What began almost as a joke has become a true-blue gaming franchise. The trailer for Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham shows that, once again, this Lego-fied adventure series is going bigger than ever before.

While most supervillains have delusions of grandeur or destruction, Brainiac, apparently, just likes collecting really small versions of really big stuff, and he's got his robot eyes set on swiping a shrunken Earth for his private collection. Lego Batman 2 expanded on the first game by adding in a slew of superheroic friends to play as, and Lego Batman 3 seems to be moving beyond its predecessors by including more new heroes, and even a few supervillains. Those with a love of the lantern corps will be overjoyed to know that lantern characters of every color will be playable in Lego Batman 3; hopefully a few fan favorites like Dex-Starr will make an appearance, too.

As this is a Lego game, you can also expect Lego Batman 3 to offer drop-in, drop-out multiplayer, gentle puzzles, and even gentler combat. Whether this third entry will lean more towards the level-based previous Lego Batman games or towards the open-world format established by Lego Marvel Superheroes has yet to be seen, but it looks like, either way, Lego game fans will have something fun to spend their hard-earned gold bricks on when the title arrives this fall on Xbox One, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Playstation Vita, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and PC.

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