E3 2019 Spotlight: LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

By Noah Friscopp

During Microsoft’s E3 2019 conference, a surprise announcement was shown off. A new game covering the entire Star Wars saga across all nine main movies will let you experience the entire Skywalker story, through the eyes of LEGO. The last game to tackle this was LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, but now there are the three more episodes, The Force Awakens which did get it's own game, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker.

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Preview at E3 2019

Watch our interview with Dewi Roberts, lead designer and Andy Hall, assistant game director for LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. We sat down with Dewi and Andy to talk about the massive breadth of the game, find out about some cool Easter eggs, and learn about the largest LEGO structure ever built in a game. 

A Totally New Game

Even though it might seem similar to The Complete Saga, The Skywalker Saga is an entirely new game. Like many of the more recent LEGO Games, Skywalker Saga features many open-world environments and a more traditional third-person perspective that lets you move the camera to your liking. You can aim and shoot similar to Fortnite and Gears of War for blaster characters, and for the lightsaber wielders, you get light and heavy attacks as well as force powers. The original LEGO Star Wars games were from a top-down perspective, where you could see more of the environment from an overhead view. TT Games mentioned this change was inspired by games like Fortnite, and with players being more used to games controlling this way. They also said how the open world was partially inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where each nook and cranny of the world has something interesting to see and do. There will be a bunch of new levels that weren’t included in the original Complete Saga thanks to the power of modern consoles, like Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jin’s underwater journey through Naboo’s planet core in The Phantom Menace.

Pick Any Movie you Want

You can choose which movie you want to play right off the bat, none of the episodes are locked so you can jump into your favorite. Movie selection involves flying to various planets within the galaxy and either selecting missions from the movies or simply exploring the worlds. Luckily, if you choose one movie and want to back out and go to another, you can. Each film has five missions to them, in addition to the open world activities. That’s 45 missions total for all the movies. Add the open world missions across 20 planets like bounty hunting and smuggling cargo in your ship like The Millennium Falcon, and that’s a whole lot of LEGO Star Wars fun. Unfortunately, the game only includes content from the main episodes, so fans of The Clone Wars, Rogue One and Solo might have to wait for DLC.

A Whole Lotta Bricks

This game has more LEGO bricks in the environment than any other LEGO game before. The space ships, buildings on the planets, and the Death Star are all made entirely of virtual bricks, and in the case of some of the larger ships, millions of them. The Sarlacc pit from Return of the Jedi is all one big model set. We’ll have to wait and see what other iconic Star Wars locations and characters have been made into LEGO. With nine movies included, there is bound to be tons of playable characters as well. The Skywalker Saga lets you play as over 200 different characters from across the whole series.

As enjoyable as the other LEGO games are, it was definitely time for a change. The Skywalker Saga looks to shake things up pretty dramatically with its galaxy-spanning exploration and new third-person perspective. 200 characters to play as, 20 planets to explore and nine movies to play through, all coming next year in 2020 to PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga - Official Reveal Trailer

Share Your Thoughts

What do you think? Are you excited for a new LEGO journey through the Star Wars universe? Let us know below!