Lego Fortnite is getting a big expansion with a GTA-style roleplaying city

Lego is building something new in Fortnite. A year after Lego Fortnite launched a new era inside of the game — one based on the idea that Fortnite is a collection of many game experiences, rather than just a battle royale — Lego is expanding its presence with a new title that sounds reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto V roleplaying as well as a rebrand of its core survival game.

First up is a game called Brick Life, which is billed as “an all-new social roleplay experience.” Players explore a Lego-ified city location with 31 other people and can take on specific jobs like courier, security guard, or sushi chef. Players can design their own homes and explore locations like a magical school and rooftop club, and there are missions to take on as well. From the sounds of it, Brick Life is a more family-friendly take on the enduring popularity of roleplaying servers in GTA V, and Epic isn’t being all that subtle about the connection:

Brick Life is launching inside of Fortnite on December 12th, though it won’t be available for players in South Korea.

As part of the announcement, Lego Fortnite — the Minecraft-style survival experience that launched last December — is being renamed Lego Fortnite Odyssey. From now on, “Lego Fortnite” will be the name of the hub inside of Fortnite that houses all of the Lego experiences. Epic and Lego have been steadily expanding their partnership over the last year, launching new games and also letting Fortnite players build their own Lego games.

The ongoing collaboration between Lego and Fortnite could provide a hint at what to expect from the upcoming “persistent universe” that Epic and Disney are making together, following a $1.5 billion investment from Disney in February. Since then, we’ve heard very little specifics about what the virtual world might look like.

Meanwhile, Epic has also announced that Fortnite is getting support for a revamped version of text chat, which will be available as an option across all of its experiences starting on December 10th. There will be three kinds of text chat available: party channel for talking with your squad; game channel for a public conversation with people on the same island; and DMs with people on your friends list.

Epic says there will be two kinds of chat filters — one that removes personal information, and another that filters out “various kinds of mature language and toxicity” — which will be always on for players under the age of 13 in all forms of chat. They will also be always on for all players in the channel chats. The feature will also include a reporting system similar to the voice reporting tool Epic launched last year. Here’s an example of what text chats look like in the game:

Image: Epic Games

All of these announcements come at a particularly busy time for Fortnite. The battle royale game is currently in the midst of a brand-new chapter that kicked off following an ambitious music-themed season, and Epic also recently brought back the nostalgia-filled Fortnite OG as a permanent mode. Meanwhile, Epic just announced “Ballistic,” a multiplayer first-person shooter mode that launches inside of Fortnite on December 11th.