The LEGO Speed Champions DLC almost used thousands of digital pieces per car

An early plan for the LEGO Speed Champions Forza Horizon 4 DLC was to represent the brick-built cars with thousands of miniature pieces each.

Episode 41 of Bits N’ Bricks is available to listen to now, with the most recent instalment exploring the development and initial pitch for the LEGO Speed Champions DLC that featured in Forza Horizon 4.

As part of the episode, the teams at the LEGO Group and Playground Games worked closely together to develop the expansion and lay out some ground rules for the bricks that would be represented in-game.

At one time, this was to include a variety of cars being made from thousands of miniature digital pieces to scale with the humans in the title, instead of the oversized elements and minifigures that made up the final DLC. This might have been similar to the giant McLaren Senna that was made for the initial reveal.

“So if you play LEGO Speed Champions expansion, we built the cars up to the scale one-to-one of what the car would be in the real world,” commented LEGO Game senior producer Jared Bals. “So if you put the LEGO Bugatti next to the real Bugatti in the game, they’ll be approximately the same size. And so from that, we use that as our scale representation of finding what a 1×1 brick was. Everything else in the world was going to be built on that scale.”

“In the official canon, this is a partnership between the LEGO Group and the Horizon Festival and they have blown all these things up to a human-sized scale so that those humans who are attending the Horizon Festival in the game can go and explore LEGO Valley.” said Creative Director for the Forza Horizon series Mike Brown on the narrative reason for the expansion.

LEGO Speed Champions will continue through 2022 and into 2023 with the next year of models rumoured to include five sets with at least four reported for a March launch.

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