Chris Faber, one of the main minds behind the conceptualizat

>>14604559
Interesting. Thanks, OP.

>>14604559
>TLG ruins everything: the prologue

>>14604559
I knew Faber was pretty pissed at TLG since he posted that banner a week ago after Bionicle ended, but I didn't think he would publicly reveal their other fuck-ups either.

Is he going the Kojima route? Are we seeing Punished Faber?

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The setting never really felt worse or dumbed down to me, only different and full of potential due to the "anything goes" philosophy of it, which was mirrored in the wide design variety of the villains and theme concepts.

Problem was that while the concept works great on paper and also as a Lego theme (seriously, the CCBS building system is fun as fuck if you know how to use it), it suffered from one crucial flaw: it's a Lego IP so it has to conform to their standards, philosophies and executive bullshit.
By the time HF came up, it felt like most of Lego's action and "big bang" themes were also just as much made with a construction system like the sets themselves, with generic, standardised and interchangable plot and character "bricks" that you can put together like you want until you get something "new" out of it.

>>14604668
I think much of the animosity stemmed from the line's media representation. The cartoon show in particular was pretty poor (if you can even call it a show, it eventually deteriorated into sporadic half-hour specials).

The fact that they gave up on the story halfway through certainly didn't help matters. They set up the return of the main villain, only to never expand on that storyline. The later years ended on cliffhangers and then restarted from scratch each time.

Don't know too much about the lore but I have one complaint about HF
>so they are futuristic robots and one of them uses an actual hand held firearm, pretty cool right?
>nope let's go back to five piece ball shooters(top and bottom piece, two connectors, the ball) because anything that resembles a gun is too scary

>>14604607
I wouldn't actually mind more fuel to the fire.

Lego is getting a lot of flak in recent times, be it for being a massive sellout with all of its licenses, con-exclusive figures that mostly end up in scalper hands, decreasing brick quality and (literal) corner cutting, questionable simplification of the building process by using differently colored bricks that often clash with the rest of the model or now with the cancellation of one of their once strongest IPs due to them fucking up royally.

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>>14604698
If you mean those Breakout blasters, those actually had once a much more interesting function during development.

Just take a closer at the ammo in proto-Bulk's blaster here:

>>14604733
They also had to cut the "skulls" on Core Hunter's set, didn't they? (granted, with that name he'd better be collecting Hero Cores instead of heads)

It's interesting to think that despite of this, the story didn't shy away from presenting questionable moments. Like when one of the Heroes wanted to blow up a bunch of eggs belonging to a sapient species, or the entire ending of the last episode.

>>14604559
Well, dang, the text in the link got deleted (at least for now). Maybe I should have quoted the entire thing, but at least I copied the most relevant bits.

>>14604733
have any more of these pics?

>>14605522
>the text in the link got deleted
TLG: "the goyim know, shut it down!"

>>14605787
guy in the other thread recovered it

The last HF episode "Invasion from below" became the most watched piece of content on LEGO's website the year it came out. At the same time it marked the end of the short life of Hero Factory. It was criticised for a lot of different reasons but here are a few personal views on this battered factory.

"Invasion from Below" was made on a very low budget by Advance and Ghost who made all the original Bionicle animations. The episode was a struggle because the storyline got changed dramatically during production. It was definitely ment to be continued because (of cause) the Queen wasn't gone and the case wasn't closed for HF. The voice actor changes was done for budget reasons because we didn't have budget for the the original voice actors.

Having worked on both Bionicle and HF from the very beginning I can tell you that the work that went into creating the HF universe was much more deep than the early foundation of Bionicle. We wanted to use all we had learned from Bionicle but make something that was really different from Bionicle yet as epic and big and therefore we created what we called a "realtime IP" meaning that this was not a legend, it was actually happening now somewhere in another galaxy. We wanted to mirror present day but in a tech build-up. In some way inspired by the humor of The Incredibles by Pixar.

>>14605796
The backstory of HF is extremely deep and epic and hold secrets that were never used. They are still in the huge concept bible that I keep. I hope to get to show them and do a extensive blogpost about HF and it's creation on this blog when the time is right. A last note is that Hero Factory was only meant as a location springboard into this vast story universe and the story was meant to get much more personal when the real truth about the factory was discovered. The idea of a factory that builds cocky heros made to specifications was actually a provocation to the whole legendary hero story we had told in Bionicle. The real hero would be found somewhere else...:) to be continued...

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>>14605692

>>14605522
Holy fuck Lego is really going Konami on Faber's ass. The Kojima comparisons keep escalating.

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G2 stuff

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>>14605796
>>14605818
>yfw when Faber's story here actually has nothing to do with Hero Factory
>yfw he's using it as an analogy for what Lego is doing to everyone's ideas there "like a factory that builds cocky heros"
>yfw this is his last plea for help
>yfw Lego is about to make him commit sudoku for being a traitor

>>14604559
>The real hero would be found somewhere else
So the characters were supposed to be secondary characters and it was supposed to be Destiny style bait and switch?

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can't wait for the artbook scans

>>14606472
>>14606480
Man, the designers must have cried when they had to degrade these designs into the toys that we got (or, as is the case with some of them, scrap them entirely). At least the concept artist had a chance to let his imagination run free.

Not that I hate the Skull villain sets, I ended up liking them more than I thought I would. But concept art like this makes me value them less.

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>>14606530
Look on the bright side, you could try making them yourself. Some dude made a sick nasty MOC based on the flamethrower skelly, so it definitely isn't infeasible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKx6ibN2wrk

>>14606480
Dude

>>14606450
>dat all swag no lag Pohatu, riding the boomerang with his hands on his hips

>>14606472
These skelebros actually look pretty interesting, not to mention intimidating. Even if these couldn't be portrayed faithfully with the CCBS, they could revise the design a little till we have something resembled the designs more than the SPOOKYs we ended up with.

Where had the magic spark that gave us the likes of Rakshi and Bohroks gone?

>>14606480
spooky hammer is best

>>14604559
I'm honestly surprised TLG hasn't beheaded him for posting all the stuff he does.

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>>14606577
>you could try making them yourself

Speaking of, I once tried building the Berserker skellington.

>>14604698
The main complaint I had was
>factory that produces heroes by the thousands each day
>only focuses on the same nine heroes each wave

>>14605522
He gave an explanation as to why it was deleted in the comments:

"Hey all. (Regarding the text removal).
These past days I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between business and fan culture and how the balance between running a international business with all the decisions and choices that requires and nurturing a group of fans can be a very tricky thing. So I deleted the text because I became too emotional and close to stuff that is owned by LEGO and what happens internally and between business partners is secret land.
When you are on the creative side of things the energy of the fans is a fantastic force full of inspiration and emotion. On the business side this is often a unpredictable and dangerous force that often goes against logic. So wether you think its a good or bad reason this is why..."

Basically he got really mad at Lego and took it down so that fans don't start raging at them. Of course, taking it down kind of has the opposite effect because it makes it look like Lego forced him to be quiet, so now people are just going to get more angry at Lego. Maybe it was intentional? The ruseman.

>>14608574
He didn't sound angry to me. I guess the post did come off as a bit frustrated (understandably), but I didn't get the feeling that he was aiming for a "look what evil Lego denied you!!!" tone, but rather a "this was our plan but it didn't work out" tone. It's not like when Greg flat-out admitted and later repeated several times that he got mad at the writers of the third movie and that he'd gladly undo and rewrite that part of the story if given the chance.

In any case, I hope this doesn't mean that he won't touch on the subject again.

>>14608620
It was definitely not his intention but the info revealed still pretty much fortifies one of the issue people have with Lego: they fuck up extremely promising themes by handling them absolutely poorly.

It kinda reminds me of that interview with Ryder Windham, the author of the G2 books, where he talked about how he had to make heads or tails out of the concept bible since most of the stuff in it was barely fleshed out, contradicting or just plain bad.

>>14604559
Why is modern Lego so bad?
Did they have some of their executives change around the mid 2000s?

>>14611931
There was definitely a change in direction around that time, when the company found its financial footing after almost going bankrupt around 2000. The process was well documented in the book Brick by Brick by David Robertson, which I haven't read in its entirety thus far.

But Lego has changed more since that time, as has apparently the market. Both Bionicle G2 and what we have now learned about Hero Factory show how they squander good concepts and place their focus on things that prove successful with minimal risks (and sometimes minimal creative input) involved.

>>14611931
Because they try to stay competitive.

Plastic quality got worse when they canged to transparent plastic as their base which is cheaper in the long run, the brick quality got worse when they redesigned them to use less plastic, stickers became more and more prominent because they're much cheaper than prints, the building process became less difficult by introducing color-coded parts, colored filler bricks and retard-friendly instructions so even the biggest potato can build a set and the amount of licenses got more and more excessive (seriously, Dimensions is becoming fucking ridiculous and the amount of Batman shit that is apparently coming out next year is almost sickening) because that stuff sells like hotcakes.

>>14607896
not bad

Definitely better than the exposed-joint shit we got

>>14606781
Honestly, I think the intricacy of the sets, not so much any spookiness. The Bohrok and Rakshi got a ton of new, specialized parts for their designs to pull off their gimmicks. And that's a pretty big expense on lego's part. It's clear the initial sets got the attention here, and then they had to coast of it for the rest. Which is a shame.

>>14614952
The thing about the skullfuckers is that each one of them is unique in their design and has some sort of function done without the need for specialized parts that are unique to them.

Warrior: sixshooter, spear backup weapon and gearbox
Slicer: four arms gearbox
Basher: rock'em sock'em function
Scorpio: mask grabber tail that kinda works like a more elaborate Bohrok head
Grinder: two figures, extra mask, gearbox and sixshooter

Meanwhile the Rahkshi and Bohrok were basically all the same figure with one or two different parts - if you bought one you bought them all.
If I'd have to choose, I'd definitely take the Skull Squad over either of them.

>>14606469
> Destiny style bait and switch?
Wot?

>>14615061
The Traveler was supposed to be more obviously antagonistic. All that's left in the actual release are hints in the background and a gutted story that may as well be filler. Shoot alien A, shoot alien B

>>14615011
I still wish they could have made unique-looking enemies for the reboot. Bohrok and Rahkshi, extreme clone sets they may be, had more distinctive, immediately recognizable designs that made them stand out even outside of their own franchise. Meanwhile, the skellies are just your generic fantasy-themed humanoid zombies with robo detailing, and the unholy jumble of fuck that is Scorpio. Also, I don't even find them that impressive or particularly well designed on their own -- not even Skull Basher, which I thought would be may favorite, but instead became my least favorite when I got it.