LEGO Skywalker Saga’s Classes Can Help Make Every Character Useful
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga's new class system can help to make every one of its playable characters useful, as it diversifies the range of abilities on offer. The LEGO Skywalker Saga features 300 playable characters, and while that number is impressive, it could cause certain Minifigures to get lost in the mix. This proved to be the case in past LEGO titles, including LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, with abilities being shared between characters. Despite only featuring 128 playable Minifigures (less than half of The Skywalker Saga's), The Complete Saga included multiple characters that unfortunately failed to stand out in any gameplay sense, despite being exciting inclusions. This issue was further made apparent by certain unlockable Minifigures that utilized too many abilities, rendering early game characters entirely useless to bring along in Free Play.
LEGO Star Wars' customizable characters were among the most egregious examples of this issue. Since players were able to mix and match different body parts, weapons, and equipment, they could end up with a character that mixed the abilities of way too many characters, meaning there was little sense in playing many of the classic, iconic Minifigures in Free Play. However, custom characters were not the only ones who caused this issue. For instance, in Free Play, players always needed to bring along a protocol droid to open control panel doors, and a blaster character to shoot bullseye targets. However, once players unlocked 4-LOM, a protocol droid with a blaster, it rendered both individual abilities useless, as that character could do both.
With LEGO Skywalker Saga's voice cast including Clone Wars actors and the Star Wars films themselves, it's more important than ever for TT Games to ensure that no one's favorite character feels unfulfilling to play. Fans of the Star Wars universe often have favorite characters that may have only appeared as minor or background figures in the films but have been expanded upon in interesting ways through various novels, video games, and shows. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga will be including a lot of these as playable characters, and each one needs to have a place gameplay-wise. This is where the new class system - as shown in recent trailers and gameplay previews - will hopefully come in.
Among LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker Saga's many gameplay improvements is a new class system. The class system helps to streamline character abilities, seemingly fitting each hero or villain firmly into one of its many categories, such as Jedi or Sith. Each class will share an ability set, such as the Scavenger's net gun or the Protocol Droid's ability to use control panels. Many of these abilities have upgrades that players can purchase through the game's new class menu. Once purchased, an upgrade is applied to all characters of that class. While it is currently unconfirmed whether some characters will have skills that extend beyond their typical class abilities, not doing so would make all characters within the same class have an equal amount of utility when it comes to solving puzzles in the game's missions and open world.
The good thing about this system is that if each character has the same skillset within its class, any - even the LEGO Star Wars version of Babu Frik - can fill that particular slot on a player's team. That means that if Chief Chirpa is a player's favorite Star Wars character, they can use him in their Scavenger slot in every one of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga's missions, without feeling like another character would have been better suited to the job. It's a tweak that should help make every character stand out that little bit more, and is another example of how TT Games is changing the LEGO gameplay formula.