CyclonatorZ

It’s weird. Aside from the bugs and graphics, the Alpha is way better than the Beta.

 

They removed the Takara dance, Nobua and some cutscenes.

 

Also they totally remade Gali’s level, with Ga-Koro looking nothing like we have seen in MNOG

That's because Ga-Koro in MNOG was actually based on the alpha design. Saffire even sent Templar Studios the model they were using at the time.

*takes deep breath*

 

I've been waiting for this moment since 2001 and I'm so grateful to everyone involved for managing to reach out to the right people and put this all together.

 

Thank you.

 

Unfortunately, I'm already facing a bunch of issues that are real buzzkills.

 

For one thing, it took me way too long to realize how I was supposed to install and patch the game on Windows 10 amidst all the different downloads on BMP and the various other links across different websites. There was no way I could know the launcher attempted to run the game from a "LEGO Bionicle (Beta)" folder instead of just "LEGO Bionicle" until I downloaded the game all over via the launcher and installed it afterwards. A few simple step-by-step instructions on both BMP and the launcher would be great in addressing this issue.

 

Now, as soon as I run the game (properly patched) I can't seem to open it in full screen and the cursor is invisible in the front end menu, which makes navigation a bit difficult.

 

The game itself seems to lag a lot and I'm not sure if that's a hardware issue or a matter of compatibility. I'll have to try it on a couple of other systems because the gameplay is a bit tedious, specifically the jumping; I can't ever seem to get any Toa to jump at the right moment and I always end up falling off platforms.

 

Do you guys think you could design the game so that it immediately loads the front end and lets you play the game from start to finish like a true end user (lol)? And speaking of finish, how much from the game is left undeveloped anyway? Does it just suddenly stop halfway across the Makuta level?

 

My question is can it essentially be "hacked" into looking like a finished game intended for play by end users?

You've just barely started playing I see. Well, I hate to break it to you, but it only goes downhill from there. The game was completely broken when it was handed to the Beaverhouse, and despite a month of working on it, it still largely is. They just had a stream of the beta tonight, and Vahkiti made ample use of no-clip and level select cheats just to get around the constant crashes and buggy, unbalanced, and outright incomplete sections. There's a massive amount work ahead before the game is even possible to play from start to finish without the debug menu.

After 18 years, the wait is finally over!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHfWVo9kW88

Not to annoy anyone but it seems that the owner of the Beaverhouse discord has got his hands on the Beta for LOMN.

Lol, you're a little late. Read the post I made just before you.

Fantastic news, everyone! It turns out Thiccbricc was actually the head of Beaverhouse all along, and it is confirmed they have the beta! The reasons they've been holding onto it for so long are unknown as of now, but Vahkiti is going onto the Eljay Johnson show at 6 PM EST tonight and spilling all the beans. Regardless, the beta is being released at 4PM today, so be on the lookout!

There was nearly a 5 year gap between the first answer and the second. Greg likely forgot he said Velika couldn't be a Toa, and his thinking back in 2012 was probably that Velika wasn't a Great Being in the alternate universe. That's all there is to it, I'm guessing.

Seriously, the instances of Greg forgetting stuff just keep stacking up, the more and more people do research. He hasn't written any piece of Bionicle fiction for 8 years, and his current job requires him to keep straight of other canons like Ninjago. It's unsurprising that his knowledge of his Bionicle stories, some of which were never completed, is a bit rusty.

I don't think anyone here is aware of it, Illuminatus. ThiccBricc has been specifically targeting the beaverhouse discord for attention, going so far as to post there a couple of times and recreate beaverhouse memes in-game.

For those of you who are not aware, Thiccbricc is a twitter account that appeared less than two weeks ago, and has been posting lots of mysterious Lomn videos that appear to be from a yet-to-be-released build of the game. Current theories are that it's either a later alpha or, yes, the long-awaited beta. The twitter account has also demonstrated the ability to mod the game's animations, something beaverhouse has not been able to do in the four months since they got their hands on the alpha - and the build Thiccbricc is showing off has fixed versions of the ice and fire elemental bosses, which are broken in beaverhouse's build.

I'm not usually one to advertise other places of communication, but seriously, if you all want to actually discuss Bionicle and LoMN on a regular basis, the beaverhouse discord is your place. It's far more active than BZPower, and a lot more personal at the same time.

It really is. The whole saga of Saffire is being described on the discord as akin to a whole season of Law and Order. There's family feuding, sabotage, backstabbing, and so on. And it all stemmed from the company losing the contract for a frickin' Bionicle game. And to think we always thought us Bionicle fans were the only ones who suffered from the game being canceled.

So, if you're not part of the Beaverhouse discord, you're probably not aware of some interesting developments in the strange story of The Legend of Mata Nui. It turns out the game was such a mess partially because Saffire Games was run by a tax-evading jerk. That jerk's name was Dave Rushton, but we've known him for a long time under another name: Deep Brick. Yes, you heard me right - going by a timeline of events that is too exact to be coincidental, the Beaverhouse team has come to the conclusion that the founder of Saffire was our mysterious source of TLOM leaks back in 2010. And get this - the reason Red Quark lost contact with him was because Dave went to jail for tax fraud.

The Unseen64 website, which catalogues beta and unreleased games, is going to be doing an article on this whole mess soon. I would recommend keeping an eye out for it.

Reinventing all of the Slizers was a great idea, and one I'm surprised hasn't happened sooner. I've seen the odd MOC here and there, but never a concentrated effort to remake all 12. And I love that you've added a bit of fanfiction that is vague and yet so interesting.

I think there's a case to be made that video games and other forms of electronic media have potentially affected the sales of Bionicle, but not Lego as a whole. Recall that it was explained that G1 Bionicle fans largely did not transition into buying lego sets from other themes. I'd argue that's because Bionicle was targeting the action figure sector of the toy market more than the building toy sector. And Bionicle's sales peaked in the first couple years because, at the time, the other big robotic action figure line (Transformers) was reeling from the failure of it's latest line (Beast Machines).

That kind of success seems no longer possible when action figures sales as a whole are declining. And my theory is that the action figure sector targeted a specific kind of kid that now is more likely to play video games than they are to play with real life toys. Perhaps the reason System themes like Ninjago and City still succeed is because they target a different type of kid, one who is far more creative and spends just as much time building their own creations as they do playing with the set right out of the box. I'm speaking in a general sense here obviously - I know plenty of Bionicle fans MOCed as well, but I question if the majority didn't treat Bionicle more as an action figure than as a construction toy, one they would assemble and play with but not disassemble a hundred times and combine with other sets.

All of this is pure conjecture, but it would go a long way to explaining why Lego just cant get CCBS back on its feet, and why they may never.

This is revealed before Voltron? Wasn't Voltron approved before this?

My guess is that Voltron's design process is considerably more involved.

What exactly are people seeing here that supposedly warrants an entire rumor for an incoming G3? I don't see any results when I click these links.

Somebody was google bombing the empty Bionicle link to appear when people searched for "Bionicle reboot," making it look like Brickset had recently gotten an exclusive scoop that Bionicle was coming back into 2019. But you're right, it is pretty ridiculous that this was enough to get people to believe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

There's nothing to see here, folks. If you're still not convinced, try changing the word "Bionicle" in the Brickset hyperlink to anything that suits your fancy. You'll get the exact same results.

You hit the nail on the *ahem* head, TMD.

The real reason, outside of canon: because the Toa Norik set was meant to be a Toa Dume set, just as Toa Iruini was meant to be Toa Nihdiki.

Masks stopped making any sense after the umpteenth retcon, so not only doesn't shape determine power, they themselves have no power but "amplify the power within the user" or some nonsense which should make the powerless/noble/great distinctions pointless, but doesn't, somehow.

I must be behind. When was this ever stated? And how does that make any sense when we know mask powers are determined by what combinations of Kanoka are used to make them?

The first half of 2011 was definitely the worst Hero Factory had to offer. Generic hero builds with all the individuality of their previous incarnations stripped away, and jumbled builds for the villains made for a pretty lame introduction to CCBS. It's a good thing they immediately got back on their feet with Savage Planet six months later.

Really, that's the only wave I would consider outright bad. All the others were at least on par with the average Bionicle wave, and Breakout and Invasion From below rivaled the best years of the previous theme.

 

 

 

The biggest question I have is how on earth did they get their hands on it?

I saw a user on BZpower claim he found the demo on that old Lego Harry Potter PC game from 2002.

Listen, I don't know why everyone has latched onto this Harry Potter thing, but I can guarantee you it isn't real.

I’ve never played that Harry Potter game but I read about it on the Harry Potter wiki. The Wiki lists all the features in the game but it doesn’t list game demos. So yeah I agree this probably isn’t real.

 

Yeah, with how many people were on BZPower at one point, there is no way this wouldn't have surfaced a long time ago. Most likely, if there was something on the disk related to Bionicle: TLOM, it was probably the same old Onua teaser video we've known about since 2001.

You think after 14 years they would have found a way to make the roof without all those giant gaps. We're up to 5 falcons now, and while it is the the least accurate overall, the original 1999 set is also the only one that is completely enclosed.

I mean I've been posting topics about this game since at least 2006, but...

 

What if the reason it got cancelled is because it kind of sucks?

The alpha is certainly a janky glitchfest, judging by the stream. And I believe the prevailing theory among fans has been that it was canceled because of the studio's incompetence, Lego's official explanation non-withstanding.

However, the soundtrack that was just released is an entirely different story. It's absolutely fantastic, and easily in the top tier of all lego game soundtracks ever.

Wew! Bionicle isn't dead!

I wish this was true.    If this had happened around 2008, we would already be on page 6. But there's no one here anymore, and the Bionicle fanbase has largely moved on.

So, is the news team going to make an article about this soon? Or have they chosen not to due to the questionable legality surrounding the release?

 

I've also got the game files for the platform game "Toa Quest 3" - I don't remember who it was made by - though they no longer play properly so I'm not quite sure what to do with them.

 

Speaking of, does anyone know where I might be able to find the latter's predecessor, "Toa Quest 2"? I remember that it had a number of bugs; but it had unique levels for almost every hero character from 2001-03, and then some, and I'd love to get all nostalgic by playing it again xD

Toa quest 2? I never got to play that one sadly. The only other Toa Quest I was aware of was a completely different version of Toa quest 3 that focused on 2004. It has four levels: Lhikan, Onewa, Matau, and Whenua, and features some pretty impressive platforming gameplay and graphics. There's an Archies escape sequence at the end of Whenua's level that is probably the most epic thing I ever saw in a Bionicle fangame.

And for the record, the version of Toa Quest 3 you have never worked very well even when it released. I remember the executable with the Tahu and Kopaka levels crashed on the Muaka boss fight, and the one with Lewa had a nasty habit of becoming corrupted and spawning you in an endless death cycle after launching it a few times. The executable with the Gali and Pohatu levels was the only one that I was ever able to fully playthrough - and I did it multiple times, cause it was great fun. Pohatu's level being a Sonic the Hedgehog clone was a stroke of genius.

It was a shame it never got patched. I believe the creator actually lost the game files in a hard drive crash, and decided to just cut his losses and release the executables he had already compiled. Both versions of Toa Quest 3 were still more impressive than the majority of games created over the course of BZP's history. Nothing like them, The Insurgent, Dark709's Comics: The Game, or Bionicle Paracosmos: the Map of Mata Nui is probably ever going to be created again.

 

I have a whole bunch of them. I even made a topic at one point with the intention of eventually sharing them with everyone. Sadly, there's no real way of doing that, because the vast majority were created in 32-bit gamemaker, which means it's impossible to run them on modern versions of windows (I believe anything after WIndows XP is 64-bit). The only hope was a crude conversion program gamemaker themselves offered, but unfortunately it doesn't work well at all.

 

I wish someone with the expertise could write a more competent version of the conversion program, but I think any interest in doing such a thing has probably faded ever since gamemaker was bought by yoyo games and became a freemium application.

By any chance does your stash include Super Smash Matoran?

 

It doesn't appear so, sorry. Unless it happens to be in one of the zip-files that is just named "demo." If it is, there's no way of confirming it, because as I explained its impossible to actually open the executables.

I have a whole bunch of them. I even made a topic at one point with the intention of eventually sharing them with everyone. Sadly, there's no real way of doing that, because the vast majority were created in 32-bit gamemaker, which means it's impossible to run them on modern versions of windows (I believe anything after WIndows XP is 64-bit). The only hope was a crude conversion program gamemaker themselves offered, but unfortunately it doesn't work well at all.

I wish someone with the expertise could write a more competent version of the conversion program, but I think any interest in doing such a thing has probably faded ever since gamemaker was bought by yoyo games and became a freemium application.