Balancing microtransactions
With any free-to-play title comes the sometimes thorny issue of microtransactions.
Gerhard said that Jagex drew on its Runescape experience to help manage this. “We try to modulate that very carefully to protect the integrity of the game but still offer people choice,” he said.
According to Gerhard, Transformers Universe is not a pay-to-win title. It simply offers a tradeoff between time and money.
Everything you can buy in the experience you can also earn with game time, according to Gerhard. The in-game currency is Energon, which trickles into your base. Players can also earn it through PvP games, PvE scenarios, or they can buy extra Energon directly.
Gerhard said, “If I think of my 10 year old, he has all the time in the world. He would play a lot. Through his play he would be able to earn, effectively, what I could buy. If I’m lucky, I’ll get one hour in the evening between work and everything else, and I’m very happy to kind of accelerate certain parts of my gameplay. Not buying powers — buying commodities that my son would have accumulated through play.”
Above: Transformers Universe will have a range of PvP and PvE modes.
Crossing gaming platforms
With talk of potential companion apps, I wondered whether Transformers Universe will be playable on platforms other than PC. “I think so,” said Gerhard.
Taking care not to give too much away, he expanded on this: “What I would say is, again, just like Runescape, the entire game is in the cloud. We do a lot of clever stuff to make it feel like it’s delivered locally, but absolutely everything’s being done on the server. Your laptop is just doing controller input, audio, and graphics rendering. Nothing else. Therefore, it’s actually quite lightweight, and we can take it to lots of other exciting places.”
“Right now, we look at some of the other platforms as a utility that augments the game. The next jump would be the game. Then, the delicate balancing of how to ensure that different platforms are still competitive with each other. Because we want to have one community. One global universe.”
“There’s work being done,” Gerhard added.
Above: Different Transformers will appear in different seasons of the game.
Stay tuned
The concept of television shows and seasons cropped up a lot during the preview. Mark Gerhard said that with Runescape Jagex sees itself as a broadcaster as much as a game developer: “There’s new content every week, new challenges. We do our best to continue to delight and surprise our players.”
These same ideas, which ultimately support player engagement, will apply to Transformers Universe.
“If we were making an HBO TV show, we’ve just finished the first season,” said chief creative officer Alex Horton at the start of the preview.
Gerhard also pointed out that the game would be very episodic in terms of story content, much like Breaking Bad and similar shows. He dropped some hints on what we might see in later seasons. “We want to literally put the universe in Transformers,” he told me. “We want to take this to space. We want to go back in time. There are some amazing things we have planned. We’re going to start flying. We’re going to do some very cool things.”
He’s hoping that plenty of gamers, across a broad spectrum, are coming along for the ride. “There’s a certain psychographic that just says it’s cool,” he said. “And we are that psychographic. We like kick-ass robots who transform and blow stuff up.”
This is part one of our Transformers Universe preview. To read about balancing the game, creating new Transformers, toy lines, and legendary Transformers, go here.