> You can be just as creative and have just as much fun with new sets.
You absolutely cannot. Don't get me wrong, I love Lego to this day but late 90's Technic is unmatched in it's versatility by a looooong shot.
You absolutely cannot. Don't get me wrong, I love Lego to this day but late 90's Technic is unmatched in it's versatility by a looooong shot.
Of course you do, because it's an emotional experience. Just like how those tomatoes you ate at nanna's summer cottage in Italy tasted incredible, yet if you'd eat those exact same tomatoes in your drabby work canteen on a rainy tuesday morning, they'd be nothing special. My children don't particularly like my old legos, yet I somehow see them as "obviously" superior over the ones they have themselves. I'm sure they'll feel the same about those same sets 25 years from now when their children play with whatever is new then.
The good thing is they've started shipping brick tools in the bigger sets—they may have to given how many fiddly little bits they include now—and extras of some of the smallest or most breakable pieces, which is nice. But otherwise they're not half as fun to build as sets. And the parts are less useful in general building (for young kids, anyway, maybe useful for the "pro" sorts) because they're mostly tiny pieces. Kit-bashing with them kinda sucks (again, at "amateur" levels of skill, I know there are real brick artists out there who work magic), better to just get generic brick buckets or use parts from older sets.
And I'm talking about 6-12 year old targeted lines here, not any of the fancier sets aimed at older kids and adults. Elves and normal town sets and stuff like that.
[EDIT] examples:
6086, Black Knight's Castle, 569 pieces, 12 minifigs
41188, Breakout from the Goblin King's Fortress, 696 pieces, 4 minifigs
And the former is ~2.5x the size of the latter. I can tell you from experience that the latter is too tiny and intricate for even little-kid hands to play with it very well. It's a nightmare of itty bitty pieces to put together something that looks slick on box art but sucks IRL.
"Oh, but that castle's like ~$150-170 inflation-adjusted while the Goblin King's Fortress is only ~$70"
Well, that's not my point, but OK.
6075, Wolfpack Tower, 232 pieces, 4 minifigs
About the same size as the Goblin King fortress when assembled, only ~30% the part count, same number of minifigs, originally $30 so at or under the price of 41188 inflation-adjusted. Definitely does look worse on box art, granted, but holds up to play better, is far easier to put back together if it gets damaged without doing a tear-down and re-build from scratch, and has spaces sized right to support play. It's a better set to play with.
I'm not going to argue set numbers and brick counts, I don't know anything about legos. All I can say is that I see children be just as creative with legos today as I and my friends ever were.
LEGO itself is fine. Brick buckets are still great value. The sets just aren't as good for playing with as-is or for building/customizing on top of, anymore. With some exceptions I'm sure, but they used to just about all be designed, seemingly (in hindsight, now that we have modern ones to compare them to) play-first.
Compare this to my brother's 6274, Caribbean Clipper. The price, inflation adjusted, was in the same ballpark.
That set did look great 30 years ago, but the new one not only has more details, the hull is almost completely brick built instead of begin made of 3 big pieces. It is also bigger as far as I can remember.
The way higher part-count of mostly-tiny bricks also makes them miserable to pick out of a mixed set of bricks. Damn near impossible to re-construct if they get torn up and make it into a well-populated brick bin. I remember being able to mix the generic bricks and a dozen largish sets freely and never having much trouble picking them back out—phew man, these new ones are not like that.
My kids have lots of fun with LEGO but the sets are... not a big contributor to that, minifigs aside. Once they get busted up—and again, they're harder to restore post-customization or repair as they take a little damage here and there—that's it, probably never see them together again, and my kids are drowning in tiny pieces from those sets and starved for larger ones when they build their own stuff. Brick buckets and large plates purchased piecemeal are much better bang-for-the-buck, the way they use them. We're mostly sticking to those and much smaller sets, having been burned by the big ones.
The new ones definitely aren't as well suited to the same play-purposes as the old sets, though maybe they're better for some other play styles or uses than those were, I dunno. They absolutely, 100% look much better.