Fortnite’s much-touted crossover with Lego is almost upon us – and it’s showing off a pretty darn impressive transformation. Lego Fortnite won’t just add a few minifig skins or some blocky guns, but a completely new co-op survival and crafting game mode with more than a touch of Minecraft about it.
A new cinematic trailer for Lego Fortnite finally gives us a look at what the long-anticipated mode will look like, revealing something that looks like an entirely new game – albeit playable in Fortnite.
Fortnite’s characters, buildings and, er, sheep are all replaced by their brickified counterparts, with players using the resources they collect to build a home base out of the plastic blocks.
Those structures will play a role in what’s outlined as being more of a survival game than regular Fortnite – particularly in comparison to its popular multiplayer battle royale mode, because who’s playing Save the World today?
Players will be able to team up with up to seven friends to survive the night against various enemies, with the trailer showing a group delving underground where they encounter skeletons and some kind of lava-covered monster. (You’d think the heat would melt the blocks, but no.) Caves will apparently offer up rarer materials and hidden locations to discover in the mode.
There are other echoes of something more like Minecraft as the player character is shown growing vegetables, fencing off livestock and munching on food around a campfire before tooling up with crossbows, axes and swords to set off on their adventure.
We see some shots of a settlement populated by NPC villagers, who can apparently be recruited to help gather materials, before the character hops on a floating platform to blast away – suggesting there might be some kind of customisable or buildable vehicle system included, though we don’t know that for sure yet.
The Lego takes on familiar skins like Peely the banana look fantastic, with Epic saying they’ve turned over 1,200 skins from Fortnite into their minifig equivalents. You’ll only be able to use any minifigs for skins you already own, but only in Lego Fortnite itself – an understandable move given their different size and shape – which indicates how much effort has gone into this new mode. It’s definitely a step beyond the average custom creator mode
We’ve known a Lego crossover has been in the works for a while, after Fortnite devs Epic and brick makers Lego said last year they had formed a “long-term partnership” that would, among other things, “shape the future of the metaverse”. That came in line with Epic’s own efforts to take Fortnite even further beyond its existing “metaverse” ambitions of being a mix of shooter, virtual concert arena, racing game, Alan Wake remake and more all rolled into one.
We’ll get to see the plastic fruits of that labour tomorrow, December 7th, when Lego Fortnite arrives in Fortnite.
