Transformers: Fall of Cybertron transports you to the final days of the planet Cybertron where you will experience the darkest hours of the apocalyptic war between the AUTOBOTS and DECEPTICONS. Embark on an adrenaline-fueled journey through a wide range of missions and massive environments designed around each character’s unique abilities. With the stakes higher than ever before, you play as a variety of Transformers characters, including Grimlock’s nearly indestructible T-Rex form and the legendary Combaticons forming into the colossal Bruticus. Fight through both sides of the Transformers’ most epic battles leading to their legendary exodus from their homeworld.

Set in a desolate, post-apocalyptic era, the game thrusts players straight into an epic Transformers story where they will explore the devastated ruins of Cybertron and fight through the final, darkest hours of the war between the AUTOBOTS and DECEPTICONS. Every character is equipped with distinct abilities and personalities that are suited for each of the diverse missions in the game. Jazz can deploy his grappling hook to traverse across multi-level platforms, Cliffjumper can cloak himself to unleash undetected stealth kills and Optimus Prime can call in targeted artillery strikes. Countless characters make their very first in-game debut including Grimlock, Bruticus, Metroplex, the Insecticons, and more.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron allows you to go head-to-head as AUTOBOTS and DECEPTICONS with its multi-player online mode. Create your own personalized character and weaponry with the most advanced and in-depth customization ever before seen in a Transformers video game. Choose individual body parts, colors, vehicles shapes, weapons, abilities, and much more. Take your creations online to prove your supremacy.

Game Chronicles goes inside this exciting and highly anticipated sequel with High Moon Studios, Game Director, Matt Tieger:

GCM: Thank you for your time! Please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us about the team behind Fall of Cybertron and how many of the original team are back working on the sequel?

Matt: My name is Matt Tieger; I’m the game director at High Moon Studios, I was the game director for War for Cybertron, and after shipping War for Cybertron we split into two separate teams with some of the team moving on to Dark of the Moon and myself and a big chunk of the core group stuck together to work on this.

GCM: War for Cybertron is arguably the best of all the Transformers games out there, largely in part to the lack of a movie tie-in. As a game studio, do you find it easier to develop a story, create levels, and design missions when you aren’t confined to working within a movie license?

Matt: It’s easier and it’s harder. It’s easier because the guard rails are much wider and you can wiggle around. My philosophy is that games tell you what they need as you’re developing them so we can really see what the game is asking for and create things without having to worry if the movie is going to validate them. For instance – “we need a character to fill this role…who is the character that would be the best choice for that”, as opposed to “this character is in the movie…how are we going to make them fit?”

But it can also be harder. The responsibility is pretty high for the fan base, especially with Transformers which is a very polarized fan group. I like the movies, I like the games, I like the comics, I like the cartoons, I like the toys, I like everything about Transformers, but I know that’s not the case for everybody. So when you’re making a movie-game it's directed to a subset of fans and requires a bit more focus. We have such a huge responsibility when you’re crafting the new canon for Hasbro of what they were doing on Cybertron, a world that fans have had two decades to imagine how good it should be and what stories should be told that it’s a little daunting honestly.

GCM: With so much source material (G1, G2, animated, movies, etc.) are you drawing upon any one source for story continuity or did you create your own internal Transformers “bible”?

Matt: There is a dizzying amount of source material. What we did was focus on gameplay first. In this case it’s gameplay variety. How many different types of play experiences can we give you that innately felt Transformers? Jazz is a great example. He’s a cool character and people like him and he has a grappling hook. We never had that in War for Cybertron so let’s try it and see if we can make a fun grappling hook.

G1 and the cartoon is our primary touchstone for the things we look for in terms of spiritual truth in what we’re trying to deliver, but that doesn’t mean we are exclusive to that. There is some really awesome stuff in the comics, particularly, the UK comics has some really great storylines, but when we do our visual designs we actually start with the toys, really looking at the design and capturing the magic of those toys.

GCM: Given the title and where it fits within the timeline, one can assume the story is going to deal with the Autobots struggle to build their Ark after the Decepticons win the civil war. Can you elaborate on the story and give some examples of a few missions and how it all comes together?

Matt: How about an example of one mission? Very early in the game the Ark is not yet built, and you’re playing as Optimus Prime trying to save the last remnants of the Autobots. There aren’t many left and the Decepticons are “knocking at the door”. We put Optimus Prime in a very difficult position as a leader. There is the long term goal of fueling the Ark and taking off, but there’s the short term “we might not live to see tomorrow” and we make Optimus make some really tough choices about what he’s going to do, and not everyone necessarily agrees with him. That’s a really early level where we see Optimus in a little bit of a different light.

GCM: Will the story mode be presented as two separate campaigns or will Autobots and Decepticon missions intertwine in a single series of missions?

Matt: We took a long hard look at everything that was in the game to see what was holding us back from making the best Transformers game possible. As we did that one of the things that contributed to a lot of the criticism in the press for War for Cybertron about the game feeling repetitive is in truth, with two campaigns you have two tutorial levels, you have two first levels, two second levels, so that once you beat the campaign the game does feel very repetitive because we didn’t know what order you were playing in.

So Fall of Cybertron is a single campaign interwoven between Autobots and Decepticons. We spent a lot of time making sure we had lots of interesting character transitions, playing as one character to another, but if you think of it as a story with three Acts, the first and the last Acts are primarily Autobots and the middle Act is primarily Decepticons.

GCM: Fall of Cybertron promises great variety in gameplay with unique character-specific abilities. What challenges did this present when trying to balance the characters for both campaign and online gameplay?

Matt: I believe the rules for multiplayer differ from the rules for single player. So if Starscream has a certain gun in single player, that doesn’t dictate that he must have that same gun in multiplayer. We allow the team to balance the characters based on their gameplay needs rather than consistency.

GCM: The world of Cybertron was as impressive as it was original in War for Cybertron. What can we expect in the way of war-torn landscapes in Fall of Cybertron, and how does level design impact mission design?

Matt: There are three fundamental changes we made to level design. One – we much better embraced the vehicles. In general, they require a lot more geometry and a lot more space and having shipped so many games on Unreal we have a really good understanding of how to make that engine work for us.

Second – we invested a lot of time and effort into the quality of the visuals including the metals and the lighting and the texturing so that we can text a metal and make it rusty or shiny or pitted and have six different types of that same metal in a way that doesn’t tire your eyes out. We had some constructive criticism from War for Cybertron about visual repetition that was true, so we invested a lot of time and effort into that.

And lastly…it might seem like a small thing, but it’s a big fundamental difference – we actually have terrain. In War for Cybertron we had flat surfaces everywhere, so in this game we have a brand new space called the Sea of Rust; sea as in desert, not an ocean, so that the dust is all metal flakes and it allows us to have rolling hills that are really fun to drive on. So there are areas that have a lot of this incorporated into it, and it just makes the driving experience a lot more interesting when you’re not always driving on a flat surface.

GCM: Being a pre-visit to Earth story you can’t rely on familiar cars, trucks, and planes for your vehicle morphs. Where do the designers and artists go for their inspiration when it comes to vehicle mode designs?

Matt: It’s the “squint test”. You kind of squint your eyes and see if it looks like an Earth vehicle. There are certain elements you need to register to make it believable fiction but still feel Earth-ish; wheels, the concept of a windshield, the natural slope of a car or jet or plane, but it all falls under that squint test.

GCM: Drop-in/out co-op for the single-player story was an amazing feature in War for Cybertron. Can we expect the same or something similar in Fall of Cybertron, and if so, how does the gameplay vary based on the number of players?

Matt: Speaking of tough decisions we have to make, co-op was one of them. When we looked at how we could deliver the best possible experience, story structure and co-op were the two biggest things that were real challenges for us. With the co-op, the amount of effort and resources required to create buddies to follow you…just to have them follow you is a colossal AI effort along with the technical requirements of creating co-op.

From a game design theory, if you have three possible characters, all with different abilities, instead of elevating one of those you end up designing to the lowest common denominator. We really wanted to deliver the best possible single-player experience we could so that meant building the levels around a specific character and their innate abilities. We then took all those AI resources that were previously used on buddies and redesigned the whole AI system.

It wasn’t an easy decision. It was probably the hardest one we made, but when we weighed out a brand new AI system and a raw better experience just playing the game where variety is king versus supporting the co-op experience we felt we had to make that choice to deliver a better game. Every mission is now custom-crafted around a specific character, and story-wise, gameplay-wise, and level-wise, it just takes it to a whole new level.

GCM: The fans have been heard and Dinobots and Combaticons are coming. How are they being integrated into the gameplay and what will they add to the overall mix?

Matt: The Combaticons are great because they have this ability to combine up into Bruticus, so we get to enjoy the experience of playing as some of the vehicles with a great pace and build-up and then ultimately, we’re going to eleven – we’re going to combine up! Grimlock is the primary Dinobot in the game and we create his origin story as to why he has the shape he has. As Grimlock he’s going through his missions finding and rescuing his buddies, collecting his team back up after all this stuff has happened to them.

{SPOILER ALERT}

Grimlock is a huge fan favorite – one of five of the most popular Transformers of all time; at least from the research I’ve done. He is a unique gameplay style that allowed us to deliver something that was very different than anything else in the game. He’s a T-Rex, also something different, and we could play with transformation being a different mechanic as well and make you think tactically. He is this universal cool. If you don’t want to play as a fire-breathing space T-Rex, I’m not sure I want to know you. He’s just perfect from that point of view and he fulfilled everything for us. But how do you get a T-Rex on Cybertron – how do you make that happen? The rules I set down initially were No Time Travel and No Alternate Dimensions. We had a lot of long conversations with Hasbro and came up with this:

Decepticons…there’s Megatron, the guy in charge and three key guys; Starscream, Soundwave, and Shockwave – all very important characters. I define them all by loyalty. Soundwave is loyal to Megatron above all things. Starscream is loyal to Starscream – he’s out for himself, and Shockwave is loyal to Cybertron. So they’re all Decepticons, but they all have their own motivations for what’s going on in the story.

Cybertron is shutting down and Shockwave finds some ancient technology call Space Bridges – the ability to open up a wormhole in space, and the Ancients used these to travel all over the universe. He finds this technology and gets it operational and starts sending out these probes to find a solution to save Cybertron. He sees this blue-green world full of life – this rare gem in the universe and his plan is to destroy that world and suck every ounce of life out of it to reboot Cybertron. The twist is, this all takes place about 70 million years ago so what he sees on this blue-green world are dinosaurs stomping around. He decides to use those shapes as his servants, because the Insecticons are also created by Shockwave as earlier incarnations. He captures a bunch of Autobots, Grimlock and crew, which previously had shapes like tanks or trucks or planes, and does experiments on them and turns them into the Dinobots. He routes all the power out of their higher brain functions and turns it into raw power because he plans to control them.

Grimlock, in the cartoon was not too bright. He was the 60’s version of dinosaurs, slow and plodding creatures, but if you look at the comics, the UK in particular, he’s a pretty cool character, very smart, tactical, and logical, so what I wanted to do was deliver more on that style of Grimlock. I feel we’ve been able to rope in all the best parts of Grimlock and deliver a great story with a backstory that makes sense and gameplay that’s fresh and original.

GCM: Creating customizable Transformers for multiplayer sounds promising. What was required to keep this from becoming a MechWarrior/Armored Core game with a Transformers skin overlay when it comes to assembling and upgrading your own personal Transformer?

Matt: I think the fantasy in Transformers is to “make my own Transformer” and that’s less about gameplay implication and more about the visual style I think is perfect. It’s cosmetic and you’re earning these parts and using them in a way to make your version of the best Transformer possible, and they’re not affecting your gameplay stats because multiplayer, in my opinion is not about who has the best laser gun, but who has more skill or who’s playing better. We originally tried it where we had gameplay involved in the parts, and we all just looked at it and decided to “just let people build” cause that’s the fantasy.

GCM: I still haven’t found all of the hidden symbols in War for Cybertron. What is the collectible going to be in Fall of Cybertron and is there a chance of an in-game method for finding them (scanner, radar, etc.)?

Matt: Yes. They were too hard in War for Cybertron. Also, finding ammo was too hard in War for Cybertron. Ammo has an all new look and is much easier to find and the AI drops a lot more ammo. There are a couple kinds of collectibles we have at this point. We have created audio logs, so if you are really groovin’ on the story every level has this series of tapes that are associated with it, but from a character that’s not even in the level, so you can be playing an Optimus level and come across Ratchet’s tapes about some event from the story.

GCM: Tell us the one feature or element of Fall of Cybertron that you are most impressed with or that gamers are going to be buzzing about after they play this game?

Matt: I think what they will be talking about is how every level felt different and it will really challenge them on a tactical level and will really surprise them on how innately this is all tied into the Transformers’ universe. They won’t even have to think about “should this be in the Transformers’ universe or does this fit?” It just all works.

GCM: Thank you again for your time! Do you have anything to add that I may have missed or something you’re particularly proud of in this game?

Matt: No – that was pretty exhaustive. It’s great to have a game I’m so excited to talk about.

Look for more pre-release coverage of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron as we anxiously await the game's launch later this year...

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