Let’s start from the ground up. How did you approach this game? Of course, this is a movie licence, but also it is the second movie in the series, and also the second game in the series (the first Transformers movie game was developed by Traveller’s Tales, the Cheshire-based studio who are known for the popular Lego game series). As soon as we started talking to Activision about it being a real possibility, we started scouring the Internet, all of the forums, hearing all the fans, and seeing what kind of game they wanted. And that’s always kind of a scary prospect, because when you’ve got something with 25 years of franchise history behind it, there’s a lot of opinions out there. But the top issues that fans were saying that they wanted addressed, or things that they’d never got to see so far in a Transformers game, were the same things that we wanted to deliver anyway. So it gave us a lot of confidence, and made us feel that we were going in the right direction. What kind of things did you focus on? We had three main pillars that we wanted to focus on, so that, whatever else we did with the game, we would address these three things. So, one was player choice. We have a game where we have a more hub-based mission system, where in between each of the 5-10 minute crescendos of action, the player comes back to the war room, where they’ll have a conversation with the other ‘bots in their faction. But, more importantly, from the war room the game branches out, so the further you get in the campaign, the more optional missions you can go off on. Also, the further you get in the campaign, the more playable characters you unlock on previous missions. So you might play three or four missions into the campaign as Iron Hide, and he was the only available character. He’s a ground character, very tank-like. And then maybe two missions later, the game will tell you that you’ve unlocked more playable characters, so you can go back and see. You can imagine that, on the Autobots side, you’ve got a character like Breakaway, who’s a flying jet sniper character, so playing the same mission that you’d previously played as Iron Hide, a ground vehicle, you can totally change the dynamics of that mission. So there’s a lot of replay value there. The third thing is multiplayer. We wanted to make sure that this would be the first time that players would be able to take their favourite characters online in intense online action. So we’ve got the biggest selection of playable Transformers ever, with some characters unique to multiplayer. It’s definitely something different. Certainly sounds interesting! OK, I’d like to broach the subject of movie licence games. Luxoflux’s last movie tie-in game, Kung Fu Panda, was well received both in terms of reviews and sales, but do you think there’s a lot of pressure on developers working on licences like this? It’s quite a liberating thing, being able to work with this franchise, where the characters are so well defined, and we can just focus on gameplay. We know it’s a double-edged sword, when you’re making these licensed games, from a hardcore gamer’s perspective, because they think that you’re just taking advantage of it. But we’re confident that we’re putting everything we can into this thing, we’re confident in our ideas, that we’re bringing something different to the market. And time will tell. Once it actually ships, then hopefully a lot of players will give it a shot, and will find out that we weren’t just effin’ around! Great stuff! Thanks for chatting with us, Joby. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: The Game is out on the 26th of June in various multiplatform iterations, with Luxoflux handling the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions.
