E3 2019 - Interview for Lego Star Wars The Skywalker Saga Interview
E3 is always a bit of a madhouse, with so much to see and do, so taking the time to talk with someone is always special and in this case, even more so as I had the pleasure to sit down and have a chat with James McLoughlin, the director of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Maxi-Geek: Can you introduce yourself and your role at TT Games?
James: My name is James McLoughlin and I am the game director.
MG: I was fortunate enough to see the live demo and came away very impressed.
JM: Well, thank you. The team have been working very hard to get this together for everyone and finally show what it is.
MG: I was more impressed as, previous Lego games have not really changed things up, outside of the theme. With this one, was there a desire to change it up so much, or was it something else?
JM: There always is and sometimes people pick up on one thing and talk about that one thing and that wasn’t necessarily our intention, we wanted to do something else and we always try to put new mechanics in or new ways of interacting with new mechanics, but with this one, we decided to just change absolutely everything and see how that went down and it seems to have gone down really well.
It starts with stuff as basic as the camera, which makes a massive different in a video game, but moving the camera a lot closer to, what we used to call a hub cam, essentially everywhere, made a massive difference to how we designed the levels, a massive different to how the game is structured and looks and feels, and then everything else just spiralled from there. It was like ok, we have done the camera, should we do the combat, should we do the movements, should we do the jumping and eventually we realised that we had redone everything.
MG: During the presentation, the presented mentioned that there was all new technology behind the game, what was the decision for that?
JM: We were working on new tech in the background for a while that we have never released anything with and it was like, is it ready yet, not quite and eventually we were in the situation where we thought, let’s make the jump. We certainly didn’t do it, because we wanted to do this, the new design elements, but it certainly helped us, with what it can do, with things like scale and massive worlds, it really helped us with that, with the limits it actually took off, helped us design things differently.
MG Of course you have announced that the game will span all 9 movies, will players get to experience the entire story of each film, or is it smaller parts of the films?
JM: What we have done, is make 5 set pieces, be it a boss fight or a vehicle section or whatever, per film and also the kind of ancillary stuff that occurs in the hub as well. So you still get to experience the whole film, but there might not be a level where you are arguing with the senate or something, I mean yeah for political intrigue. All these things will be done in the hub, an example we give is ‘Negotiations’ is one of the first levels in Lego Star Wars but here it takes place entirely in the hub, so you will experience that moment still, while you are in freeplay.
So we want players to still experience the films, but only some of it being levels and some being in the world as well.
MG: Again, it is called Skywalker Saga, will there be elements from other the Clone Wars or Rebels shows making an appearance in here?
JM: No, we are not doing that in this, we are just looking at the theatrical releases, the episodes of 1 to 9.
MG: It was good you said that it was only going to be the numbers as there was a theatrical release of Clone Wars, ironically done by Warner Bros.
JM: Ha ha, yes the irony, but we are just covering 1 to 9 in ours..
MG: In the presentation, we saw the Super Star Destroyer that was over 100m long and all the other ships, all built from Lego. Was there a limit to how many ships you wanted to add to the game, or was it a matter of everyone just kept wanting to build ships?
JM: No, again authenticity is king with us, and if the ship exists in the films, we built it it is that simple, we didn’t really worry about the limits of how many there were, because if its in the film, its important. The ships and vehicles are as much characters as the characters can be in Star Wars, we built whatever we saw that we needed to build.
MG: As the game is spanning all nine movies, with the last one being Rise of Skywalker, will the game feature more or less content, as you guys are making the making it, whilst the movie is still being made?
JM: It will be as thorough as the rest and as we are in 2020, we will have time with it, after the movie is released to ensure that it is up there with 1 to 8.
MG: The game is coming to multiple platforms, such as Switch, which in the past has had some issues with load times, how are you going about optimizing for each of the individual platforms?
JM: Well it takes time, it takes time to do it, with the new engine, the technology has helped us with that, we know we are always cross platform and one of the things is with the new technology is that it can help us with he load times. The parts like data streaming, have all been written from scratch, so we hope we can see that with performance and one of the things that this helps us with, is the style of game is how much it loads at once. When you land on a planet we can get rid of space, but we tried to make it more like islands of play, rather than trying to load the entire planet, like we may have had in Gotham or other games.
MG: Is there any particular element that you are most proud of?
JM: I think the visuals look amazing and that’s down to the art team and the Lego team, they did a phenomenal, phenomenal job and actually helped us visualise what was in our minds and we always wanted to the biggest vistas, the biggest and epic everything and sometimes it was not possible with the technology, but those guys have been amazing, they have given us ways of experiencing these worlds that makes players feel like you are on Tatooine, or are on Hoth and that is something I am really proud of, is that the world feels alive and feels like your favourite film and that has always been a big goal and I think we have definitely achieved that.
MG: During the reveal trailer, we obviously saw a lot of humor, some that Star Wars games, or Lego Star Wars games are known for, Jedi Fallen Order, not so much, just more stabbing there,
JM: Yeah, it’s a bit stabby that one, aint it.
MG: Yeah, but with that trailer, there was no spoken audio, something that the original games had, is this a return to that style of presentation, at least for the cutscenes?
JM: It’s weird because what you saw there, the trailer that we have and the playable we had is voiced as the game is voiced. The trailer wasn’t voiced, there was like a nostalgia nod to that and we didn’t think it would get the kind of response it has got and now everyone wants mumbling. So when we go back, we are going to see what we can do with that, because we didn’t plan for it, we didn’t expect that people would want to go back to that, with us pushing new and going forwards, often people don’t want to go backwards, but in this particular situation, we are thinking of some kind of mode or a cheat extra, we are definitely looking into it, I sent an email to the team, while I have been here.
MG: Speaking of cheats, we will get to fly around in a Buick?
JM: Do you know, we haven’t actually done the cheats yet, we will do some, there are always are cheats. We always look at what is going to be funny here or funny there, we just haven’t gotten to that stage yet, right now we are just trying to get the main thing together and playable from start to finish.
MG: That was all the questions that I had, so thank you.
JM: Thank you very much man.
