Dear Reader:
TT Games on why they're excited to return to Star Wars, and challenges with LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
TT Games is no stranger to the Star Wars brand, as they've created their fair share of LEGO Star Wars experiences. The team isn't done with the universe though, as they're tackling their biggest adventure yet with LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. In an interview with GamesIndustry, TT Games' James McCloughlin discusses why it's exciting to return to the series, and also what makes this new installment a bit of a challenge.
"We wanted to create a new Star Wars game which was designed without the technical restrictions of the older games -- mainly episodes one to six -- and since then we have learned so much as a studio. The older Star Wars games were great for that generation of gamers, but now players expect and need a lot more freedom in their play. With this game we hope to give players a brand new way to explore and enjoy the entire saga.
We now have a greater toolset to evaluate play through analytics and user testing that just wasn't as readily available fifteen years ago. We can now very easily target sectors of play and enhance the areas we know get the most traffic, to help make the entire experience great from start to finish.
One of the challenges of a game this size, with this amount of freedom is we don't know what order everyone will play it. This adds more importance to how we develop and elevate the game. Freedom is a massive part of modern games -- since the days of the cantina [in the early Lego Star Wars games], we have designed and developed over-world spaces from Middle Earth to Gotham City all with different challenges and hurdles to overcome. This game should be an amalgamation of all of what we have learned so far as a studio."