Lance845 wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

Lance845 wrote:

SamusDrake wrote:
If this is a continuation of the game series then it ought to be good. Loved those games to bits.

Its not. That was Transformers Prime.

I realize that Aligned was a thing, especially with Aaron Archer's "squint test" debacle, but the creators of the HMS games explicitly stated the game was designed to be "a G1 Prequel" and only had passing ties to the other media solely through Hasbro mandate.

It's actually the opposite. HMS was all on board for the aligned continuity. It was the show runners that wanted to break from the production bible and not be beholden to it. Things in the games are not and never were a part of gen 1. Like Cybertron being sentient. The well of all sparks. Sparks at all. Sparks as a concept didn't appear until Beast Wars. Transformers as life forms didn't appear until much later. Gen 1 they really were just robots and could be dismantled and rebuilt all over the place. Omega Supreme is a great example of the aligned continuity vs the Gen 1 in that hes NOTHING like his gen 1 counterpart.

At a 2015 convention in Charlotte, Rik Alvarez claimed that the Aligned plan had been compromised from the start: while High Moon Studios were on board, the Prime creators didn't want to be tied to previous material (and have themselves said they wanted to get away from the "Binder of Revelation" and do their own thing[19] and the studio, not fully controlled by Hasbro, was unfamiliar with most of the lore); IDW Publishing couldn't shift to a mostly-Aligned schedule for logistical reasons. The original idea for the MMOG fell apart due to constant team changes; Universe made it into beta testing three years late and never got off the ground; the Universe team later declared that their game was not part of the Aligned continuity at all. He made a further claim that Prime was going overbudget and that Rescue Bots was plonked into Aligned continuity by the studio against the "Binder of Revelation".

While all elements of War for Cybertron fiction are based on the Aligned production bible, the creators of the various media products diverged from each other in many details. The events of the video games overlap with much of Exodus, and the results mesh poorly. However, Hasbro has consistently described as a single continuity not just the games and novel, but the Prime fiction as well.[4] This brings up issues such as the fact that Bumblebee and Soundwave are very Generation 1-inspired in War for Cybertron and can speak words, but they're portrayed in the Prime cartoon as quasi-mute. Cartoon Bumblebee in particular is very much like his live-action movie incarnation, speaking in electronic beeps and squawks. The aforementioned "Bumblebee at Tyger Pax" story attempts to explain this change, but the retcon occurs before the game events, so the contradiction remains.

Adding to the confusion and contradiction were statements made by High Moon Studios themselves, principally ones made to the video gaming press, where the studio went as far as describing the game as a "prequel to the original cartoon series". Rik Alvarez said in 2015 that this was, in fact, the original plan for War,[5] to be a game prequel to a cartoon that it manages to be incompatible with in almost every major way. High Moon calling it a prequel even after it was made part of Aligned was likely due to marketing: the target audience of gamers who would have little knowledge of Hasbro's official canon positions, probably not care, and would like to play a game based on that cartoon they used to watch as a kid with the cool truck guy.

When asked about the contradictions, Hasbro VP of Intellectual Property Development Aaron Archer replied, "reasons for the confusion will be revealed".[6] In at least one small case, Hasbro has taken a stab at reconciliation, declaring Optimus Prime's predecessor in the games, "Zeta Prime", and the one in the novel, "Sentinel Prime", to be the same individual, "Sentinel Zeta Prime".

War for Cybertron's sequel, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron takes some steps to better mesh with the fictional universe it belongs to. Alvarez said High Moon were up for making changes to fit with the glorious five-year Aligned plan.[7]

BrianDavion wrote:
Just watched the series it's pretty good. is it the series I'd have designed if I was tasked to write it? No, but I think what I woulda done would have been too... politcally focused and seen as kinda dull (the early days of the autobot/decepitcon movement, Megatron's slow descent into fascism etc.