Forum Overview :: Transformers: War for Cybertron :: Say what you will about GTA, we can all agree it got one thing absolutely right.

[quote name="Dream Cast"]The vehicle controls! By which I mean, the actual buttons you press to control your car are the same ones you'd use in a proper driving game. Left stick to steer left and right, one button (or, in later entries, analog trigger) each for accelerate and brake. None of this press forward to go forward rubbish. If GTA III hadn't shipped with vehicle controls that were instantly understandable to anyone who's ever driven a real car, and offered just as much precision as an actual wheel and pedals, there's no way that game would've caught on like it did with the mainstream, no matter WHAT they let you do to the hookers. One thing GTA <i>didn't</i> nail out of the gate, though, was the on-foot shooting control - instead of your character's aimpoint following the camera, like in an FPS, the default behaviour had the camera circling your character disconnectedly, like in a platformer. The excellent 2005 LucasArts open-world game Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction fixed this by giving you both proper Max Payne-style TPS controls when on foot, and proper Need for Speed-style driving controls when in a vehicle. So, if I were ever doing a Transformers game (God forbid), I would definitely start by copying the basic movement controls from Mercenaries. What I would want to do to set Transformers apart, though - which to my knowledge hasn't been done before? - is try to give them a sense of momentum, both in robot and vehicle mode. I've been thinking about how specifically to do this, and I've come up with a few ideas. First, these are fighting robots that transform into cars, so it would make sense for them to try and run each over other. So let's give them some jousting/matador controls. I'll start by stealing Sonic the Hedgehog's quickstep manoeuvre, which near-instantly displaces your avatar a couple character-widths to the left or right when you press the corresponding shoulder bumper. Should probably give it a short cooldown, though, just so it's not the fastest way of getting around the map (though that could potentially be fun, too). Now, after avoiding a charge with the quickstep, you're going to want to turn around and shove something up your opponent's tailpipe, so let's make one of the face buttons perform an instant 180-degree turn. And lest you think I'm neglecting the attacker's perspective in all this, both the quickstep and 180 also work in vehicle mode. So if you're yomi enough, you can vehicle quickstep to match your opponent's robot quickstep and still plow into him. Or, if you miss and overshoot, you can press the 180 button in vehicle mode to keep him in your windscreen instead of your rearview. Now let's bring inertia, potentially the funnest property of matter, into the picture. If you press the 180 button while moving forward in vehicle mode, you should continue moving at the same speed in the same direction, friction be damned. So you can go from doing 100 km/h to doing 100 km/h backwards, as long as you release the accelerator first - pressing the accelerator after the 180 button should have you skid backwards into a stop, then launch forwards in your new facing. Meanwhile, pressing the 180 button while running forward in robot mode could cause you to skid backwards to a stop, like an ice skater or cartoon ninja. I think it might be fun if ramming another Transformer laterally using the quickstep knocked them out of vehicle mode and back into robot mode, sending them sprawling forward. They could recover by pressing either the transformation button (preserving momentum) or the 180 button (scrubbing it) before they hit the ground. Of course, none of these abilities are worth anything if the environments aren't built to accommodate them. Racetrack-style level design in a conventional FPS is when you make a long path that loops around and connects back to itself, with the various rooms to explore branching off it. They used it a lot in System Shock 2, and even more in BioShock. What would a racetrack-style level look like if it were fucking huge, and the path around it was a multilane highway? That's really the kind of space you'd need for proper vehicle duels. I think the original Twisted Metal had stages sort of like that, though I might be misremembering. Some of the levels games managed to pull off back in the '90s were so mindblowingly big and weird and full of flat 2D trees, they almost seem like dreams in retrospect. I think this post is going to seem the same way tomorrow morning.[/quote]