LEGO Dimensions – Battle Arena Gameplay and New Details

June 14, 2016

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UPDATE: Now that Wave 6 has been released, we now have better quality footage of all Wave 6 Battle Arenas across all modes

As part of the YouTube Live E3 show, Geoff Keighley went hands-on with LEGO Dimensions‘ new Battle Arenas. These are a new feature being added with the new waves of content releasing over the next few months. These arenas were mentioned in the official reveal, but now we have a better idea of how they’ll play thanks to gameplay footage. We’re still awaiting an official archive of the LEGO Dimensions segment, but until then MajesticGaming has the gameplay portion of the showcase on their channel, which you can view below. We’ve made a summary of the key points, which you can find underneath the video.

We get our first look at the Gizmo minifigure. He’s adorable!
A Stripe figure (the antagonist of Gremlins) was shown off for the first time, following his official confirmation earlier today.
Battle Arenas have four modes – Capture the Flag mode was the one shown off in the footage. You appear to gain points over time while you’re in possession of another team’s flag, and gain some points whenever you defeat an opponent’s character
The battle takes place in the Adventure Time Battle Arena, which is themed around Pillow World
You can gather studs in the map to purchase traps – in this map you can build bean bag turrets, but nobody did so during the video
When you enter the map, and respawn during the match, you skydive and have some control over where you land.
This map has lifts that raise you to higher platforms. We see an example of these lifts being used to evade pursuers.
Power-up bubbles float around, and change between different icons. The icon on the bubble influences what power-up you get
When talking about how old toys can be used in the new content, the devs mention that “it can all be played singleplayer” which presumably means that the Battle Arenas aren’t multiplayer-only.
When asked about the release schedule, it was stated that there is an initial wave in September, then additional waves in November, January and March.
When talking about the way content will be spread across waves, one of the developers said they will be “separating all of, I think, 20 IPs” across the waves and confirm there’s still surprises on the way when asked. They didn’t deny this claim when asked on Twitter after the show, which means this is seemingly a correct number. This is a key detail as the initial reveal only mentioned 16 brands, which means there’s 4 currently being kept secret if this statement was true. NOTE: It’s been raised that they didn’t specify new IPs, so it’s entirely possible (and very likely) that these 4 extra IPs are existing ones from Series 1 that are getting new characters.
When listing off some of the characters in the game by name, the developers say “The Goonies”, rather than just Sloth (the only revealed Goonies character) which implies that some of the Goonies themselves will appear as well. Many people expected this but it’s good to have confirmation. Especially for me, I’ll buy ten of whatever Goonies packs they release.