The future of Lego Fortnite: "I hope it will never be done"
"We said 'let's plan for something in 2027' and they did it in one year."
This week has seen a flurry of activity within Lego Fortnite, the game's ever-expanding corner in which several major game modes now sit. First, there was the arrival of a major update for Lego Fortnite Odyssey (the mode previously also simply known as 'Lego Fortnite') that adds the Storm King boss as a big endgame challenge, akin to the Ender Dragon in Minecraft.
On top of that, there's now a whole new and separate Lego Fortnite offering to explore: Brick Life, a colourful mash-up of gameplay that feels like a family friendly GTA Online mixed with The Sims.
How did these changes and new features come about? And what does the future have in store for Lego and Fortnite's popular crossover? I sat down with Epic Games EVP of game development Devin Winterbottom and Remi Marcelli, SVP and head of Lego gaming at the Lego group, to find out more.
How did you come up with the new name for Lego Fortnite Odyssey? And why Odyssey?
Marcelli: Finding new brands is always a bit of a challenge for The Lego Group. Lego Fortnite is those two brands coming together, but it's not specific to a genre. At the time we chose that name, it was an obvious one just because we have two very powerful brands - it would have been a missed oppurtunity! We didn't know we would have a collection of games, potentially, that would sit under that umbrella.
So what we really needed to find was one calling out the genre you'd expect to find when launching [the old] Lego Fortnite. Odyssey came about because that's what players love the most - the adventures. The adventure play is the most loved part of that game and we've dialled up that with the Storm King.
We wanted to just make sure people understood it was an adventure game. And with Brick Life, hopefully it's self-explanatory - it says social roleplay.
Did you always know you wanted the Storm King in there? For long-term Fortnite fans, it's cool to see him come over from the game's original Save the World mode.
Winterbottom: We had a vision of what this game could become. We always wanted to have the big, scary, difficult, challenging thing you could aspire to accomplish. We always had in mind it would be something like this.
"Everything we've added into Odyssey has stayed in it"
We arrived together at the Storm King after thinking about the kinds of things that already existed within the big thing called Fortnite and the history of where our game came from, and what we could do in this world. He is meant to be the challenging thing you aspire to do, which a game in this genre - we think it needs.
It's really cool the way that mountain has just appeared in the middle of your island, the biome is incredible and he sits atop of it. It's a lot of fun and we expect players will play with it for years to come.
The last thing I'll say is - everything we've added into Odyssey has stayed in it. The Star Wars content is still there, the klombos, the battle bus, the vehicles, the farming... and that's unique for us. It was challenging to drop this Storm King update in the middle of a live map that someone's been playing and that we've added all this other content. But we're really happy with how it's turned out.
How have you managed to do that? Because that new area isn't just stitched onto the side, it has to detect where you've been in the world previously, what you've built to avoid ruining that stuff.
"We can't betray that - their work, their investment"
Winterbottom: It's difficult technical work. Unreal Engine is an incredibly powerful tool that has a bunch of procedural world generation technology we've been building into it for the past few years. We've been working on this technology challenge for a while.
When we did the Star Wars update we put a new biome off to the side of your island, which is a much simpler thing to do. We always had the ambition to change a person's island live, but noting that they've changed it themselves - they've erected structures all over, they've built things. We can't betray that - their work, their investment. So there's a bunch of work the engineering and design teams did to figure out how to procedurally, algorithmically find the right place for that biome and create that structure.
We're really proud of that achievement, it's not easy to do, and we take players' investment in everything they have crafted on that island very seriously - because that's their game they've built inside of it, it's their creativity and we don't want to tear that down. That's how we approached it.
What will 2025 look like for Lego Fortnite Odyssey? Can players expect the same mix of licensed and original content additions?
Winterbottom: We just met up and talked about exactly this! We like to have enough roadmap that we can get our teams working, but not so much that we can't react to what players are liking, because we take so much from the community in terms of feedback.
There will definitely be, maybe, some more licensed stuff - there's fun things to do there. But we're more focused on how we continue to make the game fun. We've not just been adding content but we've been refining how it plays this year - and we plan to do both of those things next year with Odyssey. We're pretty excited about our 2025 plans.
It sounds like a game you're not expecting to finish up anytime soon. Will it ever be finished, or are you planning to keep building it indefinitely?
Marcelli: I hope it's a game that will never be finished. The Fortnite platform allows it and it's becoming a place where any game can be a live-service game pretty easily. And we talk about the limitless possibility of Lego bricks, so if you combine those things together it is indeed limitless. I hope it will never be done, always kept fresh and updated.
Moving onto Lego Fortnite Brick Life, how did that come about and how did you decide on the roleplay, social sim genre to go with?
Marcelli: Roleplay was a genre the community had a lot of appetite for and if you think about the Lego Group - the first thing you do once you've built your set is to roleplay, so it made a lot of sense to embrace that genre from a video game perspective. Doing this within Odyssey wouldn't have done justice to what you can get from an adventure game and would probably have been a distraction in an adventure game - so we wanted to separate the two.
Epic came with the proposal of launching another game instead of creating everything that everyone wants in one game, in order to keep the authenticity of what Lego Odyssey was at the time. We said 'let's plan for something in 2027' and they did it in one year.
How did you do it in one year?
"We're a little bit demanding with our brands and our bricks!"
Marcelli: The technical work that went into building Lego Fortnite in the first place was long and deep. We just needed to have all our elements rendered to perfection because, as you can imagine, we're a little bit demanding with our brands and our bricks! [laughs]
Winterbottom: Have you noticed the word Lego is literally embossed on every brick?!
Marcelli: We wanted that Lego love, fidelity and everything. So it was a lot of work to create the archtecture, create 2000 minifigs, but once that's there it's easier to build on. So I want to commend the work Epic Games did in the past to build that architecture there in the past for us to build on in the future - but they also work fast, too.