Transformers: War
for Cybertron was the first genuinely good Transformers game in years.
Succeeding where the movie tie-ins failed so spectacularly, High Moon
Studios pitched it perfectly, taking you back to the early days in the
Transformers saga before they took up residence on Earth, becoming cars,
vans, trucks and so on.
During
a recent post-E3 Activision showcase, we were able to catch up with
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron's Game Director Matt 'Tieg' Tieger, to
talk about the War for Cybertron sequel, before nostalgia got the better
of us and we started chatting about our favourite Transformers and
which Tieger would love to see in future sequels.
Will
the Transformers be going to Earth for the third game? Which
Transformers would High Moon like to add for the next game, and what are
the fans going to make of Grimlock and his new origin story. It's a
long interview, but well worth a read, especially if you're a
Transformers fan. Roll out! And if you still want more, you can read our
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron E3 preview.
After
the success of Transformers: War for Cybertron, what were the key
components of the game that you wanted to build upon and advance for the
sequel?
There's
a couple of things. One of the things we did after War for Cybertron
was try to focus on listening. We listened to the press reception, we
listened to forum posts, we listened to Hasbro and we listened to that
crazy little voice inside our head telling us what we should and
shouldn't be doing. We boiled all that down to ascertain the perception
of War for Cybertron was, and in my opinion was, a flawed gem. It was
really interesting, different and novel, but it had some areas that
weren't strong enough.
The
gameplay got repetitive, the visuals got repetitive and the AI was
lacklustre. So the direction we set for the team then, was to take
someone who had never played War for Cybertron, take the person who's
going to play this game for the first time and tell their friends. What
they're going to say is this world is stunning, Cybertron is epic and
big and really interesting, and every time I play as a new character, it
feels different to the ones I was playing as before and the game is
really pushing me from a challenge point of view. The AI keeps up with
me at transforming and some of the AI transforming is really engaging.
Basically,
we wanted not to just take those elements from War for Cybertron and
elevate them, but make them be the selling points of this new game.
You
mentioned Cybertron got repetitive as an environment, but when the
planet is by its very nature a metallic, oppressive place, how do you go
about improving the look of the game in Fall of Cybertron?
It's
hard, right?! (laughs) Most games have maybe five percent or three
percent of their world being metal and so you can have one level, one
degree of specularity and you're done. That was not going to to cut it
for us, so what we did is spend a lot of time focusing on metallics and
degrees of specularity. Creating bronze, making it different from steel,
different from rust, making all those metals different. There was a lot
of time put into that and that resulted in a world that doesn't have
the eye fatigue that War for Cybertron had, where you feel like you're
seeing a lot of the same stuff.
The
other benefit that came out of that transferred over to the character
customisation, because we put so much work into the metallic stuff that
we realised we could let players have the choice of how metallic you
want your characters. The other piece that we added to really change the
environments was colour. We've actually added quite a bit more colour
to this game and I think that adds more variety just in general. The
last thing we added – and this is going sound like a really simple thing
– was terrain. In War for Cybertron we had all right angles and flat
surfaces, and after a while that gets a little boring. When you have
vehicles that can drive over the ground, when you deliver terrain it
makes it inherently more fun, as you can go up and down bumps and things
like that.
We
accomplished that by creating some new areas, including one called the
'Sea of Rust', which is basically like a desert where there's metal
particles that function like sand. You can drive over lots of
interesting things and I think that adds to our variety.
Transformers
is a rich universe packed with all sorts of popular characters, so how
many of those have you got in the game and which ones would you like to
explore in the future?
That's
the great thing about this brand, is that there's so many characters to
draw upon. We haven't announced all of the characters yet, but the ones
we've talked about so far are Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, Cliffjumper,
Starscream, Jazz, Grimlock, Bruticus... and I've got more fingers left
to count on, that's how I'll explain it. What's important fir us is the
system we use to decide who is going to be in the game, and it wasn't
just a popularity contest.
Obviously
it's important to have the fan favourites in there, but at the same
time they had to provide some really meaningful gameplay. So a guy like
Jazz was a perfect fit because he was a DLC character in War for
Cybertron and he was very popular as a character, but he also had a
grappling hook. That's brand-new gameplay for us, so we're able to say
he's a perfect fit as it's new gameplay and that's one of our goals for
this. Plus, he's a fan favourite.
Grimlock
is another fan favourite, plus he's fundamentally different from a
ranged combat point of view and a transforming point of view, so that's
more new gameplay. That's the process we went through. So where we'd go
for the future, I think we'd look at characters with neat abilities as
well as being popular.
Why did you decide to restrict Grimlock's ability to transform to his Rage meter?
There's
a couple of parts to that. One, we really felt like Fall of Cybertron
is all about variety, and variety is not just this guy's blue and that
guy's red, but variety in meaningful ways. I think the best games really
challenge you as a gamer, making you think differently and this really
does make you think 90-degrees differently. Grimlock provided a tactical
rethink about transformation, so that was probably the core reason.
The
second reason or perhaps bi-product of that is it feeling really
special when Grimlock transforms. All the characters in the game –
almost all of them – their transformations take about three quarters of a
second because from a gameplay point of view, it just makes
transformations innate in your thinking. For Grimlock, because you have
to earn it, it takes four seconds to transform, so you can really enjoy
the thing that you've earned. And there's really nice cinematic cameras
that support Grimlock's transformation, so it's a real moment, and that
made a lot of sense to us.
From
a story point of view, we're telling the origin of the Dinobots, so
from the moment you start out, Grimlock doesn't have the ability to
transform and he gains that, so again it becomes more meaningful when
you get it.
Grimlock also has a completely new origin story for Fall of Cybertron. Can you tell us more about that?
Absolutely.
We knew we wanted him in the game, so we looked through the fiction,
and whether it be the G1 cartoon or the comics, the stories just don't
make sense. In the G1 cartoon, Ratchet and Wheeljack build him from
dinosaur bones they find, they're like “hey, it'd be cool to build some
dinosaurs, ” and that's it! That's the origin story, so we wanted to do
something that made a little more sense than that.
Here's
the whole deal: Cybertron is dying and shutting down... But let's start
with the Decepticons. What's really interesting about the Decepticons
to me, is you've got Megatron who's the leader and philosophically he's
having a war of ideology. He has three lieutenants: Starscream, who's
very powerful and there's a loyalty difference between these three
characters. Starscream is loyal to Starscream, very self-serving and
always out for himself. Soundwave is incredibly loyal to Megatron, and
Shockwave is loyal to Cybertron above all else. So these three
characters all have very different motivations.
Shockwave's
plan is to save Cybertron and the way he's going to do that is by
rebooting it. Think of Cybertron as a giant computer system, and
Shockwave is going to hit the power button and reset, but the way he
needs to do that is with a giant influx of new energon. Energon is a
combination and life rolled together, so he needs to find a place where
he can get all of that. Cybertron is a planet that has layers of
history, the previous ages, the ancients and so on. Shockwave starts
digging and finds out that the ancients used to use technology called
'space bridges' that opened wormholes in space and they'd walk among the
stars. This is now lost to the Transformers, but he finds the
technology, restarts the programme and starts looking through the cosmos
for other worlds that he can suck the life out of.
He
find Earth and sees that it's teeming with life that he can steal. Now
here's the twist. Shockwave is the character who creates the Insecticons
in this story, and there are some denizens of the deep from War for
Cybertron that looked slightly biological, so he combined them with
those with current Decepticons to create the Insecticons. While
Shockwave is looking through the cosmos, this entire story of everything
that's going on in this game takes place several millions of years ago
before our time, so the Earth he sees has dinosaurs stomping around. He
sees these shapes and decides that he can continue his experiments,
turning some Autobots that he's captured into these new shapes – such as
Grimlock - and by making them incredibly powerful, he can change their
brain function and control them.
Obviously,
that never ever works, but what it does do is allow us to tie-in some
of Grimlock's speech patterns and some of things that make him
interesting as a character, in a way that is meaningful. The rules we
laid down were no time travel and no alternate dimensions. We're asking
you to believe in a sentient race of transforming robots. That's enough
of a leap, so we don't need those other two pieces to make it even more
complex. That's how it all comes together and as you play through the
levels, it's all being unfolded to you and there's kiosks you can find
where if you choose, you can understand the story even deeper and learn
more about the Dinobots. Like Swoop for one is very happy with the
transformation, but Grimlock is not so much.
It
allows us to tell a different kind of Grimlock story than the G1
cartoon Grimlock. When I look at the G1 Grimlock, I never liked the
whole “me Grimlock smash.” He felt stupid and I didn't want to make that
guy. We actually did some broader research and when we looked at the UK
comics, they had a really interesting Grimlock who wasn't dumb, he was
smart. That allowed us to treat him like a character that just has a
speech impediment that has nothing do with how smart he is, it's just
sometimes hard for him to process the words. He gets frustrated – this
ties-in with the Rage meter thematically – because he can't communicate
due to the change that affected his speech patterns, meaning he's not
stupid, just angry.
We're really excited about him and we think Grimlock's going to be loved by the fans.
You've
also got Metroplex in the game, who is quite literally huge. Are we
going to see the Decepticons wheeling out Scorponok, since they had
Trypticon in the last game?
We've
got Bruticus, who is smaller, but a playable character. He's about
80-feet tall and a combination of the five Combaticons. When we started
that list of variety for Fall of Cybertron, we wanted Grimlock, Jazz
with the grappling hook and Combiners – those were the top three we had
to have. There's not necessarily one-to-one parity between the
Decepticons and Autobots for that stuff, but if the Autobots get
Grimlock, the Decepticons get Combiners. That's the way it works.
Going
back to Shockwave's discovery of the space bridge, presumably the next
place for the Transformers to go is presumably Earth?
Not
necessarily. We end Fall of Cybertron on a cliffhanger and I'm not
spoiling anything by saying that, as the joy of this story is not the
end points or the twists, it's the journey. Because you know what's
going to happen and you know they're eventually going to end up on
Earth, right? Where this game ends is, they open up the space bridge and
the Decepticons and Autobots tumble through, but do they get to Earth
right away? Do they go somewhere else and ultimately end up on Earth, or
do they take millions of years to get there. Let's not forget that this
story takes place millions of years ago prior to our time, so it could
take them millions of years and they're immortal, right? In the fiction
at least, there are loads of interesting planets that they've been to
over the course of their history.
When
you started working on this series, were you already a Transformers
geek or did working on the games turn you into a Transformers geek?
I
think it's definitely re-invigorated a lot of my Transformers fandom.
I've always been a big fan of the cartoon and the toys, and we still
watch the cartoon in my household with my three little kids. I was
definitely a big fan and it's always been a component of my life, but
working of the game has definitely reinvigorated it. I enjoy talking to a
lot of the longtime fans too, and we go to a convention called BotCon,
where there's fans who have their whole back covered in Transformers
tattoos. It's just awesome and a great community to be a part of.
What's the most common request you get from the fans to include in a Transformers game then?
The
hardest question I ever get asked and the one I hate answering is:
“will so-and-so (whoever you want) going to be in the game?” The problem
is that there's what feels like ten-thousand cool Transformers and you
just couldn't possibly include all of them in meaningful ways. That's
the hard part, because we can't possibly please everyone. That's my
least favourite question to answer.
I personally would love to see Unicron cropping up. Who would you personally like to include in the next Transformers game?
Grimlock
was the big one for me this time around, but there are some interesting
Combiners beyond Bruticus. Unicron and Primus are really interesting
characters... We'd have to make some really big changes for this, but a
character like Astrotrain... I'm not sure anyone would want to play as a
train, but the concept of triple-changers is really interesting to me.
There's all sorts of places you can go in lots of interesting ways. A
lot of people ask me about Beast Wars, which could also be an
interesting place to go to, but you never know. We'll see.
But I guess the purists, the hardcore Transformers fans are always going to want to see G1 stuff?
Transformers
is a really unusual brand, because there are so many different entry
points. You have the people who are G1 fans, you have the people who are
Beast Wars fans, Michael Bay fans, Transformers Prime fans... They all
converge into being Transformers fans and they all have these very
differing opinions, but at the root they all love Transformers.
It must be incredibly hard to please all of those fans.
It
is. But you know one of the things that's hugely important to this
brand is the audio. The voice actor choices, the music and sound effects
are all very important. Honestly, you look at those movies, my
favourite part of those movies is the audio. It's absolutely stellar.
That's one of the universal binding points, the audio. I don't know one
person who doesn't like Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, I mean it's just
an amazing voice. So we look for those kind of universal binding agents.
Are there any other classic voices from the original cartoon?
Gregg
Berger is the voice of Grimlock, and we had some really interesting
discussions about whether we should use him or not, as it might make
people think incorrectly about the kind of Grimlock that we're doing. We
were back and forth for a while, and we thought why don't we just ask
him, and see if he's up for it? I think he did an amazing job, so that's
another great voice we have. Then we have other very popular voices,
like Nolan North is in the game, there's Troy Baker, and Fred Tatasciore
who's our Megatron, and he did an amazing job. So we have a lot of
great voice actors who've done a lot of video games.
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron is out in August 28th in North America and August 31st in Europe.
