take it and put it into the game.”
To drive their seriousness home, the team has also created the gameworld around Tolkien’s original maps, and characters can now move from Hobbiton to Mordor without popping in and out of chapters, streamlining the experience as much as possible.
This is not to say Traveller’s Tales have lost their quirky sense of humor completely - at one point during our E3 demo playing as Legolas, we were able to pick up Gimli and throw him into a LEGO wall. “One of our favorite bits in the films was tossing the dwarfs,” says Ricks. “This is, y'know, still a light hearted take.”
Source : ign[dot]com
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