Transformers has a hardcore fanbase. A really hardcore fanbase. I consider myself a fan of the franchise, but I’m only a casual appreciator who has his favorite robots and sticks to them. Some of these guys are crazy, and with such a zealous set of fans, I had to ask High Moon Studios how it’s dealing with the pressure as it develops War for Cybertron.
“Transformers fans are huge and there are a lot of them — they are rabid and they read a lot about TF,” explain director Matt Tieger. “So the thing we had to get right was Cybertron itself, the homeworld, because these guys have had 25 years to imagine what it could be. Hasbro really hasn’t let anyone explore and create Cybertron like this before. There’s certainly been comics and little bits of the TV show but not to this level of detail. We tread very carefully on all that history but still have to find our place within that.
“For us there are three big components that make up this game, the first and most important being gameplay. Everything is centered on this core gameplay and we layer Transformers into that. Second component is multiplayer and there’s a huge huge multiplayer component. The third pillar is Cybertron, meaning that the world, the story, the physical charater designs. We created a Cyberton font to make sure everything was right and we spelled stuff correctly, so getting it right for the fans was super important to us, to hit that authenticity.”
To further exemplify his commitment to generating fan appeal, Tieger compared his efforts to the first Spider-Man movie. How so? Hit the jump to find out.
“I’m a big fan of the first Spider-Man movie,” explains the director. “It hit fans on several different levels — the first level of that is the person who doesn’t know anything about Spider-Man. They just wanna see a great action move, and if they see it and have a good time maybe they become Spider-Man fans afterwards.
“The next layer down are fans who haven’t thought about Spider-Man since they were a kid and they remember all this great nostalgic stuff they saw back in the day. And the third layer of fan is the one who knows everything about Spider-Man and they’ve read every comic and know everything about it and there are all these one liners they know and recognize.
“We approach our game in the same way. If you just like shooters, there’s a great shooter that you can love and maybe you’ll come out a Transformers fan. If you haven’t thought about Transformers in a long time, you’re gonna go in and just be smacked down by this huge wave of nostalgia. And if you know everything about TF, there is stuff in there that has never been explained before, we’re resetting a bunch of things, in a way that is spuriously true but slightly different. There are things that you might know and there are things that you’ve never seen before, ever. Big questions get answered.”
Sounds alright to me. Of course, there’s a risk that some of the “reset” story stuff jumps the shark, but let’s face it, you can’t get much worse than the cartoons when it comes to pure and utter nonsense.
