MOTHERFUCKER!!

"The Lego Group has shut down a long-awaited fan project after eight years in development, just a few short months ahead of its planned demo. Bionicle: Masks of Power was a non-profit, open-world action RPG set in the universe of Lego Bionicle. It followed the Toa's quest to collect the masks of power and free the island of Mata Nui from the evil Makuta, and developer Team Kanohi was due to launch a playable preview in August, but now it is no more.

As someone just young enough to have caught the start of the Bionicle craze, it's always felt like a perfect fit for an action game. Yet with the toy line long discontinued, it's unlikely that we'll ever see another official release, even with so many successful Lego games on PC. Bionicle: Masks of Power promised to be the answer to that void; a sprawling open-world game built in Unreal Engine 5 with six playable Toa heroes to take on your adventure. Sadly, it has now been brought to a close.

Despite some hardships over the past year, Team Kanohi says in a new public statement that it "was in the final stages of bug fixing and polishing for the demo's release," and was planning a shadow drop on Sunday August 10, 2025. "Unfortunately, it seems that will no longer happen. The Lego Group has asked our team to shut down our project in its entirety, and remove Bionicle: Masks of Power from the public eye."

8 years

no demo release

Lego just did the devs a favor there.

Boncles bros... Our response?

NOOOOO SOVL KINONICLE

oh yeah, it was in development for 8 years but BELIEVE ME there was a demo right around the corner for sure bros

Leak it, leave, not your problem, get to share work anyway, forever on the internet.

Retard makes a fan game instead of an original game

They will never learn, will they?

Main writer was a problem starter

It never had legs to begin with

I had this game on the top of my wishlist for 8 fucking years
FUCK the lego company, I'm never buying another lego game again

this, not even sad it's dead

how much money they make on patreon?

There's nothing to learn, rather the people who make posts like this need to learn. Here's an example:

One of the original "Pokemon with guns" ideas Devs makes a super simple, super cheap asset flip game that puts ripped Pokemon models in a bare bones unity FPS

Millions of views

Hundreds of thousands of downloads

Tens of thousands of followers on Twitter

Articles written in all the shill media outlets

Gets the expected DCMA after a few days

Pivots into following your advice, making his own game, fully original

Spends time on it, spends effort on it, makes an actual game with actual models and real design work

Releases it

Gets a few hundred views, a few downloads, nobody notices or cares at all

lego gives the okay for this project

actively discussed it on official lego podcasts even

steam page was up for years

randomly ask to shut it down

realistically its just new lego management coming in and being hard on fan projects but part of me hopes its a bioncle return for nostalgia fags

first of all, BUT DEVS WANT MORE ATTENTION is not a terribly convincing argument customer-side
secondly

promote your WIP fangame

concede to """rights-owners""" when the chips are down

feign surprise that the unfinished work leaked somehow

is just another aspect of attention-whoring
you keep quiet if you are intent on ACTUALLY RELEASING THE THING and not just collecting twitter accolades

EIGHT YEARS just for a demo? That's almost as long as Bionicle G1's entire lifespan. Not even the most bloated and inefficient of AAA developers are that slow to deliver that little.

blockland as a lego rip-off wasn't denied the ability to go retail after just changing pegs to squares and player heads from rounded cylinders to cubes.

Possible, but I doubt it. Lego actually has a habit of nixing fan projects on the 11th hour despite being positive otherwise.

Plus, Bionicle already had a reboot that massively flopped in 2015, so if we do get any more of it, I likely only see it as maybe a single, brick built set as part of their recent nostalgia pandering bank breaker sets, like the castle and classic space ship.

If these fan games are so great, why don't they put together a mostly finished product, pitch it to the IP holder and actually sell it for a share of the revenue? That's happened multiple times with multiple brands.
I doubt the LEGO Group would say no to selling a Bionicle game they didn't have to invest their own money into making, as long as their people got to give it a once over for content.

These things get shut down, not because the companies are greedy, but because they literally can't allow people to distribute stuff they have the ownership rights to without contest. They'd weaken their claim to the IP. Any time you see a company that's really cool with fangames like Valve, they can do it because they have a fairly open licensing policy for their IP that protects their rights over it. You can't just do stuff like that with no agreement in place.

I guess I can see that. The attitude mightve been different if there work Bionicle sets around to promote, but this is based on toys that have been off the market for more than 2 decades now.

the people who make games like this are too autistic to understand any of that

Today's companies are too retarded to care what their fans want.
If the HR lady doesn't care about it. It doesn't get made.

WHY WEREN'T BIONICLES LIKE THIS IN MY CHILDHOOD?!

Lego changed their IP licensing policy as part of the shuffling that made the new Lego Star Wars
and Fortnite stuff possible. To keep both Disney and WB happy for The Skywalker Saga and all their other TT Lego games, and to get everything in order for all the IPs in Fortnite to play nice with Lego, they had to make changes, and the leniency that made this possible had to go out the window with that. Probably as a condition set by Disney, WB, Epic Games or someone else entirely.

They're making a game based on the fucking Samurai Pizza Cats. Old shelved IPs are exactly the kind of thing these companies would be willing to let a team that's already done most of the work share the revenue on. Because they were getting none for it otherwise, and they didn't even have to invest any money or resources themselves to make it happen.

I doubt the LEGO Group would say no to selling a Bionicle game

Why the fuck would lego release a game about a dead franchise? Their first and foremost source of income is selling fucking physical toys, and all the movies and games have always been about selling more toys. What will they sell with this game? They don't make bionicle, so they don't need a game about it

I'm not justifying them, fuck lego, but you just have to have some iq (empathy) to understand their reasoning

Concord was in development for just as long, though.

weaken their claim to the IP

dude what do you think lawfare is
you can parrot the legal excuses all you want, but unless it gets to "blizzard v dota" or "warhammer v warcraft" level of negligence, it's trivial to dispute any infringing commercial material
companies just want absolute control over """intellectual property""", that's the plainest kind of greed there is

LMAO
I hope every single one of those developers got black listed.

How's GTA6, Half-Life 3, and The Elder Scrolls 6 coming along then? Concord?

People would buy it. Zillennials went crazy for Bionicle as kids back in the oughts. There's demand, people were supporting the fan project for nearly a decade, and Lego were entirely on board with it until their other agreements made it legally impossible for them to be so lenient.
Why wouldn't Lego take a free shot of income on something that's been laying fallow in their back catalogue for years?

If a free Bionicle game Lego can be proven to be aware of goes uncontested, Mega Bloks or some other manufacturer could hypothetically argue that Lego have abandoned the IP and it has thus entered the public domain, to use it themselves. Lego would have had to extended a license with conditions to the team. Before, there was an automatic license that pretty much anyone could use as long as they held to Lego's conditions. Something changed to make it impossible for Lego to offer such a broad license for their IP, so they're back to having to defend it.

Kirsche fucking won so hard.

Some of them got to fail upwards from what I understand. It's funny to read some interviews about Marathon from Concord devs massively downplaying their own failure, though.

As for fan games, really depends. They're not beholden to schedules and deadlines in the same way professional developers are, mostly free time when modern games typically take a lot more work to make as well. Being said, it's funny that Lego hasn't issued a C&D for that Rock Raiders remake.

People would buy it

I'm not arguing with that, of course. And now let's imagine what the lego board of directors thinks about this. The old faggots will just ask "but we don't make those toys anymore, why should we sell a game about them?" And your "just sell the game" argument won't work for them because they're not game publishers, they're toy sellers

I think that's what's going on in their minds. And the fact that they killed the game probably means that I'm right.

be anonymous

publisher tries to send DMC take down

tell them to eat shit and get raped.

release game on anonymous image board

game gets mirrored everywhere & kikes can't do shit about it.

The smart people in the room would have a bunch of examples ready of how undercapitalized nostalgic IP has made others money already. Again, it would cost Lego next to nothing compared to what their typical video games demand of them.

But when Valve does the same Anon Babble defends them?

NEVER make a fangame where you can't just polish the franchise off and release it anyway. Jesus christ this has happened like 6 times just this year, when will they learn?

anonymous

You'll get swatted retard

Just make an original game fromt he start. Shit like bug fables and cuphead did fine without being mario and mickey mouse,

can't get reddit gold by promoting your work

ebaumsworld sorry i meant twitter reposters copy the webms

have to actually finish the game first rather than just "manage" the project

the problem was never about publishing the material, countless piracy sites and aggregators should be evidence enough, but reaping the attention developer so desperately craves
how many headlines did lttp or zelda cdi make? frankly, getting c&d'd is the best way to get your hit of internet fame

Why does Bionicle attract us channers more than comparable toyetic series with deep, involving lore like Transformers? Bionicle was extremely important to me growing up in an abusive household and the themes presented in it continue to resonate with me almost more so as an adult, like I was talking about last night with how I understand the song Hero even more now that I’m in my twenties.

let's release our unofficial fangame that the IP holder can shut down anytime on Steam!

Genuinely don't know why fan game devs go out of their way to draw so much attention

If I were making one I'd be radio silent until release day. Never trust an IP holder even if they say they're "okay" with it

they're not game publishers, they're toy sellers

Actually the Lego company recently opened up an in-house game development studio.

I thought this game shut down after the main guy died?

Lego has made like 100+ games before that, lol

in house?
I don't think so, that was travelers tales

Bionicle was fucking cool as hell. You had cool character designs that did cool shit and were literally designed to exploit the autism crack that is the urge to speculate and headcanon about fucking everything.

You had cool as fuck world building, a cool power system that wasn't excessively convoluted, nor too rigid as to deny expansion.

You had cool, mysterious commercials full of drama and a huge multimedia spread of accessory content to the toys.
All accompanied by a dark, edgy soundtrack full of licensed electronic alt-rock that preteen boys were obsessed with.

You couldn't have engineered a better product to oneshot autistic Zillennial boys, even with the benefit of hindsight.

Bionicle is definitely not more popular here than transformers

youtu.be/qvM6Mg0VtO0

hyping up your copyright infringement

you hate to see it

Bionicle's story was compelling because it is overtly about putting faith in something above one's self to actualize needed change; At it's most stripped down, the entire plot A to B is about amnesiac robots saving God. There's plenty of the basic good moral stuff you see in other similar toylines, but the spirituality and mysticism present in Bionicle is what makes it stick in my mind.

pitch it to the IP holder and actually sell it for a share of the revenue?

Are you retarded? Do you really think a modern company would ever approve of that? They are fiercely autistic about IP, they'd never let some dev team make a game for them without breathing down their neck 24/7

Nobody is anonymous on the internet. If the fed want to find you they will.

The dev team would approach them with a mostly finished product, demonstrate the best vertical slice they could, then any serious misalignments could be resolved so the product could release. That's how most of the games Dotemu publishes get made.

8 years

Just let it go should have been nothing but a waste of resources and money

Dotemu is a smalltime Dev/publisher that mostly does ports. That isn't even in the same ball park.
No major company is going to let some nobody use their IP without 100% control over the product. It's insane to even think about. At best they'll give you a job working for them.

The Professor is now working at EA as world designer.

Growing up a Bionicle kid while being forced to attend a Unitarian Universalist church by my parents was weird. I believed in God at the time but had my faith obviously shaken when I tried to interact with other spiritual practices and prayer failed to save me from my family, and I started seeing spirituality as neurotypical during the skeptic/rant meta, so I pretty much turned my back on it all, but to me, Bionicle’s religion is about reframing religion as science, which I’ve heard people say about Prometheus. As an adult, I’ve come to believe in all religion and found a god (Hypnos) who I actually feel comfortable serving under, but the more scientific approach to religion in Bionicle still informs how I think of my potential connection to him. I pray to him under the assumption that he’s real and may be able to hear me, but I’m aware that he may be more of a physical being like Mata Nui than a conceptual entity.

Thry should not br allowed to do that u less they were selling the fan game. If it's frer then companies should fuck off.

What the fuck are you talking about? It sounds like your parents' fucked up gutless version of Christianity is what fucked you up, and Bionicle happened to be there. And your autistic ass started drawing connections where there were none because you thought those things were all cool.

Why don't these PR/legal subhumans ever do their damn job and find out in advance?

They don't get as much sexual pleasure if they kill the project off in its infancy

youll never get me, i deleted my cookies

What the fuck are YOU talking about? Christianity is fucked-up because Christianity has awful beliefs and morals and Yahweh doesn’t even listen to his own followers. My dad was a washed-out Christian and my mom was a washed-out Jew who both turned into exhausting New England atheist shitlibs in the 2010s, but we’re talking about what you said about me, and I was just talking creative connections between Bionicle and real religion in my own life. You’re a normalfag.

>He literally inherited the schizo gene
I'm so sorry.

As an adult, I’ve come to believe in all religion and found a god (Hypnos) who I actually feel comfortable serving under, but the more scientific approach to religion in Bionicle still informs how I think of my potential connection to him. I pray to him under the assumption that he’s real and may be able to hear me, but I’m aware that he may be more of a physical being like Mata Nui than a conceptual entity.

deliberately wait until the playable preview is about to be released

deploy lawyers

Is this reaction picture supposed to be making fun of me? I’ve seen it hundreds of times but never understood what he’s trying to convey.

How does it take you 8 years to make a point and click RPG?

take a wild guess, schizo.
In fact, why don't you ask your dream god.

Unitarian Univeralism

There's your problem right there. Even the Anglican church looks like the model of holyness compared to that nightmarish system of slop

I’m not wasting his time on your behalf.

didn't get dmca

is finished

The virgin bionicle vs the chad manic miners

That nigger sleeps all day, He has plenty of free time

Fan games have the allure of being instantly recognizable. What about this game does anyone know or even care about, other than it being Bionicle? You couldn't even just take the assets they have, and tweak them to be original, because no one would care.

It's a cult following thing
Transformers has a lot of fans across Anon Babble (Anon Babble, Anon Babble, Anon Babble, Anon Babble, Anon Babble, etc) but Bionicle's appeal through the lore was something you had to actively seek out making it more personal.
There's no Bionicle cartoon series after all, just flash games, comics, novels, etc
I think it's like how Animorphs has this nostalgic diehard cult following made up of people who actually read the books and didn't just stare at the covers or how Earthbound was developing a cult following in the west even before Smash 64 even came out.

You should have seen what happened in the early 2010s when my generation of kids was outgrowing Sunday school, staff were retiring and a small clique of crypto-Mormons moved in on the staff base and made us watch Mormon propaganda under the guise of understanding marginalized religions.

There's no Bionicle cartoon series after all

huh?

Based Rock Raiders bro.

Journey To One from the reboot exists, but contrary to outsider perception, gen 1 never actually had a cartoon. It got three good movies and one that doesn’t count. They’re not spectacular, and even as a kid, I felt there was some disconnection of ethos between the original property and the movies, but they’re actually much more faithful adaptations than they could have been and feature some great voice talent. The closest thing there is to a Bionicle cartoon is Reboot.

I still have no idea how Scholastic ever decided to publish that shit for grade schoolers. Animorphs would go from typical grade schooler fiction fare straight into something pretty dark that you'd have stuck in your head, bothering you for the next week, and right back again like it was nothing.

Bionicle has a mystique to it that's way different from other toys.

youtube.com/watch?v=Fk47EDfWK10

I mean look at this shit. No dialog. No loud music. You see this, and you're just like, "what the fuck is this?" It's got an atmosphere and world that draws you in. Then you see the Mata Nui Online Game, and it's that atmosphere amped up and expanded into a game, and little by little, you're sucked in.

except cuphead is a direct throwback to the black and white mickey mouse era in the most blatant form, both in terms of style and theme. so is that a fair comparison when discussing originality?

There were multiple animated movies.

Let's not talk about whatever that Toon Boom and cancelled-during-production Netflix shit was for G2.

8 years without releasing anything at all

It was patreon scam, who cares

Been trying to workshop a Teen Titans Go joke about this bullshit for months.

I understand that this sucks for all involved but I'm not sure why anyone expects otherwise fucking around with big boy IP.

A perfect storm with buildable action figures of cool robot people on the surface, a good blend of Polynesian theming to differentiate it from other science fiction, and it inferred a lot of mystery once you look deeper into it. Turns out good world building and lore is an autism goldmine. A different time in contrast to Skyrim and Dark Souls making this sort of thing mainstream with videos everywhere on every little bit and escalating to a point where you got motherfuckers trying to see it in franchises with jack shit of the latter and yet trying to monetize it anyway.

I still have no idea how Scholastic ever decided to publish that shit for grade schoolers

Kids are tougher than you think
Fuck the "How is this for kids" mindset regarding media from the 2000's and prior
But in all seriousness books can get away with a lot more than film and vidya because soccer moms can't walk in on something in a book the same way they can with anything on a screen

They were to direct to video and only offered a fraction of the overall plot

Nothing of value was lost.

They were following LEGO's own guidelines to heart and other fangames were outright given shout outs

Imagine doing all that and being told to fuck off anyway

Reminder:
youtube.com/watch?v=hqwP6uuYOWo

Disney, WB and epig ruin something else they touch

Wooow fucking amazing. Can't wait for the day these companies burn down.

why do free fangames always shut down when told to.

I remember being pretty shocked reading the sex and waterboarding scenes in Little Brother when I was 12.

the alternative is going to jail because a corporation got butthurt

My personal theory is that the original Piraka marketing would've done atmospheric short films ala Mata, Nuva, and Metru but there would be something wrong about them
Letting the audiences themselves slowly find out that this new wave of figures aren't actually Toa like how the Matoran of Voya Nui found out in-universe
I get why the Piraka had to look more evil for the final product but I'm honestly 50/50 on if that'd be worth sacrificing the Piraka Rap for a reveal like that

NEVER fucking announce your fangames. Just release them.

jail

lol no
But spending years in court or going bankrupt, sure

Great Roodaka fanart.

Way different, was from someone who genuinely loved the game and wanted to create a way for it to ne more accessible. These kind of things never have passion behind them.

Would recommend downloading and archiving manic miners if you haven't already because LEGO is setting a bad precedent here

I think the point to be made is that this game could have been Cybosaga: Helms of the Gods instead.

Why do people want to see her be fat?

I just read this team was sniping people from the other bionicle fan game where the dude died

Don’t try to turn Manic Miners into Gex, please.

Hahahaha, WHAT? The vaporwave troon who platformed Steven Anderson’s kids was writing this game? Does this mean we’re going to get to see Steven go up against Takanuva?

youtu.be/zVVNDanS2WM?si=knQcIc7MGAyWBAWk

And everyone knows you can trust giant corporate entities with hundreds of moving parts to never change their mind or do/say contradictory things.
Again, I get that it sucks but you have to know the risks.

8 years for a demo

But then how do you get the Patreon bucks?

After eight years in development hopefully it will have been worth the wait

Ugh

I don't really care. They announced that shit ages ago, it was clearly overambitious (an entire HD soulslike with an open world), and they spent years with nothing to show for it. This game would have never been finished, and if they tried, it would've turned into a buggy unplayable mess, because a group of tranny autists can't just make Dark Souls but with Bionicles, that's not how game dev works.
Bionicle was a fun franchise when we were kids. For me, it was babby's first lore-driven narrative, the first time I actively engaged with a large fictional world as a kid, and it certainly left an impact. But you gotta let it fucking go already. LEGO will never revive this toyline because their modern philosophy and toymaking process are both unfit for it, and there are better stories to get yourself immersed in. Just let Bionicle stay in the past, where it belongs.

It's a shame it can never be recreated but at the same time, the multi-media approach honestly fucked over Bionicle in the long run.
I think there were other kids media lines in the 2000's that might have tried to accomplish similar.

Mahri Nui had the best sets after the originals

Generation 3 is real but it comes at a great cost
Pick your poison

Minifigure scale

Human sidekicks

Pandering to the trans fanbase

Otherwise, it's absolutely perfect

youtube.com/watch?v=99F8kFe9Upo
If you want to know why Bionicle will not come back, watch this video, it's a great deep dive into the whole process.

Human sidekicks

Least evil out of all of them. Could work if you did it very, very, VERY carefully.

Human sidekicks could actually be cool, and since I already know it's constrained to be the best possible version, there's no downside.

Almost an hour long

I'll just spoonfeed you guys
It's the molds
The molds are kaput
Lego saves money reusing molds for various pieces in even unorthodox ways like having the frog piece in pink to be used for cherry blossoms
A Bionicle set made today using the exact same pieces a decade ago would cost more and would be less cost effective in the long run because said Bionicle set would have parts too specialized for further use.

Lmao just let great things stay in the past and enjoy new things that arent as good or just plain shit. They are still great toys today and my kids play with them. What does a retard with zelda picture know about what makes a great story? End yourself.

Minifigs
Because then we get play sets

Fan games should be considered parody and the right to make them should be protected by law.

It never had legs to begin with

You could say...
It never had LEGOs to begin with

the Lego group asked us to shut it down

Why don't they just say no?

they take you to court

Just don't show up?

That’s not how parody works anon

Just 3d print the molds. Or AI-generate them.

don’t show up to court

Now that is jail time

free game

"nooo you're infringing copyright! it doesn't matter if you aren't making a profit your project needs to be destroyed!"

what kind of fucking subhuman thinks like this?

They also tried rebooting with G2, using their current action figure system, and that was garbage that didn't "feel" like Bionicle at all. Bionicle relied too heavily on unique pieces, like masks, weapons, and limbs. Reworking them with modern standard pieces is not possible; you wouldn't recapture that style, as evidenced by G2.

move to a country that does not extradite to the US

What now?

CREEPS FROM THE DEEPS GON’ BE FREAKING UP YA MIND

Or AI-generate them.

Can you AI generate food?

Gatekeeping works anon
Would you feel the same way if they inserted tranny flags throughout the game?

Such as?

This isn't gatekeeping, it's tyranny. It's evil.

culture war baiting

Kill yourself.

Russia

They are still great toys today and my kids play with them

No one is saying the toys are bad. It's Lego, of course it's good. But not every franchise is meant to last forever, and some stories have to end. This obsession with everything you like lasting forever is what brought us into this current age of slop.

Enjoy your “life” in Russia I guess

Really dude?

Yes. The game was going to be free to play. This does not fall under what a copyright is supposed to disallow. This is a severe case of government overreach and it should be treated as such.

The game was going to be free to play. This does not fall under what a copyright is supposed to disallow

Grummz was the cancel pig who led the brigade to bring the to the attention of LEGO corporate, fyi :)

How much is LEGO paying you to suck them off?

attention

Lego knew full well about the project
They're aware of fan projects
Odds are it was a change in policy
Even the transgender writer people are hating thinks the "Grummz got this cancelled" conspiracy is retarded

Odds are it got the attention of their lawyers seeing as it directly happened the day after he started pissing his pants about a tweet from over a year ago.

The demo is going to be leaked on Anon Babble in torrent form in 48 hours give or take.
t. knower

Ah yes, LEGO listens to some dude on twitter

Odds are you are full of shit

shills pushing a narrative that since one of the devs is a tranny this time, LEGO corpos are allowed to shut down free to play fan projects now

some tranny is trying to push a conspiracy theory involving Grummz for some reason

This situation is retarded on all fronts. I await the leak of the demo and I am never purchasing legos again.

>some tranny is trying to push a conspiracy theory involving Grummz for some reason

The tranny thinks the theory is dumb and is baseless (and they haven't been on the game for over a year now)

Real niggas know Acceleracers was peak toy lore.

post-2001 Mainframe

Shame, anon.

You're on the wrong site anon

it's a dead IP why does Lego care?

Corpos are weird like that but I kind of want someone to test the limits to sort of thing
Fuck it, Hero Factory fan game
Knights Kingdom fan game
Galidor fan game
Lets see how LEGO responds

Bionicle pulled Lego out of shutting down
There are people in LEGO that care a lot about it

Teku gang

speaking as someone 'on the inside' - the trans writer hasn't been involved in a long time (having people on that stir drama is bad pr) and I can confirm that whole debacle wasn't related to the dmca situation whatsoever

seems like a weird way to care about it by shutting down fan projects

Not wanting fags to mess with your shit is a pretty normal response

Devs think it's because the game looked too professional
There were apparently news outlets and morons who kept spreading misinfo that it was an official game

the trans writer hasn't been involved in a long time (having people on that stir drama is bad pr)

Just give me a short answer
How messy was development (in-fighting, backstabbing, etc the works) on a scale from 1 to 10 and if it was that bad do you think the fangame would've survived all the way to completion?
I know they're planning on going legit and making an original IP

unironically it was only about a 3
to this day I'm surprised we managed to go so long without any major incidents - only three real cases of in-fighting / backstabbing I can think of over the course of the 8 years (it's been more like 5 years with the full-size team - the first 3 were mostly just development on 'legacy', which is the completed 'beta' version of BMOP)
I don't personally think the game would have survived to completion, though - I was a big advocate for scaling down the scope since the demo itself is only about 1/7th of the final game's planned content. The demo WAS going to release, I'm 100% sure of that - but the full game was unlikely to see the light of day before 2030 imo.
The new IP plans are already looking VERY promising, but I won't leak anything right now. All I'll say is that they've learned a lot of good lessons when it comes to development timelines and are going to be scoping down quite a bit while retaining a good level of quality.

short answer

Velocity X and World Race were better.

And Hot Wheels Turbo Racing for PS1.

based LEGO gatekeeping my robot toys from those EVIL FAGGOTS!

unironically it was only about a 3

That's....actually reassuring
No seriously I'm glad to hear that despite the anti-climatic end the team wasn't a disastrous mess like various other fan communities/projects go through.
I actually concluded with a friend that being DMCA'd is a probably better way to go than go out in a drama filled internal shitstorm.
Thanks for the response Anon, hope things go well for the team and for yourself individually.

why arent you leaking the demo

If you work on any project that has the potential to be taken down due to copyright or trademark infringement, and you're not open-sourcing it. You're just asking for trouble.
If you collect Patreon money for it, or have your real identity associated with the project, you're basically bending over asking to get fucked by corpos.
If you stay anonymous and leave it open-source, if your shit gets taken down, you can just "fork" it and even come up with a new identity if you really want to cover your ass.
There's nothing any company could do except play infinite whack-a-mole with your alts.

You'd be surprised but unlike most fan projects, our leadership is primarily actual active developers in the AAA space working on BMOP on the side. There was definitely drama but everyone is autistic enough about bonkles and so focused on the goal of making a good game that we didn't have too many issues (other than ironing out the dev timelines - it's hard to coordinate making a game with 30+ people all on different time zones that can only work sporadically part-time)
Thanks for the well wishes anon, hope we can make something you guys will enjoy (but this is Anon Babble so I doubt it)

our leadership is primarily actual active developers in the AAA space

My condolences

I know YA goes for stuff that can't pass standards and practices but I don't think Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, etc did anything as fucked as sacrificing disabled kids as a battle tactic
Did the graphic novel cover that?

randomly

Totally has nothing to do with the tranny "leader writer" who constantly instigates gay e-drama, drawing in negative attention

gets hired by lego after making it

The other bionicle game also got approval from Lego
These guys definitely did something dodgy