LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and the many Traveller's Tales LEGO games that came before it have found success due to their unique blend of concepts. On the one hand, they capture the essence of all kinds of famous IPs, ranging from Star Wars to Marvel and DC superheroes, albeit with a more lighthearted twist. On the other hand, they're full of creativity and building-themed mechanics that capture the spirit of real-life LEGO products. That combination of traits makes LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and its peers special; there's few other franchises that can consistently blend a variety of established IPs with a creative edge.
However, one wonders if Traveller's Tales' LEGO games are moving away from their roots right now. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is still clearly all about LEGO, considering how Traveller's Tales has used LEGO to design so many of its set pieces, but the loss of LEGO character creation means that a lot of player creativity is lost. The Traveller's Tales LEGO franchise needs to recapture its creative spirit by reviving mechanics like the level editor that a choice few past games included. The LEGO level editor perfectly captured the spirit of the franchise's source material and deserves a second chance.
Remembering the LEGO Level Editor
To date, the only Traveller's Tales LEGO games to feature a level editor are LEGO Indiana Jones 2 and LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4. While these editors weren't part of the campaign and were tucked to the side of the main experience, they were surprisingly robust. Traveller's Tales gave players access to all kinds of props, terrain pieces, traps, and enemies modeled after real-life LEGO, allowing players to create some highly detailed levels. Players could manipulate the physical terrain of the level, add water or lava to the environment, and even bring a second player along to collaborate on a level.
LEGO products may generally come as individual sets, but LEGO has always been about a person's ability to use their imagination and create something fun from the pieces at hand. That's what made the level editor so special. Traveller's Tales literally put the building blocks of LEGO Indiana Jones 2 and LEGO Harry Potter in the player's hands and encouraged them to make whatever they wanted to. As such a strong distillation of the LEGO product concept, the level editor really deserves to return to Traveller's Tales games after The Skywalker Saga.
Preserving Creativity in LEGO Games
The need for new access to a level editor is especially pressing because of the removal of character customization in The Skywalker Saga. Traveller's Tales may have dreamed up whole worlds in The Skywalker Saga, but without character customization or a level editor, players will sadly have few ways of expressing themselves and using their imaginations in the new game. There's still hope that character creation will return in the next LEGO game, but Traveller's Tales ought to try to bring back the level editor alongside character creation in order to make up for The Skywalker Saga's lost feature.
It's been a long time since Traveller's Tales built a level editor into one of its core games, so there's no telling what it might look like in the future. While more precise terrain manipulation and a greater variety of set pieces would make sense, Traveller's Tales could go beyond that. It would be great if a future level editor allowed players to upload their creations and download other players' creations in the style of the Super Mario Maker series.
Fans hoping for a level editor will just have to wait and hope for now. Traveller's Tales may not have mentioned any level editor plans, but its ambition in The Skywalker Saga certainly suggests that it's interested in returning to creative, complicated features like the level editor.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga releases April 5, 2022, for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.