2K Drive and The Lego Group recently revealedLEGO 2K Driveas the first title in a multi-game partnership, aimed at combining 2K’s expertise withLEGO’s cultural impact. It remains to be seen what other games come out of this partnership, but LEGO 2K Drive is enticing as it is. Described as a driving adventure game, players will be able to race, explore various biomes, complete various quests, do on-the-go challenges, customize their own vehicles with 1000s of bricks as options, and play with others in local or online co-op.
Game Rant recently spoke withLEGO 2K Drivecreative director Brian Silva regarding the game’s origins, features like its verticality and customization options, and rivals players will encounter. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: Did the old Nintendo 64 game LEGO Racers influence LEGO 2K Drive in any way?
A:We’re veryfamiliar with LEGO Racers. I wouldn’t say we drew inspiration from it, but I think it was in the back of our minds that people really liked that game. It’s been a long time since LEGO has done anything with racing, so it’s like let’s see what we can come up and hopefully, there’s still an interest out there. Yes, it was definitely very nostalgic.
Q: LEGO has a certain brand of humor that can be hard to define, but it’s obvious LEGO. How did you go about trying to maintain that distinct LEGO humor?
A:Yeah, everything you see in the game as far as characters go and dialogue goes came from our internal team. We tried our best to matchLEGO from the movies and TV series, which is a combination of whimsy, slapstick, and ridiculousness.
Like Parker Carr.
A:Yeah, for sure. Coming up with our own original characters to blend in seamlessly with a LEGO universe was really amazing. Super fun to do.
Q: Driving around, I saw some dinosaurs and other big things I wanted to get on top of. An NPC mentioned a jetpack - could you talk about the vertical elements of the game?
A:Yeah. There’s a little bit ofMetroidvaniagoing on, as you’ve probably already experienced. It’s like, ‘Ooh, what’s that thing up there? I can’t get to it yet. Maybe I can later. Let’s wait and see. Right?’ So maybe the jetpacks will help you get up there, or maybe there’s something else that will help you get up there. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting used to the jump feature in the game, which was very important to us to make the car feel like a character.
Because it’s not a racing game, it’s really a driving adventure game. The deeper you go, you’ll find that ‘hey, there’s way more than just races around here.’ This is a big open world. There are all kinds of challenges, on-the-go events, and fun little quests. There are collectibles everywhere, and my favorite thing to do is just jump and drive around, see where I can go and where I can’t, and find new areas that I still haven’t seen yet.
Q: On that point, the animation for vehicle transitions between road, off-road, and water is super smooth. How difficult was that to implement in the game?
A:Yeah, you got to be careful, right? There’s a precedent set by the LEGO movies and TV series. It was really just a matter of tuning it, tweaking it, iterating on it, and eventually getting it.
Q: So, as you said, it’s more of an adventure game than a racing game. How did the team approach making sure there was a variety of open-world things to accomplish?
A:It’s just a matter of playing it and discussing it with the development team over the years of development. It’s like, ‘does this feel right? Does it feel like there’s enough of this part in the game or is there another area that needs work?’
Also, giving the game you’re developing to someone to try it for you and watching them play is the most helpful thing for development. You’ll learn way more from that session than like a year of development.
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Q: LEGO is a very family-friendly thing, but it has a lot of older fans too. How did you go about ensuring fun for different playstyles and age differences in such a game?
A:The game is developed in such a way that you’re able to play it how you want. Just like LEGO, it was really important to us to make sure that thegameplay felt like playing with actual bricks, where you can build whatever you want. You can not build whatever you want, you can like, “Hey, I don’t want to follow those instructions, I’m going to build something on my own over here.” That was the approach that we had for the overall design of the game.
If you just want to do the races, great. If you want to spend hours and hours in the garage building like anything you see behind me here, you may actually build anything brick by brick in the garage. I think there’s going to be half the players who want to check out this cool stuff, build amazing vehicles, and share it online. The real intent of this game is to make it feel super creative and not restrictive.
Q: On that point, it was said “evolution” was a keyword for customization in the game. What can you say about that approach and how genuinely crazy can someone get with the customization?
A:As crazy as you want, and I’m not kidding. We have thousands of bricks to choose from in the garage. We have hinges, we have angles, we have stickers, and we have different chassis types. You can do water, street, or off-road.You could build a car, you could build a shoe, or you could build a fruit basket. It doesn’t matter, you can really build anything you want to build.
Q: A lot of racing games feature performance customization. How deep does that level of customization go?
A:Pretty deep. It’s not required, however, which is part of the game’s design. We want it to be accessible for the average player, that novice player, right? If you want to play through the whole game with the starter car, you can do that. That’s fine if you want, but you can also as the advanced gamer tweak stats. We also have a perk system where you can add different perks to the game which add abilities to your vehicle.
There’s also a tier system. We have class C, Class B, and Class A. Once you get to Class A, you can apply a whole collection of parts to your vehicle suited to your liking. If you want more boost, put that extra boost on there. If you want more armor, you can tweak it however you want, or you can ignore that entirely and just drive around in your little starter car.
Q: What can you tell me about the different biomes?
A:Sure. You played in the starting area, Turbo Acres, which is race crazy like they’re all about racing. It’s all green, beautiful, and blue skies. I believe you probably went into Big Butte county, which is our desert biome. Past that, we have two other large biomes. One is called Prospecto Valley.
The theme of that is Prospecto is a play on the word Prospect, and there are huge gold nugget deposits throughout the entire biome. It’s like a national park with lots of lush green, beautiful rivers, and lakes.
Our fourth biome is called Hauntsborough. As you can probably tell by the name, it’s aspooky biomewith lots of silly, crazy monster-themed areas.
The ultimate goal of the game is to get to the sky tournament. There is a Sky Cup Grand Prix, and the sky trophy is a gigantic trophy that everyone in the whole world of Bricklandia is after.
Q: What I’ve seen of the story so far is pretty meta and self-referential in a way. What can you tell about crafting a story with that approach?
A:We wanted to obviously keep the story very light and very silly. Your mentor, he’s the ex-big-time race car driver and a hero in Bricklandia. He sees something in you, so he’s going to make sure you get to that Sky Cup Grand Prix. Then you got the bad guy, Shadow Z. He’s a cheater, he’s a ‘make everybody do his dirty work’ kind of guy.
We’ve tried to ensure that all the characters in the game made sense. We didn’t want to just add an extra character here or there. We kept them pretty lean and pretty focused. Basically, just silly and not taking ourselves very seriously when it came to the store. It wasn’t meant to be this really dramatic or huge epic storyline with twists and turns. It’s just silly, right?
Q: What can you tell me about the rivals you meet in the game?
A:There are so many rivals in the game. That’s more than half of the characters because we have 28 rivals or something like that. You’re constantly running into them, and they’ll talk to you before you race them on their track. They all have their own themed racetrack throughBricklandiawithin all the different biomes.
They’re all after the Sky Trophy as well, so you feel this competition within the world, but we made a concentrated effort to ensure not everyone’s a bad guy. That’s Shadow Z. Everybody else just loves racing; Bricklandia is all about racing. They’re all competitive, but they’re all supportive well. If you beat them, they can be like “beat that Shadow Z for me. You know, that guy’s a jerk.'
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LEGO 2K Drivereleases on May 19 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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