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First LEGO Overwatch Set For Sale


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75987_Omnic_Bastion_Reveal_teaser.jpg

Today the first fruits of the partnership between Blizzard and LEGO have been revealed. Earlier today the companies shared details about 75987 Omnic Bastion from Overwatch, which is available now from Blizzard's online store and will be for sale at BlizzCon. The set costs $25 and includes 182 parts with at least a couple of prints (or stickers?). For more information and hi-res images, read on!

 

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Interesting to see Blizzard partnering with Lego while their other half Activision has been partnered with Mega Bloks for the Destiny IP for some time. Here's hoping maybe the overwatch line will be successful enough that they'll tell their buddies and we get Destiny bricks someday? Because I'd really like some build able Destiny stuff where the parts reliably fit together. Wouldn't be the first time an IP has switched from one to the other either, seeing the Mega Bloks Spiderman sets that were around when i was a kid vs. the Lego ones out much more recently.

 

--Ak

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I'm in a weird situation with this. I honestly don't know if I should fork out the money or skip it. Like, I love/despise Overwatch. I've been playing it on the Playstation 4 for about a year, now; And I appreciate it for the fun it offers but really dislike its lootbox system, and I just can't wrap my head around how there's now an official Lego Overwatch theme. It's just so weird how quickly LEGO's policies regarding violence and stuff has eased to the point that something like Overwatch can get a LEGO theme.

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I'm in a weird situation with this. I honestly don't know if I should fork out the money or skip it. Like, I love/despise Overwatch. I've been playing it on the Playstation 4 for about a year, now; And I appreciate it for the fun it offers but really dislike its lootbox system, and I just can't wrap my head around how there's now an official Lego Overwatch theme. It's just so weird how quickly LEGO's policies regarding violence and stuff has eased to the point that something like Overwatch can get a LEGO theme.

If anything I wouldn't see this as LEGO's violence policies easing so much as becoming more consistent. The setting, scenarios, character/weapon designs, and storyline of Overwatch are just as fantastical and fictionalized as in Star Wars, and arguably a lot less aggressively military-coded. Just look at the characters in the Overwatch sets revealed so far: a futuristic cowboy, an assassin in cartoon supervillain garb and her superhero speedster nemesis, a ghostly mercenary with comically oversized guns, a gorilla astronaut/scientist, a super-soldier in red, white, and blue biker garb, a knight in powered armor that could've come straight out of Nexo Knights, and a mech piloted by a teenage celebrity pro gamer. Is that really scarier or more militaristic than actual armies of "Stormtroopers" casually committing genocide in their war to wipe out a movement of camouflage-garbed rebels?

 

I can't think of anything more violent, militaristic, or realistic about Overwatch than stuff like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or The Lord of the Rings, and what's more in the US and UK the game is rated T (13 and up) or PEGI 12 (12 and up), comparable to movies rated PG-13 (13 and up) in the US or 12A (12 and up) in the UK. Considering how stuff like Star Wars episodes 3, 7, and 8, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Dark Knight, and most Marvel movies have been rated similarly, as was the Nintendo DS version of LEGO's own game Bionicle Heroes, it's a bit odd that a T-rated games license seems so shocking.

 

Perhaps some of that surprise is on account of the fearmongering/scapegoating of first person shooters promoting real-life violence (which evidence generally fails to support), or the toxic aggression that permeates so much of "gamer" culture (which is ubiquitous, but most obvious to many people with games that include online multiplayer and voice chat). But then again, in this era of boycotts and harassment associated with comics and movies starring female or nonwhite male characters like Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Captain America: Sam Wilson, The Last Jedi or the Ghostbusters reboot which supposedly demonstrate "political correctness gone mad", I think it goes without saying that this sort of aggressive toxicity isn't at all unique to gaming, let alone to FPS games.

 

Let's not forget, LEGO's reputation for being anti-violence/anti-warfare hasn't always manifested in particularly sensible ways. Back in 2004, the Knights' Kingdom comics and video games had the knights' swords shoot energy blasts because LEGO — a company that had been manufacturing sword-wielding knight minifigures for two and a half decades — thought depicting an actual swordfight was too violent for their tastes. This same perhaps excessive caution had motivated LEGO to refer to all Bionicle weapons as "tools" up until 2006, to threaten to fire an employee for jokingly putting a "LEGO skeleton" in the dungeon of an 80s LEGO Castle prototype, to refer to all LEGO Space lasers as "sensors" for many years, to make the first LEGO Castle in yellow because they were afraid kids would use grey bricks to build tanks (as the designers themselves had been caught doing), and to worry that black spaceships or spacesuits might be too scary for kids in the earliest days of LEGO Space.

 

Honestly I think the current policy established in 2010 (which expressly prohibits products resembling or associated with modern military conflicts and equipment, but also expressly allows for good-vs-evil conflicts in sci-fi, fantasy, and historical contexts) shows a lot more honesty and sincerity with regard to how kids use conflict narratives in their play, not to mention a clearer understanding of the real-life child development outcomes associated with conflict narratives in play and storytelling, than the previous unwritten rules. There's something that feels a little duplicitous/hypocritical about employing a de facto violence policy that less than 15 years ago considered swordfights and shootouts inappropriate for kids, while still putting swords and guns in sets knowing full well that a lot of the kids buying them would use them to role-play swordfights and shootouts.

 

The fact that the current "Conflict and Weapons Policy" is clearly written out rather than enforced somewhat arbitrarily according to the whims of LEGO Group management also helps ensure that the gradual acceptance of conflict and weapons in sets will not continue towards actual modern military sets without openly repealing or amending this established rule.

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