[TFW2005]

Originally posted by: Tony_Bacala @ TFW2005.com

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TFW2005 staff Seth Buzzard had a chance to sit down with Activision and High Moon Studios rep Matt Tieger yesterday at GDC 2010. They were kind enough to show us some gameplay for the upcoming War For Cybertron video game, introduce some new characters, and answer some questions. To read the full article, and see a slew of new screen shot images including Ironhide, Soundwave and more, click the title to this story!


TFW2005 staff Seth Buzzard had a chance to sit down with Activision and High Moon Studios rep Matt Tieger yesterday at GDC 2010. They were kind enough to show us some gameplay for the upcoming War For Cybertron video game, introduce some new characters, and answer some questions. Read on below to check it all out!

Tuesday night I headed down to San Francisco to meet with Matt Tieger of High Moon Studios. Matt is the Game Director of the upcoming Activision game Transformers: War for Cyberton. He walked me through a few sections of the game and answered a bunch of questions. Here is a rundown of what I learned.

Characters have two weapons; different weapons can be found and picked up during levels. Each character also has a special ability. The special abilities they showed off were as follows. Optimus (he isn’t a Prime yet) who had a war cry. This gives Optimus a temporary boost making his attacks more powerful, the cry also has an area of effect granting the boost to nearby allies. Next was Ratchet who has a repair beam that, as you might guess, heals friendly units. Finally we see Soundwave’s power which was to make walls of sound that could be used for cover.

Each level will have a squad of 3 characters, you will be able to choose which of these you want to play as at the start of each level with the computer controlling the other two. You will not be able to issue commands to the computer controlled characters. They will attack enemies and use their special abilities as they see fit. Matt Tieger assured us that they made sure the computer controlled characters are helpful and will not just spend the fight running into walls or putting themselves into unnecessary danger. More interesting than having computer controlled buddies is all the levels support 3 player co-op allowing your friends to hop into your game at any time and take control of one of those other characters.

Unlike the Revenge of the Fallen game transformation is not handled by holding down a button to stay in vehicle mode. This time transformation is toggled, press a button to transform, press it again to change back. This looks to allow much better control of the vehicles. The ground type vehicles are all hover cars not unlike how Wheeljack and Bumblebee where shown to be in the first episode of G1. As hover cars they can slide sidewise and are capable of movement a wheeled car isn’t. The drawback is they aren’t especially fast. When you want some speed the hover disks flip down to become wheels. In this mode you move much faster and control more as you would expect in a driving game.

Although they were nice guys and very friendly the PR folks in the room didn’t want Matt talking about multiplayer just yet and when I asked if he could tell me anything about the custom character feature they put the kibosh on that question.

At the beginning of the story Optimus does not have the title of Prime and is not the leader. A character I did not get to see named Zeta Prime leads the Autobots.

Characters I got to see as being playable were: Optimus (truck), Bumblebee (sport car), Ratchet (truck), Megatron (tank), Soundwave (truck class looked sort of like a van), Breakdown (muscle car) and Starscream (jet).

Characters I saw but were not playable (at least in the parts I saw, maybe they are in other parts of the game) were: Skywarp, Thundercracker, Jetfire (all jets) and Omega Supreme who’s alt-mode was not shown.

Omega Supreme was massive. To show just how big he was they had Soundwave stand next to him and poor Soundwave barley came up to Omega Supreme’s ankle.

Omega Supreme and Trypticon will be the only “cityformers” seen in the game.

There is a plan to have DLC for the game but it was too soon to give any hint what form it might take.

Matt Tieger wanted to update the look of the characters but wanted to make sure they were still recognizable. To test this he would show concept art to his kids and ask them “who’s this?” As long as the kids could still identify the character they knew they were ok.

The decision to make toys based on the games characters came several months into the games' development and was seen as a huge vote of confidence to the game makers that they were on the right track from Hasbro.

I did not get to play the game myself as it was an early build and they haven’t settled on a final control scheme but what I saw of the game play, story, the Unreal Engine powered graphics and an attention to detail - like having the butt of Optimus’ gun the same shape as his gun in G1 - I walked away having a good feeling that this could be the best Transformers video game yet.

TFW2005 would like to thank Activision and High Moon Studios for their time and the chance to see the actual game mechanics in action. Transformer War for Cybertron is due out late spring/ early summer 2010. Pre-Order a copy at your favorite game store today!

Make sure to discuss all the War For Cybertron GDC Info on the boards here: War for Cybertron GDC 10 Discussion

Original Source: TFW2005 War For Cybertron Game Play Thoughts and Interview! @ Transformers - TFW2005.com.