Future of CC styled buildings

[Klaus-Dieter]

Hello everybody!

You surely noticed that there was a development from last year's CC styled buildings to this year's CC styled building. The Cafe Corner and the Market Street of the last year didn't/don't include any interior whereas the Green Grocer of this year includes some interior.

So I thought: It might well be that TLG removes the backwalls of the CC styled buildings. So the CC styled buildings would then be large City sets with great architecture. In my opinion this would be perfect since that would open great possibilities for amazing City sets with awesome architecture - and since I hate backwalls and houses without interior. But how do you think about that assumption?

How do you think that the future of CC styled buildings will look like?

Do you think that and would you like that this style will make it into other themes, too (esp. Castle), or only stay a theme mixed together of City and Creator?

Replies, ideas and comments are welcome!

Klaus-Dieter

Edited July 2, 2008 by Klaus-Dieter

[Section8]

Super-detailed castle sets would be nice. More modern CC style buildings would be of interest to me but we have town plan for something like that right now. A modern CC style bank would fulfill the two purposes of continuing the CC line and giving us a decent bank set. I hope System-style town sets persist though; the current CC buildings don't fit into my system-style town well.

[Quarryman]

Whatever they do I really hope they never, ever remove the back walls, the buildings look a lot better with them. As for the CC style finding its way into other themes, shouldn't be impossible, TLC seems to have understood that there's a market for large, complex, expensive sets Time will tell I guess.

[Eilif]

Back Walls: Sorry to disapoint you Klaus, but I think that removing back walls is extremely unlikely. When the designer of cafe corner, Jamie Berard, was interviewed in BrickJournal about Cafe Corner, they showed prototypes with open walls, and the article explains that those designs were rejected. Since all the buildings have removable floors, a feature that has been well recieved, it seems that all access to the interiors will be with removable floors from now on. Luckily for those who like open backed buildings, Removing walls is nearly the easiest of all modifications, though if the next buildings are like Green Grocer, there may be neat rear details in the upcoming releases.

Interiors: When interviewd about Green Grocer ( http://www.brickjournal.com/wiki/show/Behi...he+Green+Grocer ) Jamie stated that detailed ground floor interior and back details nearly doubled the cost of the floor, necesitating a more conservative approach to the top floors, so it is likely that we will continue to see well filled ground floors and small interior features on the other floors. Market street was said to be an experiment to see if AFOLs would pay more for a detailed interior. I hope it worked.

Genre crossing: I doubt it, but who knows. It's been a pretty successfull venture thus far, and I doubt LEGO would mess with it. I think it will be a Creator/Town cross breed for some time. Jamie has said that he hopes to continue the series, and has given no hints about any modification of the direction of the series.

I am really looking forward to the next model relase in 2009, but I for one would really like to see the CC series continue as-is. I have enjoyed building all of them, and they have proved to be the best sets for acquiring parts for my own Town MOC's which I build to a standard a bit smaller than CC, but more realistic and detailed than Town. I hope they don't downgrade the detail or scale to fit better with Town, as it is their size that makes them so unique.

That said, if they were to do more municipal type buildings like banks, police stations, post offices, etc, it would be much easier for Town collectors to justify their larger size (compared to traditional Town scale) on their layouts and could result in better sales for the series. Not to mention that those are the types of buildings I am hoping to see.

Edited July 3, 2008 by Eilif

[hamilton]

"Modular Building" design style vs the older traditional "Playset" style of building design?

The former is aimed at adults, and the designs reflect this, whilst the later is aimed at children and it's design style also clearly reflects this purpose.

The "future" will be more of the same.

i am unsure why anybody would even speculate upon the future of these products.

There was no "development" as such, read the aforementioned interview with Mr Berard for confirmation of this.

They are what they are.

Eilif has stated anything i could possibly say in his entirely correct post.

[CP5670]

I would much rather have the back walls there, as is currently the case. I always found the lack of rear walls on Lego buildings a bit annoying even when I was a kid and frequently added them on myself. You can have the best of both worlds though by simply putting the wall on a hinge, so you just swing it open whenever you want to play around inside.