As soon as Traveller's Tales announced that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga had gone gold, work on another LEGO game became inevitable. While Traveller's Tales hasn't officially announced its next game yet, it has posted a new job listing that indicates that Traveller's Tales already has plans for its next game. Rather than slowing down and taking a break after LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, it'll apparently move on to the next project as quickly as possible. There's no telling what its next game will look like for now, but The Skywalker Saga certainly suggests TT's next project will be ambitious.
Ambition is a good look for Traveller's Tales' LEGO games; the franchise's annual releases didn't always innovate in major ways, aside from minor mechanics that catered to each game's source material. Future games in The Skywalker Saga's style may feel more meaningfully distinct. However, there is such a thing as too much ambition. While it's great to see that Travellers' Tales is eager to start work on another LEGO game, it needs to pace the last game's development carefully. It won't be easy to make something else of The Skywalker Saga's size, and it needs to do away with The Skywalker Saga's reported crunch.
A Slow Pace for the Next LEGO Game
It goes without saying that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga took a lot of work to make. Its sheer amount of content is incomparable to traditional LEGO games from Traveller's Tales; The Skywalker Saga's many delays entirely stand to reason in retrospect. Traveller's Tales probably doesn't want to go back to making simple annual games after this, but it also can't have its fast release schedule back in that case. It's simply not realistic to make games of The Skywalker Saga's size every year. Instead, it needs to plan for several years of development if it wants to make another game of the same size.
Giving the next LEGO game a more realistic development period is particularly important for the developers' sakes. Crunch infiltrated The Skywalker Saga's development, according to some Traveller's Tales employees, and TT cannot let crunch become the standard of future games. Game developers deserve to work at a reasonable pace, rather than exhausting themselves in order to get a game to release sooner, and the pressure of crunch makes it more likely that flaws will slip through the cracks. The upcoming LEGO game will be better off it its developers have room to breathe.
The Road Ahead of LEGO Games
As exciting as it is to hear that Traveller's Tales already has its next project in mind, the long it waits to reveal a new game, the better. A well-paced development is more important than publicity in these early days. Odds are that the successor to The Skywalker Saga will turn heads on its reveal no matter what its circumstances are. Whether it revisits a familiar IP like The Lord of the Rings or tries something new, Travellers' Tales' LEGO series is timeless enough that the next game will speak for itself, even if it's announced a few years after Skywalker Saga.
Traveller's Tales needs to give The Skywalker Saga room to breathe anyhow. Announcing a new game right around the same time as a new game release would be distracting, even if the new game isn't going on the market anytime soon. After its long, complicated journey to release, The Skywalker Saga deserves lots of time in the spotlight. The Skywalker Saga's wealth of levels and vast overworld ought to keep LEGO fans occupied for quite some time, so there's really no rush to release another game. Traveller's Tales has plenty of reasons to sit on its next game for now, so hopefully it will.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga releases April 5, 2022 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.