Lego The Hobbit is a Lego-themed action-adventure video game developed by Traveller's Tales. The game was released by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment on 8 April 2014 in North America, and 11 April in Europe. The game is a follow-up to Lego The Lord of the Rings based on the first two Hobbit films An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug.[1] It was released on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, OS X and Microsoft Windows. 3 The Battle of the Five Armies The game shows several features from the previous games, including a feature where the user should locate specific materials to build a big Lego object. When the user selects and input the correct materials a screen is displayed where the Lego machine is built and the player should select the correct pieces in exchange for studs. Also the characters have different actions to perform, making the Dwarf Company a group with different capabilities during the mission, including someone with archery abilities, another that uses a big hammer that can move big objects, another with the ability to extract minerals from stones, and so on.
Bilbo improves his abilities as the game advances: when he gains Sting he has the ability to be a more skilled fighter; and when he gets the One Ring he can disappear and build invisible Lego structures. The game, similar to the latest Lego video games, is composed on a big map, rather than a single hub. The player can move among different events where different characters ask the player to retain a specific material from a mission or to exchange materials. See also: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey § Plot, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug § Plot Much like its predecessors, the game presents storylines from the The Hobbit films: An Unexpected Journey and Desolation of Smaug. However, the developers modified the storylines to fit the events into a number of game chapters per film, as well as adding the humour the series has become known for. It was reported at the London Toy Fair in January 2014 that a DLC would be released covering the events of the final film in The Hobbit series, to be released around the time of the film at the end of that year.
[3] However, no DLC was released. Over a year later, in a correspondence with GameSpot it was revealed that, despite no actual cancellation of the DLC, there were no longer any plans to adapt the film as a DLC, nor to adapt it as another game. Similar to Lego The Lord of the Rings, Lego The Hobbit features talking minifigures. The dialogue is taken directly from the films. Additional voices were provided by Tim Bentinck, Liz May Brice, Clare Corbett, Duncan Duff, Daniel Fine, Joel Fry, Jenny Galloway, Andy Gathergood, Anna Koval, Jonathan Kydd, Steve Kynman, Jamie Lee, Andy Linden, Sara Beck Mather, James Naylor, Emma Pierson, Jason Pitt, Richard Ridings, Emma Tate, and Marcia Warren. Christopher Lee has an uncredited role as the narrator in the game. The game received mixed to positive reviews. The critics praised the game's visuals and humor based on Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy but criticized the disjointed story, sameness of characters and the ending.LEGO: The Hobbit Wiki »
LEGO: The Hobbit is an adventure game based off of Peter Jackson's trilogy of Hobbit movies inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. E10+ for Everyone 10 and older: Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief Life is Strange -- Episode 4: Dark Room The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series -- Season One Grand Theft Auto V Grand Theft Auto Online Metal Gear Online [MGS V]Lee West and James Norton are in Lego World, the home of all things Lego, to discuss the latest franchise entry from TT Games, Lego The Hobbit.During the interview Norton revealed why the studio focus exclusively on local co-op, rather than introducing online multiplayer to their popular franchise of games (so popular, in fact, that there's currently a Lego game on top of the UK charts and nine Lego titles in the top forty)."You can play with your friends and family in the living room together, which is where there's always the best experience," Norton said, before later adding, "We believe that the best experience is had sitting with your friends in the same room, together...
So that's where we focus all our efforts."Norton also had reassurances for fans with regards to the game's length: "Whilst I couldn't give you a specific number of hours I can say you're not going to fall short of what the fans have come to expect from Lego games.""It's a huge, huge game," he continued, "we've got 16 levels, freeplay, in the hub environment itself there's over 150 quests. There's lots of different sorts of variety in the types of quests and challenges you can take part in."After watching the full interview with the game's senior producer, you can read Lee's preview of Lego The Hobbit right here.It may feel like a conveyor-belt process at this stage, but TT Games' Lego titles are not just reliably scheduled - they're also dependably solid productions. While the basic gameplay rarely changes, the developers always seem able to translate their tried-and-tested concepts across wildly differing entertainment franchises, seamlessly integrating the unique mythology and humour of each subject in the process.
The technology behind the games is similarly solid and dependable, disciplined enough to save big leaps forward for when they're ready rather than going out on a limb, delivering only subtle tweaks and incremental changes in the meantime, and Lego The Hobbit is one of the more subtle updates. It seems to have been built using the same blueprint as Lego The Movie and Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which means those lovable plastic bricks and Minifigures are in for a mixture of post-process effects, advanced shading and lighting that work together to create a more realistic and cinematic presentation than last-gen.There is a change, but it's mostly down to the art style rather than the underlying technology. Compared to Lego The Movie, Lego The Hobbit's art is a lot more organic, allowing surfaces like wood, mud and rock to display a range of different characteristics to a greater extent than environments in previous games, leaving the famous Lego sheen mostly to the bricks themselves. It's a style that suits the world of Middle-earth very well, even if it means there are less of the iconic bricks and pieces on-screen than usual.
Despite the change in art style, the basic rendering set-up remains unchanged from Lego The Movie. The PS4 game offers up a 1920x1280 image vertically super-sampled down to 1080p, providing extra anti-aliasing in the process, while Xbox One operates natively in 1080p and PC can do that and more. All three utilise similar forms of post-process anti-aliasing, although coverage seems to be a tad spottier on the PC in certain areas. Check out our Lego The Hobbit triple-format comparison gallery for examples of this and the face-off comparison videos below."Lego The Hobbit revisits its predecessor with native 1080p on Xbox One, super-sampling on PS4 and minor reductions in PC image quality." Due to the minor use of super-sampling, the PS4 actually demonstrates slightly cleaner edges than on the other formats, although this doesn't really translate into noticeably superior image quality. The heavy use of depth-of-field in all versions works well in curtailing jaggies, while the post-process anti-aliasing edge-detection algorithm appears to be a little better than in previous Lego titles.
But besides the slight difference in the framebuffer sett-up, both PS4 and Xbox One basically deliver an identical graphical experience throughout.Once again it's up to the PC version to provide the main differences, although as with recent next-gen Lego titles, it's not always for the positive reasons you might anticipate. In fact, there are a number of effects that either appear to be pared back or removed on PC. The reasons for this aren't always clear, but one cause could be the developers supporting older GPUs that predate the latest DirectX 11 feature-set, with newer effects hacked in to work using an older API and running into problems as a result. (The minimum requirements show support for DX10, along with the Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS or ATI Radeon X1950 Pro graphics cards.) Either way, it means that PC owners see some small but curious graphical differences.So, it's perhaps unsurprising that once again we find camera and object blur are dialled back, while screen-space ambient occlusion seems to be entirely absent.
Interestingly, checking the game's 'pcconfig.txt' file shows that SSAO is enabled by default, even though there is little evidence to suggest it in practice. Some ambient occlusion is baked onto the textures, though, which means that environments still benefit from a little indirect shadowing and the extra depth this provides.Curiously, shadows are rendered in a lower resolution than on consoles too, and there are also a few instances where certain details appear scaled back on the PC - such as the reduction in the level of grass located in a few locations. However, if we look more closely it seems as though the grass has simply sunk into the ground, leading some of the small shoots to disappear, which seems like a rendering or geometry error more than a deliberate reduction.Slightly lower-quality level-of-detail models are also used for the characters. Up close the smooth contours of the Lego Minifigures appear a little blocky around their claw-like hands compared to PS4 and Xbox One, while the textures feature UV mapping errors where the 2D artwork isn't wrapped across the geometry correctly.
That said, the lighting model - along with the vast majority of other effects - remain on a par with the PS4 and Xbox One versions, so for the most part the games do look very close in motion, to the point where some of the slight downgrades and bizarre rendering anomalies on the PC don't noticeably stick out during gameplay.The PC version of Lego Hobbit does have one major benefit over the console releases, though: the ability to run at frame-rates much higher than the capped 30fps provided by PS4 and Xbox One. We easily hit a near-solid 60fps on our Intel Core i5 and GTX 680 system, with only a few torn and dropped frames appearing during transitions between cut-scenes and different environments during gameplay, although it should be noted that cut-scenes often tear frequently for the first few seconds before v-sync is locked down. A similar level of stability should be possible on machines boasting lower specifications, too, with just a few more noticeable drops in smoothness during demanding scenes.
Console owners are left with a respectable 30fps, at least, and it generally serves the forgiving Lego gameplay very well. Controls feel heavier when executing attacks and trying to perform quick jumps, but this is never so intrusive as to make things frustrating for the player. The use of v-sync ensures that torn frames are rarely seen, while performance practically never deviates from the 30fps target on either platform outside of a few isolated incidents.These occasional interruptions in smoothness manifest in different ways on each console. On PS4 we see some mild judder, followed by the odd tear when exploring the Middle-Earth hub world. Essentially, frames are delivered to the screen at irregular intervals despite the solid 30fps update, with a unique frame followed by two duplicates - whereas in a standard 30fps cadence we see one unique frame followed by a duplicate in a repeated pattern. Meanwhile, the Xbox One game momentarily freezes from time to time before delivering a torn frame, suggesting some kind of bug causing a GPU stall.