image

Character customization used to be a big part of the LEGO games, but TT Games eventually moved away from that feature. That’s why fans were so happy to hear that it would be coming back for LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.

An interview with TT Games’ Mike Consalvey from 2019 confirmed that character customization would once again be included. Fast-forward to 2022, and things have definitely changed.

In response to a question about character customization on Twitter, TT Games shared the following statement.

“This interview was from 2019, and sometimes features change throughout development. We can confirm that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga doesn’t have character customization, but we do have 300+ characters for you to choose from.”

It’s true that things change during the course of development, and features have to be tweaked or removed. Its just extra painful to see happen with character customization, as fans were elated to learn it would finally return. I guess we’ll have to wait until the next LEGO game to hopefully see the feature return.

Add Comment

Comments (6)

jake_a

2y ago

I wonder what the hurdle was because they did confirm it would return a few years ago. I'm not upset about it because I didn't really use it in previous games. It just seems like it would be easy to mix and match pre existing parts. I think the game looks fantastic though! So excited!


streex

2y ago

Automatic 2 out of 10.


elfteiroh

2y ago

@jake_a

300 characters is a BIG number. As someone working on a game with character customization and a TON of content data, I fully expect that at the time of the interview, they probably had a LOT less characters playable, making it reasonable to have customization, but the more characters they added, the harder it was to scale the systems.
Scaling systems get very hard the more combinations are possible.


Could you explain that? From a consumer perspective, I feel like it is just a matter of swapping premade assets (LEGO minifig pieces). And then you would just have to pick a class to determine your weapon type.


elfteiroh

2y ago

@jake_a

I cannot say for lego, but in our game, the big problem with a very big amount of potential assets was the conundrum of loading all the assets at once and having one big loading at the start, but a fluid navigation, or a loading between each asset swap…
We tried the first, but ended up overloading the available memory on certain devices, so had to rethink our system… then, after a couple more update adding options, the sheer number of *THUMBNAILS* was too much and started overloading memory, so we had to drastically lower their visual quality (from 1024px textures to 128px… and that’s only temporary, someone is working on making the loading of thumbnails paginated to load only a couple more than currently shown, dynamically loading/unloading when the buffer is consumed.
But yeah, these things gets complicated, and we are lucky to have a service game, so constant dev, but there they need to release at a specific date, so they have a fixed amount of work time available, so they need to make choices.
Legit, nobody working in games like cutting features. When we do, it’s often just short of a point where we would fail the project by trying *too* much to make it work. So when it happens, there’s most probably a reason. … and yeah, with computers, sometimes the reason doesn’t even make sense to us programmers, and that why we didn’t manage to make it work. Or sometimes it’s just that the scale is just… too big, and it’s like trying to fit three pints of milk in a one pint glass. It… can’t be done. :(

Oh… in this particular case, this might also be a license thing. It might have been that the licensing didn’t want them to make certain combinations, and finding a way to make it not feel bad was… well… too hard? Just speculating here.

Edited 2 times

I think I understand what you are saying. Thanks for the explanation. I really appreciate it.