Transformers: Fall Of Cybertron Has A Different Target Audience To Movies

We’ve all watched the trailer for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron from last year’s VGAs, right? That morbid rendition of a war on a foreign planet that is anything but forlorn.

High Moon Studios had good reason for making it that way, and apparently it’s all because of their decision to appear different from the recent film series undoubtedly aimed at teenagers with an appreciation of robots duking it out over a patch of Earthly terrain and females duking it out over a patch of… well, Shia LaBeouf.

Marketing Manager Greg Agius said that the trailer — which in my opinion seemed completely out of place with the content in the game — was inspired by the team’s hope for players to “take a fresh look” at Fall of Cybertron rather than writing it off as a simple movie spin-off.

“We needed to communicate that Fall of Cybertron is an adult oriented game that stands totally apart from anything related to the films,” he said.

“So the team set out to break every rule we could think of for a Transformers trailer: we had zero voiceover, we destroyed main characters, we made the story come to you, and we picked a song that is totally groundbreaking for this franchise.”

He concluded: “When fans started posting, ‘attention – this is how you do Transformers’ I knew we had done things right. The style and look is all very in line with what gamers are currently playing.”

I’m not so sure…

See, the whole cry your eyes out sort of trailer that shows war in a very sad way was done to death — no pun intended — with the Gears of War games. There were other titles but really we were shown gigantic robots with guns for arms, some shaped as dinosaurs which hadn’t even existed on that planet, fighting over land that had no fauna nor flora whatsoever. Please, tell me how any of this makes for a sad tone?

However, I will take nothing away from their efforts to move away from the movies. Good on them for that.

Thoughts?