How LEGO Horizon Adventures’ Hub Presents an Alternative to The Skywalker Saga

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home November 20, 2024 4 Views 7 Min Read
How LEGO Horizon Adventures' Hub Presents an Alternative to The Skywalker Saga

In terms of LEGO video games, LEGO Horizon Adventures is a bit of an outlier in many ways. For one, this LEGO game is the first to adapt a popular property not developed by veteran LEGO game developer TT Games and was instead developed by Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo. Additionally, LEGO Horizon Adventures is the second LEGO game to be solely based on a preexisting video game series, with the prior game being 2009’s LEGO Rock Band. However, in terms of gameplay and setting, there’s one way that Horizon Adventures sets itself apart from its direct predecessor, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. The implementation of a hub instead of a completely open world.



New LEGO Horizon Set is Official

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New LEGO Horizon Set is Official

Fans of the Horizon series can look forward to an upcoming LEGO playset featuring some familiar characters and terrifying machines.

The Worlds of LEGO Horizon Adventures and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

LEGO Horizon Adventures is based on the setting and events of Horizon Zero Dawn, retold in LEGO’s iconic comical fashion. Unlike Zero Dawn, Horizon Adventures is not a wide open-world game where players can seamlessly travel throughout post-apocalyptic Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah from one end of the map to the other. Instead, Horizon Adventures has players select quests from the central hub of the Nora tribe’s capital, Mother’s Heart. Here, players can customize Aloy, Varl, Teersa, and other characters as well as build multiple structures with fun LEGO-themed decorations ranging from Horizon cosmetics to those found in the LEGO City and Ninjago toy lines, along with numerous other activities.


In contrast, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga adapts nine Star Wars films which all take place on several alien planets, space stations, and warships. Due to this vast area spanning the entirety of the Star Wars galaxy, TT Games chose not to utilize a central hub in The Skywalker Saga, and instead, had players travel to certain locations on each planet to continue the game’s main campaigns. This often required players to fly through hyperspace in various ships and take part in brief battles or simply fast travel from planet to planet. Upgrades and bonus features were no longer purchased at a physical shop and were instead purchased from a simple menu players could access at any time while traveling the galaxy.


LEGO Star Wars’ Old Hubs Explained

Previous LEGO Star Wars games did utilize hubs similar to Mother’s Heart, including Dexter’s Diner in 2005’s LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game, the Mos Eisley cantina in 2006’s LEGO Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy, and the warships the Resolute and Invisible Hand in 2011’s LEGO Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars. Each of these hubs offered their own unique activities and unlocks, such as building small LEGO sets with mini kits, building customized characters, and taking part in side bounty hunter missions. The Clone Wars even allowed players to fly in brief space battles as they traveled from the Resolute to the Invisible Hand. These locations additionally had unlocked characters walking around the hubs, making the areas feel more lived in.

The Potential Role of Hubs in Future LEGO Games


Hubs such as Mother’s Heart allow players to customize their own village and grow a personal connection with the inhabitants and the location itself. If Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo were to make a LEGO adaption of Horizon Forbidden West, they could continue having Mother’s Heart be the hub or have The Base be a new hub, since it already served a similar role to a hub in Forbidden West. Studio Gobo could even build on Mother’s Heart house building by allowing players to customize interior rooms inside The Base similar to how Zo decorates her room. If Studio Gobo adapts other popular video games in comical LEGO fashion, they could continue using hubs, such as having Firelink Shrine be a hub in a LEGO Dark Souls game.

Future LEGO games could still use a Skywalker Saga-like open-world system to navigate their worlds instead of a centralized hub. For instance, if Halo Studios were ever to make a MEGA Halo game in response to Horizon Adventures, it may be better to use an open-world system rather than a hub given Halo’s varied galactic settings, such as the many Halo rings, Earth, and High Charity. Similarly, if TT Games or another company were to make another LEGO Marvel or DC Comics game, they might utilize Skywalker Saga’s open-world system due to the vast number of locations in both the books and films. Either way, the hub found in LEGO Horizon Adventures and the open world found in Skywalker Saga both offer unique advantages and disadvantages for future LEGO games.


LEGO Horizon Adventures
is Studio Gobo’s first LEGO game, while TT Games has developed 29 LEGO games since 2005.

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