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If you could design or come up with ideas for the ultimate Transformers game what would it be? What kind of storyline would you use, what characters would you use, would it be a role play game like Marvel Ultimate Alliance, a deep story line involving Generation one characters. How would you create it?

Either an RTS, or an Ultimate-Alliance game.

As i spend a lot of time using MAME and am still a massive fan of Old Skool SFII style 1on1 beat-em-ups I want the game I mentioned in this thread
http://tfarchive.com/community/showthre ... adid=37005

I've been thinking about this for some time. In a perfect world, we'd have a third-person shooter / real time strategy / football management sim Transfomers game with a lovely character-creation system that would encourage a crapload of user-created content.

The idea is that a typical game involves the two factions facing off against each other on a fairly large map. Each faction has a base and, because this is Transformers, the base is also a Transformer. The player who controls the base plays the game like a real time strategy, dispatching Micromaster patrols, piloted drones and Mini-Cons and such to influence events on the battlefield while also managing his faction's energon budget and doing his best to keep his side fuelled up and in good repair. By keeping watch on the battlefield through spy drones and communications officers, the base player would, say, build and defend energon mining depots, dispatch retrieval squads to downed players so that they might be repaired within the base's walls or weight his energon budget so that an important but expensive player, say the Field Commander, gets repaired before the next Demolitions Team gets dispatched to back up the Western front. He can also join the fray as a standard player through a drone interface.

If the going gets too rough, the base will forego its managerial duties, transform into a titan and shoot the **** out of everything within reach, up to and including the other base. When a base transforms, it's almost always the signal for the endgame, so there's a big element of brinkmanship in there, too.

The other neat part of this imaginery game would be the highly individualistic nature of each player on the battlefield. Different armour/chassis classes and the choice of alt-mode would determine the mass, speed, fuel consumption and ordinance resistences of each character, with according strengths and weaknesses. Weapons may also be unique to each character to help out with balancing issues.

Fuel would also be a big part of gameplay, too. Each non-base player's energon budget is divided into reserves for ammo, shields / health and fuel. Without fuel, the player is immobilised and useless, without health, he will need repairs and without ammo, he won't be able to destroy very much. A player gains energon from downed foes and by being refuelled by specific characters or by the base itself. Each character would have different weights to his fuel consumption according to balance.

So, say one decides to play with Bumblebee in his VW form. Bumblebee is incredibly fuel-efficient, hardly ever needing refuelling, but his armour is very fragile and he can't take a lot of punishment. He is, however, quite hard to hit, owing to his size and his special ability to dodge in vehicle mode, even though his acceleration and top speed in car mode is very average. He doesn't bring much firepower along with him, but say he has a precision weapon with a good range on it that can allow him to target weak spots on heavily-armoured characters. As a scout, he'd also be able to detect invisible or cloaked enemies. You could also give him a degree of interactivity with the base by being able to dispatch hard-to-detect camera drones.
Compare that to a character like Grimlock, who would be heavily dependent on fuel support, quite slow, but able to shred enemy armour with his rocket launcher and energo sword. He'd be almost immune to most firepower in Tyrannosaur mode, he'd also move a little quicker, consume more fuel and he'd have very little range.

If there's a good character-creation system in place, the fan community could go nuts with making each and every version of Grimlock and Bumblebee, from Cybertronian modes to their TF: Animated appearances, available for download. Server-side admin options could impose limits on which universe each game would be played in, or whether multiple characters or faction mixing would be allowed.

All of which I reckon is a good way to use the franchise's strengths in service of a fun and slightly unusual type of game.