In other news, however, Gerhard has an intriguing point about their collaboration with Hasbro. Read on below!
Jagex has created all the original Transformers featured in the game — such as Duststorm, Firebreaker, and Showdown — from scratch, working closely with brand owner Hasbro.
“The IP [intellectual property] has been going for the last 30 years,” said art director Gerard Miley, pointing out that Jagex was free to draw on the entire range of Transformer generations for inspiration. “Universe is a key word,” he added, while also noting the key influence of the Transformers Prime animated television series. “The DNA of Prime is in our game,” he said.
Hasbro has no Transformers manual to use when creating a new bot, “so it’s really just studying the visual language of it,” said Miley. “Using clever shapes and a little bit of trickery to get the transformations working.”
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Working so closely with Hasbro has yielded some great cross-promotion opportunities for Transformers Universe.
“It’s been a tremendous relationship,” said Gerhard. “They’ve been really blown away by how we’ve paid homage to the brand.”
With that in mind, Gerhard told me that Hasbro “has taken a number of bots we’ve created and turned them into a toy line.”
The toys won’t interact with the game, as we’ve seen with titles like Skylanders and Disney Infinity, but their presence on toy store shelves will be a great boost to the Transformers Universe brand as well as vindicating the quality of Jagex’s original Transformer designs.
While Hasbro itself is “superkeen” to promote the game on this toy line, Gerhard is wary that most of the people who buy the toys are quite young. He wants the game itself to be well received within the industry and with older gamers before leveraging the “extra footfall” that the toy line would create. “I think it’s a fantastic enhancer,” he said.
While this is the first official confirmation we have about a Universe game-based toyline, it does not come as that much of a surprise - after all, we've already seen some odd bolts cropping up in the Transformers: Prime (RID) line. Remember them?
As other members of staff have also pointed out, the game has been in development limbo for ages, and we've heard and seen from one of its concept artists previously too, with clear Prime-esque concept designs too. You can read the whole interview here - and make sure to leave your thoughts in the Energon Pub!