Transformers: War For Cybertron

2175 Words5 Pages

Fun Fact: Because many fans were "irked by the 'Michael Bay-ified insect-like versions" (that have been dubbed "Bayformers") of the Autobots and Decepticons, the design team put a more "modern" polish on the style, hoping to evoke the feel of the Generation 1 cartoon.

Preview

On nearly every wall hangs a giant poster of stunning Transformers-themed concept artwork. There are a lot of walls in High Moon Studio's warehouse-filling offices. The staggering amount of concept work the developer has done for their upcoming game must be some kind of world record.

In one corner, a programmer is adding a few lines of code to the game, while at the same time watching VHS tapes of the original 80s Transformers cartoon. Every cubicle is filled to the brim with toys, memorabilia, paraphernalia and posters related to the 25-year old franchise. The original Hasbro toy line that focused on the war between two factions of transforming robots has, over two and a half decades, grown to encompass cartoons, movies, comic books, video games and much more. Sadly, the games have generally sucked ass. But no more!

Cybertron Revealed

Hasbro gave High Moon carte blance, allowing the developer to be creative with a property it's employees love. One aspect of the Transformers history that has remained mostly untouched is their origin homeworld of Cybertron, so High Moon used that as their central premise: the war between two factions on Cybertron, before events led the battle to Earth.

In a twist that goes against convention, what the studio did was build a game first, then apply the license. Usually, developers that have been tasked with making a game for a license tend to work top-down, trying to fit a game into the licence's paradigms. Th...

... middle of paper ...

... Decepticons from resurrecting Unicron (big planet-eating Transformer from the Generation 1 movie). Cybertron, was pretty much it's own thing and it's own story, and ended up being mostly irrelevant.

2002-2006: Transformers: Warriors

Generation 1, Beast Wars and Beast Machines all combined into one comic and expensive toy line.

2007-present: Michael Bay

Big robots punching each other while Shia LeBouf tries to act. You've seen the movies (Transformers & Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). They're pretty cool, and there's some comics associated with them.

2007-2009: Transformers: Animated

Cartoon Network ran this weird hyper-anime cartoon, where the Autobots play at being superheros, battling evil humans.

2010-Present: The Future

Hasbro will be releasing a toy line based on the Transformers: War for Cybertron game, and it's gonna be sweet.

Open Document