CyclonatorZ

There is no flaming. Flaming makes for a negative atmosphere and it will not be tolerated. That means you should avoid yelling at and needlessly criticizing other members.

On 12/16/2019 at 9:18 AM, Sir Kohran said:

I've always wanted to know who was really at fault here. Did Saffire/Sapphire just take too long, or were Lego unrealistic in expecting a whole game to be completely ready in less than a year?

It was Sapphire Studio's awful management, end of story. The two brothers that co-owned the company were shady as all get out, and didn't actually know how to run a company. Not that this was a big deal to them. They evaded taxes for a long time after Sapphire Studios "shut down," by re-opening the company under a new name multiple times, and each time "owned" by a different family member. One of the two brothers - the one that was theorized for a while to be the infamous Deep Brick - ended up going to jail over this. The other retired from the gaming industry and became a mormon minister

On 12/7/2019 at 1:43 PM, Lenny7092 said:

It would be nice if any Bionicle could make a story to end the G1 story and have Greg canonize that since we need the story to be finished for our sake. I mean, seriously. Don't leave the story hanging.

They did. It was called Journey's End. Far as I'm concerned, the post cancellation serials never happened. (Cause I'm totally not bitter about Greg turning one of my top 5 Bionicle characters into a serial killer or anything.)

13 hours ago, Sir Kohran said:

It's been suggested that that image is from the game, but I have doubts about that because it looks like a shot from a cutscene and the game's three cutscenes don't include Makuta.

Do we know for sure that the game would've had the Makuta scene?

 

 

I think the main problem was that it wasn't going to be finished in time for the year it was meant to be about and the sets it was meant to advertise.

The reason it wasn't gonna be finished in time was because the final build they showed Lego was a disaster, owing to Sapphire Studio's mismanagement. So Lego pulled the plug. The Beaverhouse - aka the folks fixing and finishing the game - can attest to this. It's taken a herculean effort on their part to get the game into a semi-functional state, and there are still quite a number of game-breaking bugs.

On 10/19/2019 at 9:28 PM, Mukaukau Nuva said:

This is kind of a meta question, but how many LEGO-original properties actually get a resolved ending? I haven't been keeping up with recent themes, but it generally seems kinda rare, especially since G1 only got an ending due to the creative team having the clout to ask for one.

Chima and Knights Kingdom (the constraction figure line) received endings. Themes that did not include Exo-Force and Nexo Knights. Both of those latter properties were similar, in that their second years reportedly saw a steep drop-off in sale, resulting in their third years being heavily truncated, particularly from a marketing standpoint

I'm gonna interpret the title of the thread a bit differently than everyone else, and start with fleshing out the first and second years. Firstly, 2015 would have two additional sets: Makuta the Mask Maker, to go with Ekimu, and a sixth skull creature corresponding to Water. Skull spiders would also be expanded to Skull Spawn, with unique forms for each element. So in addition to the scorpions that we got in the stone sets, we could have skull swimmers (with webbed feet), skull striders (water striders-esque legs,  but able to stride over magma), skull swarmers (with wings), and skull skiers (treaded rears like the Muaka and Kane Ra from G1).

Then, 2016 would have two additional elemental beasts, corresponding to ice and air. I'd also allow Umarak the Destroyer to double as a stone beast, with an alternate beast head included. 

And finally, we get to 2017, the canceled third year. II have no idea what they were planning, but I'll tell you what I would have wanted: Dark Masters and Dark Protectors. The Shadow Toa never got a chance to shine in G1, and the evil Tohunga plot was cut entirely apart from Ahkmou, so  bringing back thesae concept and fleshing them out as the elite minions of Makuta in G2 would have been rad. As such, I actually built Dark Masters for my personal G2 collection, mostly out of the parts that were left over after I combined the Masters and Uniters into singular forms.

Meanwhile. the third versions of Tahu and Co would be called Lords. Lord of Fire, Lord of Water, etc. Not sure where they would go from a design perspective. But one thing that would have been cool to see, would have been for them having official combiner forms ala Toa Kaita, and the design process taking this into account far more than the Toa Mata did. Finally, the minions included with the Toa could be an evolution of Skull Spiders, but each taking a dark form of the Lord's masks. 

If successful, I'd also leave the door open for a longer plot that would eventually culminate in Makuta turning out to not be the true big bad, but the Mask of Ultimate Power itself, ala the popular fan theory at the time. A several year arc would involve the Toa hunting down several additional great masks. First the mask of Time, which had flung itself forward into time to hide itself from Makuta. In a cool inversion of G1's Metru Nui arc, Tahu and co would chase after the mask of Time, first into Okoto's high tech future, and then an alternate, dark future where Okoto has become a wasteland. 

After that, Tahu and Co would hunt down three other masks over an Ignition length trilogy involving pirate raiders, a far away island kingdom, and culminating in an actual final battle against the Darkness, with Makuta fighting alongside the heroes, and the six great masks being spiritually forged into the Mask of Unity, a flawless version of the Mask of Ultimate Power that rightfully can not be wielded by one being alone. I could go into greater detail about all of this, but my post is already long-winded as it is.

On 9/15/2019 at 4:21 PM, Mukaukau Nuva said:

The first factor is simply a lack of (effective) marketing. I’m not the first to mention this. G2’s primary marketing outlet was the Netflix show Journey to One. Ninjago was LEGO’s first (successful) foray into this medium, which demonstrated that TV shows were the way to hook kids on a long-running story. Heck, Transformers proved that in the ‘80s. There’s one caveat here though—on Netflix, the viewer must actively seek out the program. As a result, no kid is going to search for Journey to One without already having heard of Bionicle beforehand. As a result, Journey to One isn’t bringing new kids to the line—it’s trying to convince already-interested kids to stick with it. At that point, you’re relying almost entirely on word-of-mouth to generate interest. Contrast this to 2001-2002, which used traditional print ads (posters, cardboard standees), an online presence as a part of the fledgling internet (Bionicle.com, Bioniclestory.com, and the MNOG), a promotional campaign with McDonalds (the Tohunga), and a short comic book series. It all served to generate hype, and it worked.

 

There is apparently an explanation for this, and it's a doozy. I don't have the quote on me, but back when DeeVee was a lego ambassador, he claimed that he had been told that G2's marketing budget was slashed considerably at the last minute. The reason for this was that lego needed the funds to undo what I would argue was their dumbest business decision since greenlighting Galidor: canceling Ninjago at the height of its popularity.

You will recall that Ninjago was canceled in 2013, and was revived the next year with a much smaller number of sets. 2015 was when the theme once again kicked into full gear, with two separate subthemes, each with a season of the television show. And that year was also the year Bionicle G2 launched, conspicuously with extremely bare-bones marketing considering how much Lego had initially hyped up its return.

This is the first of many G2 MOCS I have already posted on my Twitter account (@CyclonatorZ). They are part of a G2 headcanon I have devised that throws out basically everything written by a third party (so, yeah, pretty much everything other than the shorts.), and also changes or expands upon many other story elements. My Kopaka is based heavily on the Warcraft character Jaina. I got the inspiration from the massive shoulder pads both Kopaka Master and Kopaka Uniter with Ketar have.

(Please excuse the slightly poor quality of the picture. This was the first I took using my smartphone camera. I've gotten much more adept at using it since then.)

Christian Faber elaborated once how the human immune system was his biggest inspiration, imagining that our antibodies are little heroes (Toa) inside our bodies (Mata Nui) fighting diseases (Makuta). I've heard this tidbit retold in the community in various ways, including that this inspiration came when he himself was fighting a serious illness, but I don't think he personally recounted as much so I'm not sure how true that bit is.

 

He shared the story at one point on his blog that he had previously fought a major illness. But if you want an actual detailed summary of how his personal battle with cancer shaped the Bionicle Mythos, read the Bionicle chapter in the book Brick By Brick.

Sometimes a bricklink store being suspended doesn't necessarily mean the seller was doing anything shady. Sometimes the story is a lot more complicated, as it was in the case of Gary Istok. You may not have heard of him unless you've heard of his amazing Unofficial Lego Sets/Parts Collectors Guide. But I can vouch that the dude is absolute legit - and he explained some time ago that his store on Brlcklink only got shuttered because sudden, major issues in his personal life got in the way of him being able to fulfill his most recent orders in a timely fashion.

This forum is so dead, but I can't let go of it for some reason. So here, for those of you who still frequent what's left of BZPower, have a little humor courtesy of the r/bionicle discord. (And hey, come join us if you want to talk about Bionicle regularly instead of over an average of five posts a day.)

Already looks a lot more polished than the last attempt at such a project. But to be fair, Lego Island 3 was just the project of a single teenager being done in unity, so that's completely understandable.

I understand the need for environmentally friendly products, but Biobuddi is delusional if they think consumers - especially American consumers - are going to push for that over affordability and quality. Even more so if they think they have a chance to take some of Lego's marketshare solely because of this - for god's sake, the only bricks Biobuddi manufactures are a duplo clone. Tell me when they have a monster hit theme comparable to Nijnjago that uses System-styled pieces, and I might be more inclined to believe them, but I expect they never will.

Well, some Lego products are expensive unnecessarily. I mean, look at the Bionicle G2 sets and Lego Dimensions packs (probably a reason why they are cancelled). Talk about paying a lot of bucks for them. Lego should decrease the prices by like 30%-50% to make things sounds more promising. Buyers would have less hard time if that could happen.

This isn’t the first time we talked about Lego’s money problems lately. Last year, Lego’s money problems happened since The Lego Ninjago Movie. This probably led to budget issues, which caused the cancellations of some great and successful themes in this decade that could’ve continued. I mean, look at the quality of Bionicle, Hero Factory, Nexo Knights, Legends of Chima, Mixels (the media promoting the sets), Lego Atlantis, Lego Clutch Powers, Lego City Undercover, Lego Monster Fighters, Lego Pharoah’s Quest, Lego Alien Conquest, Lego Galaxy Squad, Lego Dimensions, and the constraction category. They were doing good so far and then they seem to get mixed-to-negative reviews and then they ended and cancelled, and Lego never mentioned any futures about them or re-continuations from them. It’s like Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War in this year erased them out of existence.

Well, we only have some great and successful stuff, like Ninjago, Star Wars, DC Super Heroes, and Marvel Super Heroes, nowadays. That’s a few.

Man, Lego gotta think about its budget and increase it somehow, because things ain’t looking as good as the last decade.

Themes like Atlantis, Monster Fighters, and Pharoah's Quest were never meant to last more than one or two years. The only one that outright had a wave canceled as far as we know, was Alien Conquest. Regardless, they're not considered everegreen like Ninjago, so their short run has nothing to do with sales.

This has been known for over three months.

The Beaverhouse has been hard at work, and is proud to present updates for the Beta, Alpha, and the unofficial TLOMN launcher:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseBioI_Gto

In case this hasn't been pointed out: some of the rule threads in specific sections have not been updated in ages and are inconsistent with Bzpower's current rules on topic revival. Specifically, that it's been doubled to 120 days in a lot of areas. Bionicle Discussion, for example, still has it listed as 60 days in its specific rule thread, which has not been edited since 2015.

No, because Bionicle is an action figure line with an attached story - not a tv show with attached merchandise. And action figures are on the decline across the board. Doubly so for the buildable ones Lego offers. If constraction figures cant sell even when they're in the shape of Darth Vader and Boba Fett, they're not going to sell period. That's just the way the cookie has crumbled.

As devastating as it will undoubtedly be for a lot of us, I think we are going to have to accept that Bionicle - and constraction as a whole - is finished. I wouldn't be surprised if Lego gives CCBS one final shot a few years down the line, if only to justify all the money they spent developing the system - but I don't expect it to be successful, anymore than G2 was.

 

It doesn't surprise me at all that there are rumors that G2's marketing budget was slashed last minute, due to the need to re-allocate resources to Ninjago after Lego realized what a horrible mistake they had made cancelling it.

 

Wait, didn't Lego attempt to end Ninjago in 2013, which was 2 years before G2 launched?

 

Well, keep in mind, products begin development 18 months in advance. The negative reaction to Ninago being canceled, and its subsequent revival, had repercussions for the next 2 years of product, especially once Ninjago kicked back into full gear in 2015.

Also, for those who may doubt the truthfulness of this rumor, it came from none other than Bzpower's own Deevee - who, as a member of the Lego Ambassador program, had far more credibility than a mere anonymous leaker. I can't give you a screenshot, but he posted the info in a lego related discord a while back. It was his understanding, according to what the Bionicle team told him at the G2 reveal event, that they were going all out with Bionicle. When that didn't happen, the reasoning I already have detailed was given.

One final note: supposedly Ninjago didn't just screw Bionicle over, but also the final year of Chima. Which makes sense when you think about it, because the final year was a rehash of the previous wave's theme. Perhaps they had planned for the theme to go out with a much bigger bang, but budget cuts forced them to reuse assets they had already created,

The thing that really sticks out is that the majority of G2's lore was created by a third party - AKA Ryder Windham. Virtually everything we know about the individual protectors (including their friggin' names) as well as the skull villians, was created by him. And it was relegated to books and graphic novels that barely anyone read, which was the exact same issue G1 faced in its later years. There were no widely accessible comics or online flash games that fleshed out the lore - instead we got a series of animations that, while well animated, were far too short to accomplish anything other than moving the very bare bones plot forward. Skull Slicer, the character Banana Gunz is so intrigued by, appears and is defeated in mere seconds. Talk about wasted potential.

It doesn't surprise me at all that there are rumors that G2's marketing budget was slashed last minute, due to the need to re-allocate resources to Ninjago after Lego realized what a horrible mistake they had made cancelling it.

 

 

 

What are those shoulder pads from? Are they included in any cheap sets or would my best bet to get them be bricklink?

They're from the second-wave Legends of Chima constraction figures. They weren't released in North America, though, so if you live here your best bet is Bricklink.

A single one came on the Queen Beast, actually, although that is a very inefficient way to get them in any decent quantity.

 

~B~

 

I knew Queen Beast included the mold, but for some reason I thought it was in black, or a color other than gold.  Whoops.

 

You're all forgetting about both versions of Ekimu. Each of them contains two in pearl gold.

Edit: lol, I didn't realize this was a topic bumped from a few years ago. No wonder they weren't aware of sets that didn't exist yet.

 

 

Back when I first joined BZPower, I remember Greg saying that running out of story arcs would never be a problem, because they had at least 20 years of story ideas planned out at the time. That was 2006, and the line got canceled four years later. Obviously, there's years worth of story that was either skipped to speed it up for the cancellation or simply never got told. I wish we could see that...

It wouldn't have been told even if Bionicle wasn't canceled. The direction of the story was permanently altered with the decision to attempt a soft-reboot with Bara Magna. The original idea for the story post 2008, which wasn't supposed to end with Makuta taking over the MU, would have been a direct continuation of the Toa Nuva's adventure, and focus on their quest to find the Great Beings. If Bara Manga had succeed, we would have gotten at least three years with Mata Nui and his gang of Glatorian, and when/if we did finally return to the MU, the story would have almost certain focused on the Toa Nuva trying to take back the MU from Makuta.

That’s what I meant by “skipped.”

 

Except that, well, I'm convinced the Great Beings might have been far more important to the mythos than they ended up being, and the canon version of them being amoral buttholes that nevertheless factored very little into Bionicle's core conflicts is very different than what I feel they were originally aiming for. I'm convinced they might have been intended to be the true villain of Bob Thompsons "7 books." Once Makuta took over the MU, though, there wasn't really any room for a story with the Great Beings as the ultimate evil, which is why they proceeded to demystify them in 2009.

This is all admittedly speculation, but I feel it jives with how the Matoran's legends and religion turned out to be entirely bunk. Mata Nui was an artificial creation and failed his people, Makuta might not have been all bad (at least in early drafts), and the Great Beings might actually be the Great Evil.

Back when I first joined BZPower, I remember Greg saying that running out of story arcs would never be a problem, because they had at least 20 years of story ideas planned out at the time. That was 2006, and the line got canceled four years later. Obviously, there's years worth of story that was either skipped to speed it up for the cancellation or simply never got told. I wish we could see that...

It wouldn't have been told even if Bionicle wasn't canceled. The direction of the story was permanently altered with the decision to attempt a soft-reboot with Bara Magna. The original idea for the story post 2008, which wasn't supposed to end with Makuta taking over the MU, would have been a direct continuation of the Toa Nuva's adventure, and focus on their quest to find the Great Beings. If Bara Manga had succeed, we would have gotten at least three years with Mata Nui and his gang of Glatorian, and when/if we did finally return to the MU, the story would have almost certain focused on the Toa Nuva trying to take back the MU from Makuta.

I literally have never gotten why the Rahkshi had those particular powers until this thread. It always seemed like a really strange mix to me - but then, I haven't watched Mask of Light since I was a kid. I guess that movie wasn't a total wash after all.

Could the alpha and beta ever be combined into one game?

The beaverhouse is already hard at work on this. Currently they are mostly in the investigative phase, as they have yet to fully figure out the source code. Of particular interest to the team is attempting to put Nobua (the purple Hau villager at the beginning of the alpha) and the dancing Tohnuga into the beta - both are much loved among the Beaverhouse community,

Also, there are intentions to not only combine the content of the two builds, but also to finish the game. Concepts are currently being brainstormed for a final boss, and porting the cut alpha Makuta levels to the beta is a priority.