It's no secret at this point that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is filled to the brim with content. Traveller's Tales has pulled out all the stops for this new LEGO Star Wars entry, overhauling every department of the franchise and improving on its foundations. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has detailed levels with branching paths, character classes with upgradable abilities, overworld planets littered with sidequests, and hundreds of collectible characters from across the Star Wars saga. In spite of The Skywalker Saga's ambition, however, Traveller's Tales has managed to preserve many core tenets of LEGO Star Wars, like its sense of humor and the importance of building.
Unfortunately, there's one core feature that didn't make the cut in The Skywalker Saga. For many years, character customization has been a core feature of LEGO Star Wars and other LEGO games, allowing players to make custom playable minifigures using the parts of other characters. Unfortunately, The Skywalker Saga has dropped character customization, according to a new statement from Traveller's Tales. The loss of character customization is sad because it had a ton of potential within The Skywalker Saga, and it could suggest that this classic mechanic is on its way out of the TT LEGO games in general.
The Loss of LEGO Character Creation
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was remarkably well-equipped to deliver a character customization system that broke new ground for the LEGO franchise. The Skywalker Saga's colossal character roster would've supplied a bounty of parts to make a character with, and the RPG-like character classes and skills would've made it easier than ever to give a custom character a specific moveset. Sadly, it looks like Traveller's Tales won't capitalize on this potential. Unless character customization joins the game later in a DLC or a free update, The Skywalker Saga will only feature its official roster of characters.
Not only is this a loss of a great feature for The Skywalker Saga, but it could send a sad message for fans of LEGO game character creation. The Skywalker Saga's sheer scale is likely to inspire similarly ambitious LEGO games from Traveller's Tales in the future, but if all games are of The Skywalker Saga's scale from now on, then there'll be a consistent risk that Traveller's Tales doesn't have room for character creation among each game's new features. Its omission from The Skywalker Saga could be a sign that character customization is a low priority for Traveller's Tales, meaning it may bow out of the franchise permanently to make room for other content.
The Skywalker Saga's Character Content
Traveller's Tales has yet to explain why character creation got cut from The Skywalker Saga. It merely clarified that a 2019 statement that the feature would appear is no longer accurate. It's possible that there simply wasn't time to get character creation right among The Skywalker Saga's other features. Sadly, there have been reports that The Skywalker Saga developers suffered from major crunch during the process; hopefully the feature's removal at least provided a bit of relief for the game's developers.
While the loss of The Skywalker Saga's character customization is sad, the game makes up for it in other departments. Players may not be able to mix and match character parts, but a list of more than 300 playable characters offers a ton of gameplay variety, especially when that list includes some surprising Star Wars characters like Salacious B. Crumb. The Skywalker Saga's RPG mechanics also offer players a little customization throughout the official cast of characters, since fans can prioritize unlocking and upgrading the abilities that appeal to them most. All in all, The Skywalker Saga has a solid amount of character options, but the loss of character creation still casts the feature's future in doubt.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga releases April 5, 2022 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.