How LEGO Games Went Open-World

[Hapori Tohu]

The window to the world of LEGO videogames opened a little bit more today with the latest installment of the Bits N' Bricks podcast. Hosts Brian Crecente and Ethan Vincent take a look at LEGO City Undercover, a game that started life as a Wii U exclusive but eventually found its way to a variety of platforms. You can hear from Ste Bate and Matt Palmer from the TT Fusion team that made the game and Darryl Kelley, an executive producer from The LEGO Group, to find out how the studio went from making mobile console ports to a giant open-world game. You can listen to Season 2 Episode 24 - Inside LEGO City Undercover: From Segway to Zombie Hordes on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to hear a bevy of anecdotes from the title's creation.

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[Chronicler06]

My favorite of all the Lego games! As soon as I found out about the subject of this week's episode, I knew that I would be especially interested in everything that would be discussed, and it did not disappoint. Interesting that it was right after they finished with Lego Rock Band that they started considering a truly original Lego game based on the popular City theme, and Nintendo asking for a game built around the then-upcoming Wii-U system also helped to move it forward. I was pleasantly surprised to learn, for example, that the story was written by a former standup comedian, and that many of the buildings in Lego City were designed by a former architect (I certainly liked how this version of Lego City reflected a lot of real world cities such as New York, San Francisco, London, Miami, just to name the ones I can quickly identify). Also interesting was that the most difficult aspect of the game to develop was the design and performance of the vehicles (I always liked how all the vehicles are named as if they were brand names, without any of them (except apparently the Segway) being any actual real world brands). Really, there's just so much I loved about this game, and what I learned from listening to this episode only made it even better.