When Should City be Cancelled?

[The Brick Boss]

11 minutes ago, TeriXeri said:

Which still happens widely unless you completely ignore the Friends or Creator lines.

And that's just tunnel vision.

Also there's still the Education theme sets, which are specificly meant to educate (and not sold in regular retail)

Friends and Creator are doing what City should be doing. Look at the question I asked after that and you'll see why I am ranting about this. 

[Lyichir]

21 minutes ago, pooda said:

History lesson. 

When the Christensen family invited the town theme, which is now City. His goal was not only to make an enjoyable toy. But to educate children on different aspects of urban life. I wonder what Ole Kirk Christensen and Godfred would say if they were to see that their prize theme has been turned into a police state/nature theme? 

As long as I love...I'm holding my own on this and standing with its heritage. 

I mean... there's still different aspects of urban life represented. While Police tends to be one of the most common "subthemes", there's still a wide variety of other sorts of City sets released each year. As for the introduction of science-based careers outside the city limits, I honestly can't see why the founding family of Lego would object to it. Honestly I only barely understand why you seem to take it so personally...

[The Brick Boss]

Because it's not Lego Science or Lego Police. Its Lego City. Meaning that everything should be touched on. Not just one or two things. That's why it's a big deal. 

I don't see why it's NOT a big deal to you two. 

[TeriXeri]

-

Edited June 24, 2019 by TeriXeri

[The Brick Boss]

12 minutes ago, TeriXeri said:

Because I can look past the City Logo on the box and buy Creator sets if I wanted houses or more beach sets.

And I also don't think City should release 200 sets a year to cover everything, LEGO isn't cheap and sets tend to only last 1-2 years on shelves for most of them.

Even then, if they did have 200 sets a year, things would still be missing, but it's LEGO, it allows people to make theirr own designs, and LEGO even helps with things like City builds with something like the Xtra theme providing food accesoires or stickers to use to make your own Pizza Restaurant, Bakery, Transit system etc.

 

That's it. I'm ignoring this post. I'm keeping my point of view (which isn't wrong). Point blank. End of discussion. I don't need your point of view or anyone else's. Like I said, until I see some surprise changes, I will speak as I find. ?

[TeriXeri]

-

Edited June 24, 2019 by TeriXeri

[The Brick Boss]

Don't quote parts of my statements to make yourself look better. Quote everything I say and acknowledge everything I say. 

[JopieK]

@pooda and @TeriXeri: Stop behaving like little children. Maybe LEGO should put more focus on Junior instead of City, at least some here would deserve that I would say when looking at where the discussion goes...

[TeriXeri]

I'm sorry if I offended or attacked anyone, that was not my goal.

Edited June 24, 2019 by TeriXeri

[JopieK]

So stick to the topic and stop reacting to each other (ad hominem) otherwise the topic is doomed to get locked that would be a pity right?! Although maybe it would be time for that anyway.

[The Brick Boss]

24 minutes ago, JopieK said:

@pooda and @TeriXeri: Stop behaving like little children. Maybe LEGO should put more focus on Junior instead of City, at least some here would deserve that I would say when looking at where the discussion goes...

I apologize for the disruptions. I had no intentions on starting trouble. If you go all the way back, I was simply agreeing with the person who started this thread - though I don't necessarily want City to be discontinued. Just a minor overhaul of some things. That's all. 

Once again, I apologize strongly. 

As for Juniors, I think I can agree. I was actually planning on snagging some Junior's sets just for the brick of it. 

[MAB]

17 hours ago, pooda said:

Good question. I've also worked with children before and one thing I know about children is that they ask questions. Children are a lot more advanced now than they were back then. Say they start asking "Mommy! Daddy! Are there arctics in the city? Are there jungles in the city? Are there volcanoes in the city?". No would be the logical answer. So then they'd say "But it says City! Why does it say City if they're not in the city?" See how easy it is. Little details like that will cause confusion. So to cut that confusion, what do we do? Send those themes somewhere else.

 

While there are not volcanoes in the city, there ARE volcanoes in City. Similarly, City is near the sea, the jungle, swamps, etc.

My kids have got multiple sets from different subthemes of City, including Arctic, deep sea diving and volcanoes, and have never been confused about it.

 

 

[legotownlinz]

The 2H2019 catalog contains four pages of police sets in three different subthemes (mountain police, sky police, classic police). That's out of balance. City will never be cancelled (but maybe renamed), but it needs some adjustments to cover other areas than police and firefighters more often.

Edited June 24, 2019 by legotownlinz

[jdubbs]

Good lord. When I posted in this thread over a year ago I never imagined a) it would still be active today or b) my suggesting that splintering the Arctic/Jungle/Volcano subthemes into a separate Explorers line would prove so controversial... or elicit this kind of vitriol. 

I hate it when people say this to me but in this case I think it fits: It's just a toy. Hardly worth this much energy.

[Aanchir]

On 6/23/2019 at 6:53 PM, icm said:

This is slightly off-topic, but while I generally agree with @Aanchir's analysis of things in nearly every particular, I do think that the exploration themes from the 1990s that Brickset retroactively classifies within "Town" were unofficially prompted, or at least nicely coincident, with wider awareness of those topics in their respective years.  For instance, Launch Command dates to 1995, the same year as the movie "Apollo 13," and Space Port dates to 1998, the same year as the movies "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact."  I'm not aware of similar movies about scuba diving or Arctic exploration in 1997 and 2000, but I do remember reading a lot about scuba diving and deep sea exploration in "National Geographic World" magazine in 1997 and reading a lot about Arctic exploration in "World" and various other magazines around the turn of the century.  Maybe there was some big anniversary?  Similarly for the exploration themes of the 2010s released under the "City" banner, the 2011 Space wave coincided with relatively wide awareness of space exploration thanks to the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the completion of the International Space Station and the 2019 Space wave is explicitly inspired by the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.  I don't know enough about the other fields covered in the exploration themes to relate them to wider events and anniversaries in Arctic exploration, deep sea exploration, jungle exploration, or volcanology, but I suspect that there may be some identifiable prompts for one or more of those themes too.

TLDR - Lego needs no external prompts to develop an exploration subtheme of City or Town, but maybe they help.

I suspect a lot of the wider awareness on science and exploration sets in recent years is just tied to general increasing interest in toys that relate to or encourage STEM learning. Not just in the LEGO City exploration subthemes, but also LEGO Friends, LEGO Ideas, LEGO Creator, LEGO Duplo, or LEGO Boost. Even some "ordinary" City subthemes are tilting in this direction: for instance,  the geologists in last year's LEGO City Mining Experts sets or the ROVs/drones in this year's LEGO City Fire and LEGO Sky Police sets.

On 6/24/2019 at 8:44 AM, pooda said:

History lesson. 

When the Christensen family invented the town theme, which is now City. His goal was not only to make an enjoyable toy. But to educate children on different aspects of urban life. I wonder what Ole Kirk Christensen and Godfred would say if they were to see that their prize theme has been turned into a police state/nature theme? 

As long as I love...I'm holding my own on this and standing with its heritage. 

The world has changed when Ole and Godtfred ran the company, and nowadays people's lives are affected by things far outside their hometowns. For instance, satellite-based mapping and navigation tools have become an intrinsic part of traveling (even for those who prefer printed maps, most maps of that sort are made using satellite data).

So learning about satellites, and by extension the spaceflight technologies we use to send them into space, would have just as much educational value to kids learning about their everyday worlds as police stations, and arguably a lot MORE educational value than coast guard stations, which were a part of LEGO Town from the very beginning (or from BEFORE if you count the European edition, which used the earlier proto-minifigs).

Learning about the importance of studying and protecting nature is also an inherently valuable childhood lesson, particularly in a world where many major societal problems have resulted from a disregard for the natural world around us (air and water pollution, deforestation, invasive species, etc).

What's more, it's not as though the popularity of Police sets is some newfangled phenomenon that Godtfred would've been surprised by… there were certainly far more police sets even in the Town theme during the 70s and 80s than there were buses, banks, shops, restaurants, or medical sets in general, and plenty of police-related sets even BEFORE the Town theme.

On 6/23/2019 at 9:52 PM, pooda said:

Now I understand you guys disagree with me and all. Quite frankly I don't give a flying brick. Pun intended. 

I was born in the late 90s and grew up during the time of the first stages of City and at that time, there were only 6 subthemes; Medical, Airport, Police, Fire, Construction and Trains. Then Cargo and Harbor were added. Then that Roadside Assistance subtheme. Then farm. Those were all good. But then forest and arctic sets had to come. I was hoping those would just be one-offs. But they ended up being a major part of City. Much to my dismay along with the overwhelming amount of police sets. 

But let me ask you something, @Aanchir

If you grew up during a certain time and there was something very near and dear to you as a child, wouldn't you be angry if they made senseless changes to it?

Literally every LEGO theme that was near and dear to me as a child has changed in enormous ways since my childhood. Do you want to know some of my favorite sets from back then?

• 6958 Android Base
• 6949 Robo Guardian
• 6493 Flying Time Vessel
• 6082 Fire Breathing Fortress
• 6339 Shuttle Launch Pad
• 4011 Cabin Cruiser
• 6350 Pizza to Go
• 6414 Dolphin Point

Why on Earth would I have preferred for LEGO to keep things the same when today's nearest equivalents to those sets are so vastly superior? Just compare the sets above with sets from this year alone, like:

• 70838 Queen Watevra's 'So-Not-Evil' Space Palace
• 70676 Lloyd's Titan Mech
• 70677 Land Bounty
• 70678 Castle of the Forsaken Emperor
• 60228 Deep Space Rocket and Launch Control
• 60221 Diving Yacht
• 41379 Heartlake City Restaurant
• 41094 Lighthouse Rescue Center

Of course, there are also things I loved as a kid that there aren't such direct equivalents to right now. The Aquazone, Cyber-Slam, and Bionicle themes, for instance, don't really have many close parallels in the current range of sets and themes. I would love if LEGO created new sets inspired by that sort of stuff in the future, but I don't fault them for making sets or themes that DON'T feel like the ones from my childhood, or complain that they should get rid of them to make things more like they were before.

After all, loads of the sets and themes that I've gotten excited for over the years were ones that felt new and different in ways I'd never seen or imagined before, but which felt like the type of sets I might have loved just as much (or more!) as a kid than the ones that were actually available back then:

• We didn't really have much in the way of fairground or amusement park sets back then, for instance, but now we have loads of them across several different themes. Given how much I enjoyed the LEGOLAND park builder computer game back then, I'm sure I'd have been just as thrilled to build amusement park rides and attractions using real bricks!
   
• I loved spooky stories like I'd find in series like "Goosebumps" or "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark". But supernatural stuff back then typically came in the form of cartoonish ghosts, skeletons, dragons, witches, and wizards — nothing nearly as eerie as the ghosts and monsters from themes like Hidden Side or Ninjago.
   
• I was captivated for a long time by fairy tales, fantasy stories, and world mythology, and delighted in stories about magical heroes, heroines, creatures, and villains in series like "The Chronicles of Narnia", "The Prydain Chronicles", "The Lord of the Rings", and "Harry Potter". I didn't have to wait too long to enjoy Harry Potter sets, even if they were not all that great by today's standards. But I would have been DELIGHTED by the gorgeous, otherworldly magical adventures in the Elves theme!

I don't know what you must think of me to think you can call me "shorty" or act as though I'm somehow out-of-line for disagreeing with you. But you seem to be getting kind of snippy with other people too, which makes me think you may want to step back and question whether other people having different likes or dislikes than you is worth getting this upset about. After all, the whole point of discussion forums is for people to share their points of view and opinions, even when they differ — and they ALWAYS differ.

I'm certainly not too young to know what it's like to see the world move on from the stuff I enjoyed as a child. But I'm also not too young to recognize that the stuff of my childhood sometimes wasn't all that great in hindsight. That's why it's so exciting to me whenever I'm reminded of just how much things have evolved since then — not only in LEGO, but also in many other parts of my life, from video games to cartoons to movies to societal values to my own growth as a person.

On 6/24/2019 at 8:32 AM, pooda said:

Yeah. But there is only one problem. Those changes weren't senseless. They still stuck to their origins. 

City is the only Lego theme that doesn't make sense anymore. The Town and City sets have always sold well. Back then, City would surprise you with new things. It's not doing well now because Cchildren are now getting bored with it. They pretty much see the same thing every year and are tired of it.  Winter comes and you see police sets and vehicles. Summer comes and there is an explorers theme. That gets boring every once in a while. 

How is LEGO City not doing well? It's been one of LEGO's best selling themes for at least a decade at this point. The reason that LEGO City has developed the patterns you're describing is because they have done so much to boost the theme's popularity. Whereas in the late 90s and early 2000s, LEGO was losing money AND losing credibility among buyers by taking lots of expensive risks without doing enough market research or managing their costs well enough to back them up.

When you see LEGO entering into a repetitive pattern, like creating similar sets every year, that's generally a sign that buyers are continuing to show strong interest in those types of sets. After all, LEGO pays close attention to what sets are selling well for them in any given year, and tend to axe or radically overhaul any product lines that are declining in popularity, LONG before they actually stop being profitable.

[KotZ]

3 hours ago, Aanchir said:

• 70838 Queen Watevra's 'So-Not-Evil' Space Palace
• 70676 Lloyd's Titan Mech
• 70677 Land Bounty
• 70678 Castle of the Forsaken Emperor
• 60228 Deep Space Rocket and Launch Control
• 60221 Diving Yacht
• 41379 Heartlake City Restaurant
• 41094 Lighthouse Rescue Center

Did you have to link all those? Because now I'm wanting to buy them all.

Quote

Of course, there are also things I loved as a kid that there aren't such direct equivalents to right now. The Aquazone, Cyber-Slam, and Bionicle themes, for instance, don't really have many close parallels in the current range of sets and themes. I would love if LEGO created new sets inspired by that sort of stuff in the future, but I don't fault them for making sets or themes that DON'T feel like the ones from my childhood, or complain that they should get rid of them to make things more like they were before.

I know LEGO had been doing Technic, experimented with Slizers and all, but Bionicle really should not have had the success it did if we go by the metric that it's not "true LEGO" because it didn't fit in with older generations childhoods (that being said, Galidor is an abomination and should never be brought up again). Bionicle doesn't have your classic LEGO parts, but it's innovative designs and fantastic story sets it apart. I think you could even hold Bionicle responsible for the current CITY sets that people are bringing up (a supposed overload of police sets in different scenarios) and recognizing that kids love imagination and storytelling and good guys vs bad guys.

Quote

• We didn't really have much in the way of fairground or amusement park sets back then, for instance, but now we have loads of them across several different themes. Given how much I enjoyed the LEGOLAND park builder computer game back then, I'm sure I'd have been just as thrilled to build amusement park rides and attractions using real bricks!

That game was so fun!

Quote

I don't know what you must think of me to think you can call me "shorty" or act as though I'm somehow out-of-line for disagreeing with you. But you seem to be getting kind of snippy with other people too, which makes me think you may want to step back and question whether other people having different likes or dislikes than you is worth getting this upset about. After all, the whole point of discussion forums is for people to share their points of view and opinions, even when they differ — and they ALWAYS differ.

I'm certainly not too young to know what it's like to see the world move on from the stuff I enjoyed as a child. But I'm also not too young to recognize that the stuff of my childhood sometimes wasn't all that great in hindsight. That's why it's so exciting to me whenever I'm reminded of just how much things have evolved since then — not only in LEGO, but also in many other parts of my life, from video games to cartoons to movies to societal values to my own growth as a person.

Exactly. If we go by pooda's metric of age, I'm guessing I'm only a bit older as I was born 1995, then should I be more annoyed with the diversification of City as well, even though I'm not? I still kinda remember the original Arctic and divers sets passed down from my cousin. Those parts and sets were awesome. Would they survive as their own theme now? Maybe. But it's way easier to add them to a City theme that's not just a metropolis city. City's have suburbs. They're in various places. Why not include some more exotic locales for the more exoctic cities? Also, those older themes seem to me to be more fantastical rather than City/realistic.

I mean, one of my favorite lines as a kid was Exo-Force, and I look back now and it's kinda silly. But if they updated it? I'd be all over it. LEGO has evolved certainly, in many ways for the better.

Quote

How is LEGO City not doing well? It's been one of LEGO's best selling themes for at least a decade at this point. The reason that LEGO City has developed the patterns you're describing is because they have done so much to boost the theme's popularity. Whereas in the late 90s and early 2000s, LEGO was losing money AND losing credibility among buyers by taking lots of expensive risks without doing enough market research or managing their costs well enough to back them up.

When you see LEGO entering into a repetitive pattern, like creating similar sets every year, that's generally a sign that buyers are continuing to show strong interest in those types of sets. After all, LEGO pays close attention to what sets are selling well for them in any given year, and tend to axe or radically overhaul any product lines that are declining in popularity, LONG before they actually stop being profitable.

You hit the nail on the head. I'll go back to my film analogy from another post: movies repeat stories, franchises, adapt books, etc because they're an already baked in market. Filmmaking is seriously a risk averse business, sometimes to its own detriment. But they still continue to make moolah. LEGO does the same, but at least they're diversifying their subthemes.

[Vindicare]

On 6/24/2019 at 8:06 PM, jdubbs said:

I hate it when people say this to me but in this case I think it fits: It's just a toy. Hardly worth this much energy.

Sometimes it needs to be said. First & foremost this is a product marketed to kids. I, just as much as damn near the rest of us, are tired of seeing police/fire. Why adults still make such a big deal over this knowing they aren’t going anywhere is strange. 

 

We get a decent amount of other stuff each year. We’ve gotten a few town square type sets with a neat assortment of city life(they do love their pizza/bike shop combos). Then we have sets like Capital City & Donut Grand Opening, both have a new, at least recently, vehicle -open top tour bus & TV van. I could do with less cranes & helicopters though. 

Edited June 26, 2019 by Vindicare

[Peppermint_M]

Less personal arguments would make this a lot more palatable. 

@pooda and @Aanchir Can you agree to disagree and just drop it? No one needs to convince the other that they are right or turn each other's thinking around. This is a children's plastic building toy after all. These arguments are getting more personal and seem to be spilling across into other threads. 

[Henchmen4Hire]

As someone who isn't impressed by 98% of the stuff on shelves right now, I still wouldn't scrap their big money makers. However, I wish all that profit LEGO is making would translate into them experimenting with new themes. I want to see young Legomaniacs exposed to more cool, weird shiz.

[ks6349]

I hope they'll make something intermediate between CITY and the modular buildings of Creator Expert so that it'll make everything look more consistent. Now the modular buildings of Creator Expert are sometimes too big and too detailed while the buildings of CITY aren't. When they are put together, I don't feel very good

[The Brick Boss]

On 6/24/2019 at 6:22 PM, legotownlinz said:

The 2H2019 catalog contains four pages of police sets in three different subthemes (mountain police, sky police, classic police). That's out of balance. City will never be cancelled (but maybe renamed), but it needs some adjustments to cover other areas than police and firefighters more often.

That last part is my other main concern about City. Too much police. They should've stayed with the original police and left it there. The original Police and Fire sets brought in plenty of money to survive every year. 

1 hour ago, Peppermint_M said:

Less personal arguments would make this a lot more palatable. 

@pooda and @Aanchir Can you agree to disagree and just drop it? No one needs to convince the other that they are right or turn each other's thinking around. This is a children's plastic building toy after all. These arguments are getting more personal and seem to be spilling across into other threads. 

Don't worry! I have her on my ignore list. She started following me around to where it became scary. 

[Lyichir]

2 hours ago, pooda said:

That last part is my other main concern about City. Too much police. They should've stayed with the original police and left it there. The original Police and Fire sets brought in plenty of money to survive every year. 

Don't worry! I have her on my ignore list. She started following me around to where it became scary. 

Replying to you in multiple topics doesn't mean that she's following you around, it just means that, like you, she has an interest in multiple topics on this site and gets involved in discussions accordingly. Not everything revolves around you.

[Aanchir]

9 hours ago, KotZ said:

I know LEGO had been doing Technic, experimented with Slizers and all, but Bionicle really should not have had the success it did if we go by the metric that it's not "true LEGO" because it didn't fit in with older generations childhoods (that being said, Galidor is an abomination and should never be brought up again). Bionicle doesn't have your classic LEGO parts, but it's innovative designs and fantastic story sets it apart.

I think that for the most part, what Bionicle lacked in "traditional" LEGO parts, it made up for by staying true to the LEGO design philosophy, what with its emphasis on building lots of different models with a shared parts palette. Galidor, by comparison, fell short in this regard, with many sets made up mostly of parts specific to one or two characters.

That said, the book "Brick By Brick" reveals some interesting details about how Galidor's building system (which could also be said to include the robot arms in the Alpha Team: Mission Deep Sea sets the same year) originated as a concept for a product line with the working title of "LEGO Beings". That product line would have been less action-figure-like in its premise and more of a free-building system for creating wacky otherworldly creatures, kind of like Zolo or Bonz. While I suspect that still would've had serious issues with out-of-control costs (as many new-element-intensive product lines at the time did) if it had been released in that sort of form, it does help explain how LEGO ended up working on a product line that felt so far removed from their more general focus on creative building.

Galidor was only developed hastily into a character-driven, media-supported action figure line with a 2002 launch date once early feedback for the Bionicle theme from test audiences gave LEGO's higher-ups an unrealistically inflated sense of confidence in how much potential they could squeeze out of that toy category. Many folks who had been at LEGO during that time believed for years afterward that Galidor might have been less of a disaster if it hadn't come about through such a reckless, rushed approach with limited time put into testing and planning.

By contrast, Ninjago was originally developed beginning in 2008 with an intended 2010 release date, and actually had that development schedule extended by a year in efforts to optimize its overall launch strategy. Sometimes a little more patience and a bigger investment of time like that can make a big difference in foreseeing all the potential opportunities or potential risks that might need to be considered and addressed by a new product launch.

9 hours ago, Vindicare said:

Sometimes it needs to be said. First & foremost this is a product marketed to kids. I, just as much as damn near the rest of us, are tired of seeing police/fire. Why adults still make such a big deal over this knowing they aren’t going anywhere is strange.

We get a decent amount of other stuff each year. We’ve gotten a few town square type sets with a neat assortment of city life(they do love their pizza/bike shop combos). Then we have sets like Capital City & Donut Grand Opening, both have a new, at least recently, vehicle -open top tour bus & TV van. I could do with less cranes & helicopters though. 

On this note, I think LEGO has helped to make the police and fire sets more exciting as of late by including other types of buildings and scenery to contextualize them — for instance:

• the pier in 60213
• the burger restaurant in 60214
• the under-construction building and construction site in 60216
• the monument in 60207
• the tree and armored truck in 60175
• the pontoon raft in 60176 (which reminds me fondly of my very FIRST System set, 6665)

True as it may be that nothing about these sets would compel me to get them even if I were still an avid City collector, there's something really heartwarming about knowing that kids buying these sets today are likely getting more out of them that will help them to flesh out their cities than they could have gotten from police or fire sets in my KFOL and TFOL years (1994–2009). In fact, even though the City theme launched as early as 2005, it wasn't until this type of cross-pollination began to occur in the police and fire themes that the City theme got its first bank, museum, bear, crocodile, hot air balloon, and mountain lion.

In fact, LEGO City police and fire sets supplied the City theme's first forest, wetland, and mountain areas in general, all three of which have been an intrinsic part of cities where I've lived or visited with family during my childhood. Even if they're not sets I'd necessarily seek out today, many of them are sets I can be certain I would've loved as a kid. And that makes it hard to have any sort of antipathy towards them.

Coast Guard sets have likewise become an extremely generous source for civilian boats, lighthouses, and other coastal scenery, animals, and civilian characters. Not only does this stronger presence of civilian characters and general subject matter in these themes make them feel less wholly redundant than if only the same few types of builds got repeated each time these subthemes were due for a new wave, but it also helps to emphasize the relationships that the emergency services have with the communities they're a part of which selling the same builds separately would not communicate in nearly the same way.

9 hours ago, Peppermint_M said:

Less personal arguments would make this a lot more palatable. 

@pooda and @Aanchir Can you agree to disagree and just drop it? No one needs to convince the other that they are right or turn each other's thinking around. This is a children's plastic building toy after all. These arguments are getting more personal and seem to be spilling across into other threads. 

Apologies. I didn't intend to get so personal, but I felt a little pressured to defend myself after getting ad-hominem responses singling me out (demanding to know if I work for LEGO, calling me "shorty" for whatever bizarre reason, etc).

Like Lyi explained above, I definitely haven't been following pooda around to other threads. For the most part I just check topics I've been following and reply to whichever comments I see that I feel like I particularly disagree with, want to add to, or want to ask about.

But that type of pursuant behavior is something other people have accused me of or even blocked/ignored me over in the past, even if in some of those cases I never even realized I'd been replying to the same person across all those different threads until they accused me of hounding them on purpose.

Seeing as both you and pooda seem to have gotten this impression, I suspect I do owe them an apology for not being more mindful of their feelings… though now that they've put me on their ignore list I suppose I missed my chance to apologize directly.

8 hours ago, ks6349 said:

I hope they'll make something intermediate between CITY and the modular buildings of Creator Expert so that it'll make everything look more consistent. Now the modular buildings of Creator Expert are sometimes too big and too detailed while the buildings of CITY aren't. When they are put together, I don't feel very good

I think one of the big reasons for that discrepancy is that there's a huge gulf in the target age range for these themes. City has generally started at 5+ (though now included 4+ since the Juniors theme has been split up across the different themes that were previously treated as its own subthemes), while Modular Buildings are 16+, about as high as LEGO target age tends to get.

With that in mind, it's not surprising that they would look jarring side-by-side, although I sometimes feel like their level of detail has more to do with that effect than their size. In terms of their street-facing width, a lot of the modular buildings aren't really all that large compared to many City or Friends buildings, and even the foot prints of buildings that take up nearly the full baseplate for one property (e.g. Grand Emporium, Fire Brigade, Palace Cinema, etc) can feel small compared to some other expert-level builds that are not as heavily condensed in scale, such as the Simpsons House, Ghostbusters Firehouse Headquarters, or Kwik-E-Mart.

That said, some Creator 3-in-1 buildings like 31097, 31065, 31050, and 31026 could serve as sort of a middle ground.

[TeriXeri]

1 hour ago, Aanchir said:

That said, some Creator 3-in-1 buildings like 31097, 31065, 31050, and 31026 could serve as sort of a middle ground.

Indeed, and even with the "modular" 2017-2018 sets, they can be stacked or re-arranged.

2019 Townhouse has a slightly different system as it isn't based off 8x8 and 8x16 plates.

This is like a middle ground between single 3-in-1 sets and an Expert set by combining 1 of each recent 2017/2018 set purely by the main build's modules (also includes the 2018 LEGO Store, while not labeled as Creator, it's the same scale, 8x16 with some removable doors/walls/windows)

Size of those buildings are 16x16.

While far from perfect (I don't compare it to Expert sets with 2000-4000 parts) I find it a quite fun system that got better with more sets, and it still gives the option to have a small town of smaller buildings as well, and this is doable without fully taking apart a set.

---

For 2019 however they went a different direction, for the Townhouse set at least they went with a corner based off 3 sections of 12x12 (6x12 plates), so the build is 24x24 with 1 corner empty.

The buildings themselves are 8x12, because there's a 4-wide sidewalk.

Edited June 26, 2019 by TeriXeri

[ks6349]

On the other hand, I hope they will avoid using any stickers or provide spare stickers for future replacement. It's difficult to keep the good condition of stickers against dust and moisture over time. It's also the reason I totally skip sets with stickers like the Palane Cinema which is a pity

by the way I totally agree with @Aanchir

that Creator 3in1 serves as a good intermediate but as he mentioned there are only very few sets released over the years. I've got 31026 31036 31065 and 31097 but it's just too few.

 

 

Edited June 26, 2019 by ks6349