Okay, as awesome as all the custom content for Lemmings and its many different clones are (NeoLemmix, Lix, SuperLemmini etc.), and as much effort as the developers of those engines put into those games year after year:
Now I've re-discovered another childhood passion of mine, which also has a vary active fandom, much more active than I thought...
and the efforts they go to in order to develop custom games for their beloved franchise, well, that's on a whole other level than Lemmings. Programming a 2-dimensional, deliberately reduced game in terms of graphics (8-pixel-characters etc.) such as NeoLemmix must already be hard enough; but these guys make straight-up 3D roleplaying games.
Im talking about the Lego Bionicle fandom! For all the feeble efforts Lego themselves have made to release video games for one of their most successful custom franchises - an excessively-shortened first game to go along with the first movie, and then the fairly repetitive and easy-to-beat "Bionicle Heroes" - the fans are now doing way more than making up for that:
There are currently 3 (!) different custom fan games for Bionicle being worked on (at least that I am aware of - there may be more?). All of which are centered around the main storyline of the first six group of Toa (later renamed to "Toa Mata"). All of these are complete 3D roleplaying games:
1) "Legend of Mata Nui": This is a fan rebuilt of the first official video game Lego ever wanted to release for Bionicle (in collaboration with Saffire, which went bankrupt over the late cancellation). The fans got their hands on an alpha built, then made a beta version, now there is a comparatively stable rebuilt version.
Gameplay here is very much reminiscent of the Legend of Zelda games: Characters have voiced but speak in some pseudo-language, so you have to go by the subtitles; there is a grappling hook
; the bosses have their names presented on screen at the beginning of combat and typically expose a vulnerable spot over and over again over the course of the boss fight, so that's the thing where you have to keep hitting them; there's no leveling-up of characters, but you can fulfil quests to extend your health- and mask-power bar (kind of like collecting heart containers in Zelda). And there's a temple for every element (which is part of the lore, of course), so this is similar to the "shrines" in e.g. The Legend of Zelda - "Twilight Princess".
Then there are two entirely fan-made games, built from scratch; and where "Legend of Mata Nui" is still somewhat level-based (albeit with freedom of movement between the various regions of a given level), both of these custom ones are open-world games.
2) "Quest for Mata Nui": Not to be confused with the one mentioned above. This one is still in development, and is going to be a Starcraft 2 mod. Graphics-wise, this one looks to be the best by far. They have a YouTube channel where they keep posting development updates, from game music to demonstrations of particular abilities and enemies to straight-up short gameplay excerpts.
3) "Masks of Power": This one is also still being worked on, but there is already an available download of the most-up-to-date version. I've just tried it for the first time tonight, and so far it's already much more stable than the fan rebuilt of "Legend of Mata Nui"!
It's easy to save, there is no lagging, I couldn't see any graphical glitches, combat works, there are dialogues, even small quests to be fulfilled already... I definitely expected this one to be in a much earlier stage still. The graphics are also largely accurate to the source material - it's just that the landscape is currently a lot "emptier" than in what I got to see from "Quest for Mata Nui". All the important stuff is still here; there are simply fewer details and decorations thus far.
And the best of all: Lego has not shut down any of this - as they could have done for copyright reasons, obviously! "Legend of Mata Nui" has been available for a while now, apparently; the developers of "Quest for Mata Nui" even met up with some Lego folks, so they kind of even got official permission to keep working on this (instead of just a passive "non-interference" by the company). If I remember correctly, they said Lego did give them some "guidelines" on what they should do so that they can retain Lego's "support" - obviously, it would be unwise on Lego's part to just give the developers a blank cheque and let them do whatever they want with their franchise.
The last time I was this impressed by a fan game was when I discovered the fan community of the
Dungeons-&-Dragons video game "Temple of Elemental Evil" had not only fixed a bunch of the bugs of the original game (especially when you tried to run it on Windows 10), no, they also went ahead and added a bunch of custom content to it, most of it after the ending of the official part of the game, but also some in between - and they increased the cap for leveling up from 10 to 20, so that there could still be progress during these new later parts of the game. Meaning, they had to program in all the spells, abilities etc. that D&D requires for characters between level 11 and 20 (in rules version 3.5). That thing is called The "
Circle of Eight Modpack".
Definitely a great effort as well... but Temple of Elemental Evil is still a turn-based game with small characters you view from above. The people behind the Modpack also didn't create any new graphics, they just adapted and re-used the ones already present in the original game. For example, with a slight change of the lighting, the same building that makes up the upper floor of the Temple of Elemental Evil in the main game can also serve as a church of the (good) Sun God Pelor in the expansion part of the game.
But those Bionicle fan games, especially the two that were built entirely from scratch, without relying on previous "official" work, they had no such help. They had to make everything by themselves, I assume.
PS: Bridging the divide between Bionicle and other, more standard fantasy roleplaying games:
There also seem to be Bionicle mods for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.
While they look great for the characters themselves, as well, as does the landscape (since it's what we were all used to from Skyrim), there is of course the inconsistency of the robot-like Bionicle characters fighting Skyrim's standard fantasy foes, i.e. organic beings, such as wolves and bandits.