PRESS RELEASE for LEGO 75222 - Betrayal at Cloud City Announcement

[dvogon]

Damn! Two days out and now there is not only a CC teaser but the official images!

Strange feelings...

One one side at least we have an updated CC in lego from ESB, which is my favourite film, and it's a playset as I expected, so glad to see it now. The minifig selection is quite good as well. 

On the other side I feel they tried to do too many things with this set, albeit with not that many pieces. They made less errors than with Assault of Hoth set, though.

A perfect set to mod I would say. I'll buy it for sure (how couldn't I?). My children (and me after modding it) will love it like the Death Star.

But man, it seems somehow unfinished with so many parts devoted to unnecessary big (for the set) ships. I would prefer to have a decent system scale Slave I and cloud car sold apart, instead of mid scale ones in the set. Well... on the opposite side this fact could be seen as an excuse to build ourselves a mid-scale MF to land on the set.

But seriously, a system scale Slave I and a cloud car would have more audience, specially for those that cannot afford (at least) €350 in the EU. And for those able to afford the CC set, for sure they could afford the system scale additional sets as well to complement it.

The set is surprisingly flat, given how good the spherical Death star is to give a better feeling of the overall place. A lower deck would have given it a better CC shape. The upper part is ok IMO.

About the rooms, there are some good, but other are lacking. Saving one-fourth of the available CC space for the landing pad is revealing. The rest of the rooms lack precious space and detail due to this design decision, and not for free. 

For instance, the big gray corridor has almost nothing in it. The window in the lightsaber duel scene deserves a printed window, specially for a set of this type, like the ones we got for the final duel and the room is too small for flying something with the force. The trash room with only an assassin droid is accurate, but lacks other broken droid stuff, another untaught and an incinerator. The freezing carbonite room lacks the upper part, which is essential to the accurate functionality of that thing. This is something that the Death Star did very well, as many rooms have ceilings, a luxury of having more parts for actual city stuff. 

Han Solo is excellent. At last dual-molded minifigs come into SW sets. This deserves a special cheers! However, I would have put this minifig in the UCS MF, where it's the actual undoubted star.

The price is... how to say that?... in line with the new Death Star, given that at least this one has a new design that has to be paid for.

Edited August 21, 2018 by dvogon
Fixed: There is an incinerator that seems to have fire as well.

[Lobot]

Mixed emotions as far as I'm concerned....

I've been quietly praying for a new UCS Cloud City for the last 7-8 years and it's finally happened; but that box-art is just awful!  And, the layout has pretty much ruined what could have been an exceptional set.  I really don't understand why it wasn't split into two or three levels, possibly encased within a half-cylinder.  Add an external lift as a play-feature, plus a decent landing pad and it would have been in a totally different league!  It's such a shame - I had really high expectations as the last few (UCS) sets have been almost flawless.....

Despite the above, I'll still buy it  

[Terrasher]

I really wish we could have gotten more of the Vader / Luke duel. That scene deserves a set of its own.

I'm starting to think TLG should have gone the way of Jabba's Palace and the Rancor Pit and released CC as multiple sets, without worrying about making the whole thing circular.

[Thego]

I like it well enough. But it's missing Willrow Hood.

[darththeling]

42 minutes ago, Lobot said:

I really don't understand why it wasn't split into two or three levels, possibly encased within a half-cylinder.

Mmm, I had the same thought, I guess it all came down to stability. They probably tried to do that, make a build with a layer underneath. The moment you try to put a figure on the platform, it'll flip over unless it has some ugly pillars for support. Maybe we can see some variations in the designer video when it drops. Anyone have an estimate on that based on previous UCS releases?

Not sure about you guys but I've been just eye-soaking this things for the past hour or so. This layout is magnificent. It is a sumptuous feast of delicious details. A lot of posts are talking about the overall package - start identifying the parts that equal the sum of the build. They've got so many things right in the dining room. 

Wide open spaces: the landing platform is gorge.  I won't be using their Slave-1, but I'll be arranging a sqaud of Lando's finest there for secure arrivals. 

They used the room where C3P0 gets blasted!! Well done  I really wasn't expecting that space, but it's a welcome inclusion.

The red 'security tower' hall way... excuse me, I've something in my eye again... A BEAUT.  That space included in such a correct way warms my heart, guys, we are going to be able to re-create the THIS DEAL'S GETTING WORSE ALL THE TIME scene. Come on! Very few of us with custom mocs have been able to recreate that iconic scene. I pray Lego doesn't alter the deal any further. 

/Gush

Cost is $400.00 for Canadians, if anyone's curious. 

EDIT: Back view

Edited August 21, 2018 by darththeling

[Borex]

13 minutes ago, Thego said:

I like it well enough. But it's missing Willrow Hood.

I can totally see them to make him a polybag giveaway

I think they should have switched battle outfit Leia for another Ugnaught. And i'd like to see more pics of CC from different angles. We cannot see how the bottom is done, because it is hovering, right?

The carbon freezing chamber looks strange without stairs. 

I think that a lot of people will MOC this set in the end. It is inviting to do so.

If they only made a new mould for chewie with 3PO on his back, that would be so sweet.

 

[thorin]

54 minutes ago, Ellisss_2 said:

Looks pretty good, wish they invested more parts into the actual city than have a Slave 1 and Cloud Car.

I do see this point. As I’ve said time and time again, I don’t understand why Lego doesn’t put all their pieces into the “build” and then have a $20 set for the cloud car and a $35 set for slave 1. I love the idea of collecting several sets to make a bigger scene and I just don’t understand why they don’t take advantage of it on these larger sets when they are stuck trying to cram so much in.

Having said that... I looooove this set and can’t wait for it!

 

[DEAD1974]

28 minutes ago, Borex said:

I can totally see them to make him a polybag giveaway

I think they should have switched battle outfit Leia for another Ugnaught. And i'd like to see more pics of CC from different angles. We cannot see how the bottom is done, because it is hovering, right?

The carbon freezing chamber looks strange without stairs. 

I think that a lot of people will MOC this set in the end. It is inviting to do so.

If they only made a new mould for chewie with 3PO on his back, that would be so sweet.

 

but it has stairs just elsewhere in the room

[lomis]

As a fan of the 75098 : Assault on Hoth set, I really like this one as well.

I had an internal struggle for years about buying the Death Star (10188 / 75159).
Ultimately, I decided it was a little too "one note" and bought several of the characters on bricklink.com.
Don't ask me why I didn't feel the same about an almost all white Assault on Hoth...

Otherwise, this set really appeals to me for many reasons:

• ESB is my favorite Star Wars film by far and there have been far too few Bespin-based sets over the years.
• The Minifigure selection is great.
  Is Han the first Star Wars character with dual molded legs?
• The mini vehicles look great.
  Others seem to be bothered by the choice of red over orange for the Cloud Car.
  I don't have the same issue; the vehicle in the movie is such a dark orange it's almost red anyway.
  And Slave I looks fantastic.
• I prefer playsets to static UCS displays.
  The ability to access all parts of the set are great and I think the size of the areas is good considering you get so many rooms/scenes from the film.
• Variety in design and look of the different parts of the set.
• Lando's cape.

I'll probably be picking this up as soon as it goes on sale.

[nikhkin]

I think my biggest disappointment in the set is that it looks quite cluttered to have the carbonite chamber right next to the platform Luke and Vader duel on. 

I think it would have been better positioned where the big empty space is at the back, with the area currently used for the carbonite chamber being used to represent the fairly iconic triangular corridors.

With the set rearranged like that, they may have been able to better represent the area the window was blasted out from, and the carbonite chamber being next to the torture room would flow quite nicely for the playset. 

[MAB]

37 minutes ago, Borex said:

 I think they should have switched battle outfit Leia for another Ugnaught.

 

 

An ugnaught was in the recent cheap carbon freezing chamber set, and there are currently over 3500 of them on BL, many really quite cheap (<$3 US) so I'm quite glad they didn't put another in.

 

As to the set, it is OK as a series of vignettes but the overall shape is awful and doesn't really look like Cloud City if the vehicles and minifigures are removed. Some nice details in there. I like the Vader vs Luke section best. But so many parts seem to be floor and walls. The spherical shape worked well for the Death Star, but this one doesn't work so well.

Edited August 21, 2018 by MAB

[darththeling]

9 minutes ago, MAB said:

As to the set, it is OK as a series of vignettes but the overall shape is awful and doesn't really look like Cloud City if the vehicles and minifigures are removed. Some nice details in there.

Well, you could say that 75222 has the same shape of Cloud City as 10188 has the shape of the Death Star. As long as you admire it from very selective right angles. 

[MAB]

12 minutes ago, darththeling said:

Well, you could say that 75222 has the same shape of Cloud City as 10188 has the shape of the Death Star. As long as you admire it from very selective right angles. 

It doesn't though. The DS is spherical from any angle. Whereas this has a landing platform as a "room" inside the body of cloud city, then two rooms have floors. The freezing chamber has no floor and has the gantry next to it, in the same "room". Plus the overall shape is really just the top section, the underside appears missing and there is no stalk. I'm not sure how they could do the stalk and keep it stable, but the upper section could have been better as two levels (as already noted by others).

[Borex]

56 minutes ago, MAB said:

An ugnaught was in the recent cheap carbon freezing chamber set, and there are currently over 3500 of them on BL, many really quite cheap (<$3 US) so I'm quite glad they didn't put another in.

But Leia is the same as the one in the Hoth Medical Chamber. A new different Ugnaught would be better i think.

 

1 hour ago, DEAD1974 said:

but it has stairs just elsewhere in the room

Oh, i almost missed that. But it looks wrong to me. I think a lot of people will try to tweak that.

[Terrasher]

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but the picture of the dining room with Vader stopping Han's shot doesn't show the LBG triangles at the top of the wall that's shared with the carbon freezing chamber quadrant. Might the top be removable, then? But what for? Just for ease of access?

[TheMainBricker]

Quite disappointing really. The box art looks odd, no different to the MOCs, it just seems to float in the air when there are no external features to the set (would've been better against a backdrop of an interior).

The set is just too cramp, in some quadrants they are cramming in four rooms. And then one quadrant is just a landing pad (this could've sat outside of the circle). The Death Star had one room per quadrant (but obviously multiple levels). If they had an under level they could've filled it with the more industrial rooms of Cloud City (like the scrap area), had the living space on the top level and could've allowed the carbon freezing chamber to have double height. I think a lot of people thought this would be half of a Death Star (which would've encompassed two levels). The Death Star could be rotated to see each room, but here you can't do that are the rooms are all behind each other.

Playing through Battlefront you get a sense of Cloud City and all of the rooms, it's a shame they couldn't have done more here.

I much prefer the Ugnaught included in the Carbon Freezing chamber set a few years ago, don't know why Lego went to the hassle of making a new mould that looks worse.

Apart from the UCS Falcon, I have to question the designers they have working on the SW theme. The modulars and the Ninjago Movie sets have been incredibly detailed, but the SW sets have been lacking lately.

I feels like a disappointment and similar to the 1960's Batcave, really looking forward to it, bought it, but still disappointed.

 

 

[BrickJagger]

Yikes. I really don't like this. The set itself is okay, but the price is just ridiculous. $350 for a set with 2800 pieces? Also, there's hardly any details for what is supposed to be a collector's item. Just look at this image:

 

The entire back half is nearly blank. I get that part of that is the landing pad, but there's barely anything in what looks to be a sizable portion of the interior. The landing pad itself is also a weird shape and throws off the otherwise circular structure, and the bit where Luke and Vader duel is within arm's reach of the Carbonite Chamber. 

Here's what really gets me. Some will argue that it's a playset, but I don't see many parents spending $350 to get their kid a relatively obscure city when they could get the Death Star or another more iconic set. Others will argue that it's a D2C, but it looks nothing like Cloud City, mostly due to its lack of roof panels, and it has almost zero display value because you have to look closely to even figure out what it is in the first place. To be honest if kind of looks like someone attempted to MOC Cloud City out of a destroyed Millennium Falcon.

Needless to say, I won't be buying this! 

[Jedi-Bendu]

4 hours ago, Agent Kallus said:

If you're disappointed by this then what exacting were you expecting?

 

Willrow Hood. Treva Horme.

Also, a perfect round and symmetrical set without the vehicles (both deserve real system scale releases and without them CC 1) could have been bigger or 2) the set could have been cheaper)

 

[Huigberts Builds]

Oh I really love this set so let me give a quick list of my thoughts (maybe a more detailed one when I own the set).

Things I like:

Slave 1, since I always thought the others where way to big for my display.

Lando and Han look amazing

Dining chamber is so fancy

I assume this is the vader with the episode 6 face, which is pretty hard to find now, if not I'm disappointed

The overall build is perfect next to the death star

Things I don't like:

CC Leia's hair

Carbonite hair, common

C3po is once again the boring old one without armprinting. I rather have him with arm printing or a completely new messy version. 

And as a reaction to a post on the other topic:

6 hours ago, Joel1234 said:

399 euros in Belgium and Netherlands for this piece of **** Wow! 

Common, that's as much as the original Death Star and definition unfair for the amount of bricks. But I'm gonna buy it anyway since the d2c hogwarts that I saved for became an easy pass.

[manglegrat]

I'm not a playset person so it's a Minifigs-only prospect for me - and there's a few I'm interested in, here.

They may have nailed the perfect Han Solo fig this time - dual-moulded legs with the side-printed stripe?  Must-buy!

Add the Luke, Leia (CC dress not Hoth), Lando and cloud car pilots to my wishlist. Maybe the bushy-lipped Security Guard, too. Maybe Lobot if the print is substantially different to the prior version I already have.

[AndrewShun]

3 hours ago, krisandkris12 said:

I wonder how many young kids desire for cloud city based playset enough to make their parents or grandparents pull $350 for it. Or how many currently teen lego fans that still enjoy minifig play and have enough savings...? Correct me if I am wrong but most people that adore cloud city scenes would be AFOLs by now? And eventhough I am sure many adults will still like this set as is, I have a strong feeling that something more visually appealing would be much better. Because this looks just ugly... On the box art, it looks like flying piece of broken structure that was supposed to be on the ground. Yes, it may have nice rooms, nice figures or whatever, but it just doesn't look like anything close to cloud city on display! The first thing I see when I look at the box art is the exposed unsightly back side of tan corner panel piece, and the rest of the thing is built in similar fashion. The only way to enjoy it visually is to be a minifig, which can be approximated by actually playing with the minifig. But then it's back to my question - do the target customer group really want to do that?

Personally, as mentioned above, I would much rather have a display model with just a few interior rooms.

Exactly my thoughts

[Omega 8]

Looks fantastic to me. 

[Sneakguest]

2 hours ago, Thego said:

I like it well enough. But it's missing Willrow Hood.

 

Hehe, honestly I don't. He was pretty easy to MOC. And lets face it, if you are not a real star wars nerd, you don't know Willow Hood. Most kids who buy or get sw lego are not that deep into the SW saga so they would have any clue about the name or even remember they have seen that character before. That is the easy part with Bespin in comparison with Mos Eisley Cantina or Jabbas Palace, where in whatever minifigselection you'd make, someone would be disappointed, but seriously, there aren't a huge variety of central characters in Bespin. I think more Bespin guards and more Ugnaughts is the maximum they could do.

[Borex]

Too much bricks are lost in the structure. I think it would have been better if they went a different route for cloud city. Just what others already suggested; loose sets. I expect to see a twin pod cc car in the future though. I really like that ship, and i'm really glad we have her pilots now as well.

Best figure in this set for me is: Han. And a close second is Luke, but i think the lines of the pockets are a bit too thin.

[sn0wmana]

Very exciting to finally see this long-rumored and -desired set in full! Personally I like that they went with the playset approach in the same vein as the Death Star. I understand many folks that would prefer a model, but a setting like Cloud City begs for scene recreations. In an ideal world we would get both representations and TLG would eventually release a model CC (similar to 10143 Death Star II) later down the road. Interesting too that they actually dropped the UCS label for this one. I'm willing to bet this was at least in part due to the response to the Assault on Hoth set. 

The figures are expectedly amazing, especially the nice surprise of a Han figure with dual-molded/printed legs, but the inclusion of the Hoth outfit Leia instead of a proper new jumpsuit print is a huge disappointment. Nice to see all the major rooms and interiors represented, all of which look fairly accurate. I'm particularly a fan of the corridor leading to the landing platform. The platform itself could've been a bit bigger though, and I agree with some others that feel the mini Slave I is kind of a waste of parts. 

I'm not sure what I was expecting price-wise, but having a near-identical price per piece ratio as 75159 shouldn't be too much of a surprise I suppose. Overall it's what I've been wanting from a Bespin playset and I'm just glad we're getting another set from one of my favorite locations in all of the films.

Edited August 21, 2018 by sn0wmana