There's no doubt that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga pushes the boundaries of the LEGO video game franchise. It appears determined to be a fresh start for the series, introducing totally new mechanics while overhauling some central aspects of the series. From its vast overworld to its staggering list of hundreds of playable characters, every aspect of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga seems poised to break free from tradition. However, The Skywalker Saga is far from the first LEGO game to experiment with the formula. It owes many of its central facets and its spirit of innovation to games like LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes.
Released in 2012, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes introduced a number of major innovations that changed the franchise's formula forever, including its totally new approach to an overworld. LEGO Batman 2's decision to replace the traditional hub with a large world that players are encouraged to explore carried over into LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, which applied the open-world concept to a series of planets, rather than just one city. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga owes a lot to both of these games, which experimented with the LEGO franchise's overworld long before The Skywalker Saga sought to capture a whole galaxy of planets.
LEGO Batman 2's Groundbreaking Overworld
The Skywalker Saga's overworld wouldn't exist if it wasn't for LEGO Batman 2. Before LEGO Batman 2, all LEGO games featured a small hub where players could travel to levels new and old, buy new playable characters, look at their Minikit collection, and so on. This included the first LEGO Batman game, which limited players to the Batcave and Arkham Asylum while they weren't actively playing a level. In developing LEGO Batman 2, Travellers' Tales decided to push boundaries quite a bit. Instead of using the Batcave as a hub again, it allowed players to run around Gotham in search of levels and objectives, which was a level of freedom unprecedented in a LEGO game.
Exploring Gotham was one of the best parts of LEGO Batman 2. Players could use the vehicles they'd unlocked to drive and fly around at their own pace, seeing a pretty sprawling and detailed rendition of Batman's home city of Gotham. What's more, Travellers' Tales filled this overworld with a ton of objectives to keep players busy after they finished LEGO Batman 2's story. There were a staggering 150 Gold Bricks for players to collect, which they could then use to unlock certain playable characters. What's more, LEGO Batman 2 players could save various citizens in peril scattered around Gotham and track down Red Bricks to activate Extras and put new twists on the gameplay.
Although Travellers' Tales has provided fairly limited details on LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga's overworld, it sounds like it'll resemble LEGO Batman 2's Gotham quite a bit. Odds are that players can search the overworld for unlockables and bonus objectives for a very long time. Fans already know that there's a lot of LEGO vehicles available in the Skywalker Saga overworld, and considering the fact that The Skywalker Saga has around 300 playable characters, the overworld will surely be packed with ways to unlock new Star Wars characters to play as. LEGO Batman 2's open-world got praise from critics and fans, so The Skywalker Saga will likely lean on this successful ancestor's design choices.
LEGO Batman 3 Was an Early Skywalker Saga
The Skywalker Saga sells itself on an overworld composed of many Star Wars planets, but it's actually not the first LEGO game with an intergalactic overworld. In fact, LEGO Batman 3 did it just a couple of years after LEGO Batman 2 broke new ground with its overworld. In LEGO Batman 3, the Justice League and the Legion of Doom team up and travel into outer space to stop the villainous Brainiac, who wants to capture Earth. The result is a LEGO Batman game where DC heroes and villains travel to the planets of the various Lantern Corps, aiming to free the different Lantern Corps leaders that Brainiac has kidnapped. While these planets are represented as levels, they're also part of LEGO Batman 3's overworld. Players can travel to each planet from the Justice League Watchtower and explore them on foot.
The Lantern Corps planets in LEGO Batman 3 introduced a brilliant new level of overworld variety that set it apart from LEGO Batman 2. If descriptions of the game are to be believed, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga will be wildly different from previous LEGO Star Wars games for the same reason. Players will be able to run around on two dozen notable Star Wars planets and moons, collecting studs and solving puzzles. It's a diverse sci-fi overworld that's far broader in themes and aesthetics than LEGO Batman 2's Gotham, or even bigger worlds like LEGO The Lord of the Rings' Middle-earth. That diversity of settings drawn from LEGO Batman 3's spacefaring model will serve the LEGO Star Wars series well.
The Skywalker Saga is LEGO's Next Step
Looking back, it wasn't hard to tell that LEGO Batman 2 was a revolutionary game in the LEGO game franchise. After all, using Gotham as an open overworld was only one of its innovations. It was also the first LEGO game to feature voice acting, telling an original story with fully voiced DC characters. Fans and critics responded positively to LEGO Batman 2's story and dialogue, and so voice acting and detailed stories have become new LEGO game conventions. LEGO Batman 2 was a big step forward for Travellers' Tales star franchise, and it always will be.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga could very well be the next step forward. Between its interplanetary overworld, massive character roster, and enhancements to the LEGO franchise's combat, The Skywalker Saga clearly aims to set a new bar for content quantity and quality in LEGO games. Future LEGO games could very well be on the same scale as The Skywalker Saga, featuring hundreds of characters and diverse combat mechanics, yet preserving LEGO's humorous charm and approachable puzzle and adventure gameplay all the while. Since The Skywalker Saga is overhauling the franchise by building on LEGO Batman's ideas, maybe the next big LEGO game will return to DC, honoring LEGO Batman 2's bold ideas.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga releases in early 2022 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.