This week has seen a flurry of activity within Lego Fortnite, the ever-expanding corner of the game that is now home to several major game modes. First, a major update has arrived for Lego Fortnite Odyssey (the mode previously also known simply as 'Lego Fortnite') that adds the Storm King boss as a big final challenge, similar to the Ender Dragon in Minecraft.
On top of that, there's now a brand new, standalone Lego Fortnite offering to explore: Brick Life, a colorful mix of gameplay that feels like a familiar GTA Online mixed with The Sims.
How did these changes and new features come about? And what does the future hold for the popular Lego and Fortnite crossover? I sat down with Epic Games' executive vice president of game development, Devin Winterbottom, and Remi Marcelli, senior vice president and head of Lego games at the Lego group, to find out more.
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How did you come up with the new Lego Fortnite Odyssey name? And why Odyssey?
Marcelo: Finding new brands is always a challenge for The Lego Group. Lego Fortnite is those two brands coming together, but it's not gender specific. At the time we chose that name, it was a no-brainer simply because we have two very powerful brands – it would have been a missed opportunity! We didn't know that we would have a collection of games, potentially, that would be under that umbrella.
So what we really needed to find was one that mentioned the genre you'd expect to find upon release. [the old] Lego Fortnite. Odyssey came about because that's what gamers love most: adventures. The adventure game is the most loved part of that game and we have improved it with Storm King.
We just wanted to make sure people understood that 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 there? For long-time Fortnite fans, it's great to see it coming from the game's original Save the World mode.
Winter background: We had a vision of what this game could be. We always wanted to have something big, scary, difficult and challenging that you can aspire to achieve. We always had in mind that it would be something like this.
“Everything we've added to Odyssey has stayed there”
We came to Storm King together 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. It's meant to be the challenge you aspire to do, something we think a game of this genre needs.
It's really cool the way that mountain just appeared in the middle of your island, the biome is amazing and he's on top of it. It's a lot of fun and we hope players will continue playing with it for many years to come.
The last thing I'll say is that everything we added to Odyssey stayed there. The Star Wars content is still there, the klombos, the battle bus, the vehicles, the farming… and that's unique to us. It was a challenge to launch this Storm King update in the middle of a live map that someone has been playing on and to which we have added all the rest of the content. But we are very happy with the result.
How have you managed to do that? Because that new area isn't just sewn to the side, it has to detect where you've been previously in the world, what you've built to avoid ruining those things.
“We cannot betray that: your work, your investment”
Winter background: It is a difficult technical job. Unreal Engine is an incredibly powerful tool that has a lot of procedural world generation technology that we've been incorporating over the past few years. We have been working on this technological challenge for some time.
When we did the Star Wars update, we put a new biome next to your island, which is much easier to do. We always had the ambition to change a person's life on the island, but we noticed that they themselves changed it: they erected structures everywhere, built things. We cannot betray that: your work, your investment. So there's a lot of work that the engineering and design teams did to figure out how to procedurally and algorithmically find the right place for that biome and create that structure.
We are very proud of that achievement, it is not easy to achieve and we take the players' investment in everything they have created on that island very seriously, because that is the game they have built within it, it is their creativity and we No. I don't want to tear that down. That's how we approach it.
What will 2025 be like for Lego Fortnite Odyssey? Can players expect the same mix of original and licensed content?
Winter background: We just met and talked about exactly this! We like to have enough of a roadmap for our teams to work on, but not so much that we can't react to what players like, because we take a lot from the community in terms of feedback.
There will definitely be, perhaps, more licensed things; There are fun things to do there. But we're more focused on how to continue making the game fun. Not only have we been adding content, we've been refining how it plays this year, and we plan to do both next year with Odyssey. We are very excited about our plans for 2025.
It seems like a game you don't expect to finish anytime soon. Will it ever be finished or do you plan to keep building it indefinitely?
Marcelo: I hope it's a game that will never be finished. The Fortnite platform allows this and is becoming a place where any game can be a live service game quite easily. And we talked about the unlimited possibilities of Lego bricks, so if you combine those things, it's really limitless. I hope it never gets done, that it always stays fresh and up to date.
Moving on to Lego Fortnite Brick Life, how did it come about and how did you decide which role-playing and social simulation genre to pursue?
Marcelo: Role-playing games were a genre that 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 role-play, so it made a lot of sense to embrace that genre from a principle. Video game perspective. Doing this in Odyssey wouldn't have done justice to what you can get from an adventure game and would probably have been distracting in an adventure game, so we wanted to separate the two.
Epic came with the proposal to release another game instead of creating everything everyone wants in a single game, in order to maintain the authenticity of what Lego Odyssey was at the time. We said 'let's plan something in 2027' and they did it in a year.
How did you do it in one year?
“We are a little picky about our brands and our bricks!”
Marcelo: The technical work that went into building Lego Fortnite in the first place was long and in-depth. We just needed to have all of our elements rendered perfectly because, as you can imagine, we are a little picky about our brands and our bricks! [laughs]
Winter background: Have you noticed that the word Lego is literally engraved on each brick?
Marcelo: We wanted that Lego love, fidelity and everything. So it was a lot of work to create the architecture, to create 2000 minifigs, but once it's there it's easier to keep building. So I want to praise the work that Epic Games did in the past to build that architecture there in the past so that we can develop it in the future, but they also work fast.