Fyndegil

Let's just hope Cookie Monster hasn't acquired a taste for mushrooms...

^ I don't think the Maori had writing pre-colonization.

My theory on Okotan would be that they took the basic design of the Nuva symbols but changed them up to make them look more Mayan.

On 6/25/2022 at 3:26 PM, Alexander123 said:

Its referencing how overly complicated Bionicle lore is to someone new to the franchise trying to figure out everything compared to something simple like Hero Factory.

To provide some additional context, there was a particular user here who really wanted Bionicle G1 and Hero Factory to share the same universe. I think that might help explain the reaction.

On 4/18/2022 at 12:48 PM, Lorentz said:

in your original idea you weren't going to be following canon anyway

I didn't have an original idea. If you were talking about the guidance I posted, all I meant was that you'd lose your players if you had to give them a lot of external information in order to understand your game. Then, as long as you've selected your premise well, you're free to follow canon within your game.

Don't they have the golden masks at that point, and doesn't that involve turning into Kaita?

On 4/14/2022 at 1:06 PM, Lorentz said:

Your player characters should be the Toa Mata on the island of Mata Nui, on their way to fight Makuta in Mangaia. Forget about the Golden Masks, forget about Kaita. Let them know that they're playing something based on the finale of the first year's storyline. Keep it shrimple, keep it iconic. 

What exactly are they doing on Mata Nui if there are no Golden Masks or Kaita? That would rule out searching for the masks and entering Makuta's lair, and the actual fight against Makuta was never an option to begin with. We're left with randomly fighting Rahi, I guess, but an RPG needs to have a narrative with a direction. It also helps if the narrative gets resolved satisfactorily in the end.

What OP actually goes with would depend on how extensive they want the game to be. They shouldn't be limited to year one. There are storylines from years two or four that might be able to fit. Three and five probably wouldn't work, and I'm not sure about the rest of the years.

1) For a non-Bionicle audience you should make it in a way that you have to explain minimal amounts of lore.

2) It would look best if all the masks all had roughly the same style.

3) Use standard elements. Systems of elements are supposed to be based on the classical elements or Chinese elements. Following this will make it accessible. Bionicle added alternative element types to keep the franchise from getting stale. Pokemon had elements like "electric" and "bug" so they could have more variety in their 150 species.

On 3/22/2022 at 11:21 PM, Lenny7092 said:

This year is Bionicle’s 2007 story arc’s 15th anniversary. It takes place between the 2006 and 2008 story arcs.

Same energy.

Actually in all seriousness I appreciated this post. I wasn't able to follow 2007 very well when it first came out.

Is that your band?

So like, Maku soaked his mask, and then the Matoran joked that that was how he learned to break boulders with his head?

21 hours ago, Heyzorks said:

How?

"Even though it's impossible it'd still be cool."

-Zach Katz

Are you ok dude? That last post was quite a jumble.

Legal issues would complicate it too. I think you only have standing to sue a company in a country where they actually do business. If a company is only selling products in one country, then you have to be sure that they're violating the law of that country, and then hire lawyers and probably interpreters to represent you there.

23 hours ago, Lenny7092 said:

I’m trying to help them and to show that I know a lot about Bionicle just in case there are this kind of people.

You're so conceited, Lenny.

(apologies to Anthony Michael Hall)

in b4 lock

I think their concern is more with conflicting with kids' religions, rather than just with taking stuff from religion. They're probably worried that kids might say stuff like "Pastor says only people have souls but the Bionicles are saying they have souls too" and then their parents would say "Looks like you're too young to distinguish fiction from reality so no more Bionicle for you." Or maybe that a kid from an atheist family would become more interested in religion if they used "religious" words.

They're probably underestimating kids' intelligence, but I really think their reasoning is somewhere along those lines. There's also the question of whether Mata Nui as the "Great Spirit" is a religious concept, but that brings up whole different issues.

To be fair, I think Lenny's writing style is a little too off topic for it to be the new subject of this thread.

3 hours ago, Lenny7092 said:

2. There are many new people who come to this website after 2010, 2014, or 2016, when Bionicle and Hero Factory ended. These guys may not have heard of these things. You don’t know how many of us do not know what is Bionicle or Hero Factory, so that’s why I say this. I’m a veteran fan of the themes who has been through the whole history of the themes, so I know how to teach people about the themes.

The thing about that is that message boards are usually designed for people who already share an interest to discuss said interest. If this is the case, you should assume that the rest of the community already knows the most basic information and should avoid repeating it every time you start a thread. On this message board, some of the members may have joined to talk about other themes, but they would still be Lego fans so it's not very likely they've never heard of Bionicle. The Bionicle sections are intended for use mainly by those who are fans of Bionicle. If a non-Bionicle fan BZP user wishes to learn more about Bionicle, they may have enough knowledge to find the information they're looking for on their own, or they could talk to other members for guidance. When you start a thread, it's not your job to recapitulate the knowledge base of your core audience.

To use Lorentz's example, "What storylines would you like Bionicle to try?" is a question that can only be discussed by Bionicle fans. It's essentially asking what you think is missing from your experience of Bionicle, and thus presupposes a prior experience with Bionicle. Plus, for the answers to be meaningful, one's experience of the franchise would have to be near complete, or else you might say something that's already been done. Secondly, it would be expected that only somebody who's already a Bionicle fan would have an investment in what storylines Bionicle might try in the future. Therefore, it's reasonable to expect that non-Bionicle fans would have little reason to interact with your topic, even if you tried to teach them in your original post. In my opinion, it was probably appropriate to give the short summary of each year, to refresh everybody's memory, but the wall of text version and the "short description" of the franchise was an insult to your readers' intelligence. Everybody knows Bionicle is a toy made by Lego.

I think part of the problem might be that the lore started to expand beyond what could be made as sets. Well, there might have always been thousands of Matoran, but no one would ever expect unique sets for all of them. I felt like things really started to get silly somewhere around 2003 or 2004, especially with Metru Nui and how many Rahi were reported to be stored in the Archives.

Toadette celebrating spring

Adults can also read the initial terms and conditions.

Well realistically, what do you think they're going to do?

At the very least, wait to judge them until they actually announce the set.

I dunno, those sets look too human to be Bionicle ripoffs. The construction style reminds me of some of the Exo-Force sets, although there might be more recent Lego themes that provided a stronger influence. In terms of character design, a couple of the sets look like they might have been inspired by League of Legends or Evangelion, but the rest of them were probably just drawn from Chinese culture.

22 hours ago, Lorentz said:

He proposed the idea simply as a random reference to Sonic the Hedgehog. 

My point exactly.

17 hours ago, ZEROANON00 said:

And yeah, funding one set as a means of gauging interest for something could lead to a loss of money, but considering we're talking about not making it an evergreen theme I think they'll bounce back.

Why would they want to gauge interest again when they already did that seven years ago and got negative results?

There's not just the loss of money from low sales to worry about, but also the opportunity cost of not developing something that consumers will probably buy.

17 hours ago, ZEROANON00 said:

As for why the ideas set hasn't been announced, usually that happens riiiight before it comes out. I find it interesting that the vote was done twice though, but I might just be overthinking stuff lol.

Yeah, I might be reading too much into that too.

It's entirely possible that the anniversary set will be Bionicle. I had heard that Faber had vaguely said he's in talks with "corporations," or something like that, so maybe Lego really is considering a revival and using the anniversary set to gauge interest. I'm not keeping my hopes up, though.

I can see where you're coming from with that, but it sounds like something the company would go into expecting low sales, and that's still a risk. There may be a "demand" (IMO more apparent than real), but TLG probably interpreted the failure of G2 as a sign that the fandom doesn't put their money where their mouths are.

Come to think of it, that probably explains why they come across as hesitant to just accept the first 90th anniversary vote and announce a Bionicle set.