Seems odd to kick this thread off now, skipping the biggest gaming story in years, but I think the other thread has it covered. Instead, I’ll start this one off with this investigation from Polygon:
Even if you don’t care about developer treatment or crunch, this is pertinent for anyone thinking about picking the game up:
Around the time the project kicked off in late 2017, management made the unpopular decision to develop the game on a new engine called NTT.
Sources tell Polygon that employees inside the studio had been pushing hard for TT to switch to the Unreal Engine, with a small group even creating a Lego Star Wars test in the software. This was well received internally by those who saw it, according to both current and former staff, but management decided to continue developing the project on NTT, in an attempt to avoid paying engine licensing costs — Lego games often ship on a large number of platforms, and each of those adds to the expense. This was despite warnings about some of the problems NTT might cause.
Members of the team say that in practice, when they got their hands on NTT, it was unstable and missing features. Tasks like adding animations that would take two minutes in the old engine could take 10 minutes or longer this time around, depending on how many times the engine crashed. It also resulted in hours of work vanishing if the engine didn’t save properly. New engines typically arrive with teething issues, but several former employees wondered why the company had taken this risk on such a high-profile project.
To add to this, staff say that much of the pre-production on The Skywalker Saga had been done with the old engine in mind. That created problems when trying to implement the game’s design, as assets and animation had to be reexported and reintegrated.
Former staff members say that constant revisions to the design were not uncommon throughout development, and that this resulted in months of lost work. Among these was a new 27-hit combat tree, which was removed after focus tests said that users were only using one button to fight with.
“The director would request new mechanics on a whim, then ask that they be changed, whilst never actually fixing anything that really mattered,” says one former employee. “Read every review of a Lego game. They always say the same [things]: ‘Platforming is pants, the camera is terrible, no online co-op.’ So let’s add a God of War-style combat tree! 5-year-olds will love it.”
Multiple sources close to the company say TT will no longer be using NTT on future projects, finally agreeing to switch to Unreal Engine, which some view as a potential step forward.
A one-and-done new engine, lots of crunch, dissatisfied employees, and mismanagement. TT Lego games were always a bit buggy anyway and that was with a tried-and-true engine, so this is extremely concerning to me.