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Transformers Morphs into a Grown-up Shooter Title on the PS2
“The term ‘shooter’ is a little limiting for this title …”
My, how times have changed!
It does not seem all that long ago that the Transformers were a children’s cartoon series, content on have a group of robots that changed from robot form into a vehicle, then later into mechanical animals, and then back to vehicles. They battle an enemy that would not go away, but rather tried to elude them across many different but similar worlds, ever intent on world conquest.
But now, rather than just entertaining on television, the Transformers are set to conquer on the PlayStation2 platform in a third-person shooter title that brings the wealth of the series to the consoles in a richly textured and challenging adventure.
Transformers, from Hasbro and Atari, pits three Transformers against Megatron and the Decepticons in a variety of Earth-like settings. The game sports a maze-like atmosphere of landscape features, a host of enemies, and will challenge the player to use sniper abilities, terrain elements and some tactics to work through the levels and enemies.
But unlike the children’s series, this game has a little more adult approach. It is fast-paced and challenging, and geared for the shooter fan of any age level.
Mark Coombes of the Melbourne development house stopped morphing into a Lamborghini long enough to talk about this title with GameZone.
Question: This game does a terrific job of taking the children's cartoon series and updating with the more adult, or grown-up shooter perspective. Was this something that took a concerted effort to achieve, or do you feel that those elements were always part of the Transformers series and thus were easy to incorporate into the game?
Mark: It was most definitely a conscious and concerted effort to give the Transformers a more adult treatment for this game. It was no easy task either, we had to move away from the existing versions of the characters but also keep them recognizable to do justice to the license, and all the time keeping Hasbro on board with what we were doing. We found that the transformers are portrayed very differently in their various media, the toys, the cartoon and the comics. The comics were actually closest to where we wanted our characters to be but we found we used all the reference when creating them. I think we have now created our own style of these characters that stands apart from the other three incarnations.
Q: The graphics on this game are sterling. What engine did you use to achieve this?
Mark: We have our own graphics engine and sound engine as well as our own animation, and physics system. These have been developed over previous titles for the PS2 and are now very refined and efficient systems. We also developed new technology, which enabled us to render copious amounts of foliage in the expansive worlds. Check out the Amazon level to see what I mean.
Q: What elements do you consider essential to a quality shooter title, and how does this title achieve that?
Mark: The term ‘shooter’ is a little limiting for this title as a great deal of the gameplay comes from exploration and collecting. However to answer your question I think good controls are essential to this kind of game, good and varied pacing of action, intelligent and numerous enemies, and plenty of player actions and weapons, above all it cannot fall into the trap of being repetitive. Several elements in the game were specifically designed to make what the player does and what he encounters interesting. The minicons, which are a major feature of the license, we found were a very good gameplay mechanic. They act as pickups that give the character new abilities and better weapons. This made sure there was a constant supply of new things to do as the player progressed through the game.
Q: How many missions will there be and how do they link together for an overall story?
Mark: There are eight worlds as we call them. They can’t really be desribed as missions as they are really a playing field that the player can visit on many occasions and complete multiple goals. They are linked together with a story of rescuing the stranded minicons on Earth before the evil decepticons can capture them; the journey takes you all over Earth in exciting and remote locations until the story concludes on Cybertron. We wanted to make the play area as expansive as we could. Because the character can transform into a vehicle at anytime they would be able to traverse a normal sized level in no time.
As the player explores the worlds they get instructions from their HQ telling them what there next objective is; however the game is presented so that the player can decide to go and complete that objective now, or go and try exploring another part of the world or even warp out and go somewhere completely different. As I mentioned before a big part of this game is about exploring and finding those minicons, you never know when you are going to need a bigger gun.
Q: What made you go with only three autobots and how did you arrive at the three chosen? Why did you choose only Transformers that will become land vehicles and not aerial vehicles? How will the land vehicles be used and will transforming become key to success in some missions?
Mark: Three seemed to be the right number, all good things come in threes. With three characters we were able to make them significantly diverse so that choosing one character over another actually has some bearing on the game. If you add more the distinction becomes less and less, and to be perfectly honest development time is a big factor here too. These are very complex models which we took a great deal of time to perfect if we tried to do more then the quality of the finished product would ultimately suffer and we didn’t want to do that. We chose the three main characters of the license Optimus Prime, Hotshot and Red Alert, they worked together very well, visually and gameplay wise.
We were happy with the design of the game using the three main characters with them all being land-based vehicles. There is a lot of design and system work that goes into creating a flying character, having Jetfire as a playable character for instance would have a huge impact on the design of the game and the construction of the worlds.
The transforming is my favorite thing in the whole game. We designed into the worlds areas where you would have to use the vehicle mode to progress, jumps over ravines for instance. However I have found that the more I play the game the more transforming I do in general situations. It’s a great tool for moving around the levels fast when you are hunting for minicons, its also invaluable for getting you out of a tight combat situation fast, or dodging missiles, jumping over enemies, ramming enemies, or just plain showing off. I don’t think you are playing the character to its full potential if you are not transforming regularly.
Q: Will gamers be able to power up each of the autobots and use them for selected mission based on their loadouts?
Mark: This is another really cool thing in the game, you can make the transformers into different specialist characters using different minicon loadouts. You'll have great fun creating your own but I have Hotshot as a ‘Covert-Op Minicon Hunter’ using the stealth device and glide wings he can slip in undetected to even the most heavily guarded minicon. Optimus is my Bruiser, he packs the biggest guns, is great at hand-to-hand and can take out just about anything Megatons army can throw at me. Lastly I have Red Alert as by Boss Basher, his extra health with some good shielding, and a minicon called Buildup gives him great staying power.
Q: How linear is the game?
Mark: We put a lot of effort into making this game as nonlinear as possible. I touched on this a little earlier in describing the design of the worlds; they are very open and expansive inviting the player to 'go there own way.' Obviously there is a story that unfolds in a linear fashion as you progress from world-to-world, but the game is not necessarily played in a linear fashion. In your first visit of a world you will most certainly not find all the minicons located there. Some are hard to find while others require you to use a specific minicon to reach it, that you may not even have yet. So very often you will find yourself going back to find that elusive minicon. You may even get to a point where you know you just need a better gun, so you decide to try and find one in an earlier location that doesn’t have so many bad guys. This exploration is fun too, and we have design the levels so that they have different enemy placements when you return to them after your initial play through. I personally think that these 'return quest' as we call them are as much a part of the game as the story driven element.
Q: What do you think will set this title apart from the other cartoon series to videogame titles?
Mark: I think the Transformers brand is much bigger than the cartoon series. I don’t see our game as the game of the cartoon at all; in fact we purposely moved away from the cartoon’s style as it is pitched at a much younger audience than the average PS2 player. This is a Transformers PS2 game and we presented it how we thought the core PS2 audience would want to see it. You could call it a ‘licensed’ game and compare it to others, and these have been a really mixed bag recently some good, some not so good, although, there is no good reason why licensed games should be separated out in this way. We approached the development of Transformers with the intention of making absolutely the best game we could, we innovated a lot of new technology for the game to realize the ambitious worlds and player characters. We wanted to be sure the game would stand up to the very best titles out there today, licensed or not.
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