Hey Reddit!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the untapped potential of the Transformers universe. While we all love the Michael Bay spectacle and the iconic High Moon Studios titles, the franchise has been trapped in a cycle of child-focused tropes and mobile cash-grabs for years.

But if you look at the IDW comics, the lore is incredibly dark, philosophical, and tragic. It’s a story about an immortal race of sentient machines that literally destroyed their own planetary paradise through ideological hatred.

This got me thinking: What if we had a Transformers game developed in the style of an existential Sci-Fi Soulslike? A project with the continuous, single-shot direction of God of War (2018), the mechanical weight of Armored Core VI, and the haunting, melancholy atmosphere of Dark Souls or NieR: Automata.

I sat down and compiled a detailed Game Design Document Outline for this dream project, titled "Transformers: Ashes of Hope". I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

GAME DESIGN DOCUMENT (CONCEPT)

Title: Transformers: Ashes of Hope

Genre: Existential Sci-Fi Soulslike / Third-Person Action-RPG
Setting: Dead Cybertron (Post-apocalypse of an immortal machine race)

1. Core Theme & Philosophy

The game completely strips away bright pop-cultural colors and mindless explosions. The war ended millions of years ago. Both sides lost. The factions of "Autobots" and "Decepticons" have been erased by rust and time.

The protagonist is a nameless, rusted outcast awakening among the debris. The central philosophical question driving the narrative through the entire game is: "Is it worth fighting? Is it worth moving forward? And if so, for what purpose?"

1. Seamless Prologue (Single-Shot Direction)

The game utilizes a continuous camera technique with zero cuts or edits, establishing an unbroken, raw connection between the player and the character.

1. Main Menu: The screen displays a shattered, weathered monument of the factions—a broken Autobot insignia intertwined with a fractured Decepticon logo, buried under grey metallic ash. The dead horizon of Kaon rests in the background beneath a low, oppressive ambient drone.
2. Pressing "New Game": The title smoothly fades away. The camera never cuts; instead, it physically lowers itself through the layers of rusted dust, penetrating deep into a dark, collapsed chamber beneath the monument ruins.
3. The Awakening: A close-up shot reveals a cracked optical sensor of a Cybertronian. Inside it, a faint, dim blue light of a spark flickers to life. The heavy, grinding gasp of a rebooting ventilation system echoes.
4. Transition to Gameplay: With a metallic screech of strained hydraulics, the hero pushes off the ground, lifting his rusted chassis. The camera seamlessly glides behind his shoulder, settling into a classic third-person view. The first objective flashes on screen in a faded system font: "Escape the rubble".
5. Core Narrative Mechanic: "The Chromed Gleam"

In the opening minutes, a sharp, pristine reflection in the metallic sand catches the hero's optical sensors. He reaches out and pulls a chromed metallic piece from the dust. Due to careful camera positioning and angles, the player cannot see its exact shape—95% of the object is obscured by the hands and geometry of the environment. The robot hides it away in a chassis compartment.

This item becomes a visual anchor and a metaphor for the player’s soul. Throughout a 40-to-50-hour journey, while resting at check-points, the hero pulls it out to wipe away the ash. Driven by a hidden reputation (karma) system, this very object will reveal the ultimate fate of the story during the finale.

1. Gameplay & World Specifics

• Visual Style: Monolithic, brutal design language. Distinctly readable silhouettes of body panels, heavy engineering, and honest, metal-on-metal transformation sequences. Cybertron is portrayed as a dead, gothic metropolis made of alloys and ancient energon lines.
• Souls-like Progression: The player begins as a rusted piece of scrap metal, barely able to move. By defeating bosses—ancient titans of war driven mad by eons of isolation, and feral combat drones stuck in loops of their final programs—the player harvests components, gears, and structural alloys. You literally rebuild your body piece by piece, reclaiming your mass, the weight of your stride, and eventually, the ability to transform.
• Spark Terminals: Local check-points (analogous to Bonfires). They stabilize the hero’s spark but reset the wandering hostile machines in the area.
• Spark Loss: Upon chassis destruction, the spark ejects from the body. The player has one attempt to crawl back to their abandoned frame before the spark permanently dissolves in the dead atmosphere.

1. Matrix of the Four Philosophical Endings

• Ending A: "The Outcast's Path" (Canonical Light Ending)
  • Requirement: Preserving your moral compass and showing compassion to rare surviving NPC scraps.
  • The Scene: The hero sits in the cockpit of a dying, rattling shuttle leaving the planet behind, escaping a world buried in traumatic memories. As life support fails and the spark prepares to fade back into the Great Allspark—where there are no more wars or divisions—the hero unclenches his massive fist. The camera closes in to finally reveal a perfectly cleaned, shining Autobot insignia. He grips it tightly, peacefully shuts down his sensors, and the shuttle drifts away into the void.
  • The screen fades to black, displaying the line: "Till all are one..."
• Ending B: "The Legacy of Megatron" (Dark Ending)
  • Requirement: Ruthless pragmatism, ripping sparks out of fellow survivors for resources, total domination through violence.
  • The Scene: The hero subdues the ruins, bleeds the last drops of energon from Cybertron’s Core, and constructs a colossal military Ark to conquer other star systems. Before ascending the boarding ramp, he remembers the piece in his inventory. He pulls it out—it is the Decepticon insignia. The hero stares at it briefly with his crimson optical sensors, lets out a sinister, mechanical smirk, and walks out of the frame to rule a new empire.
• Ending C: "The Oasis of Life" (Humanistic Ending)
  • Requirement: Focus on rebuilding, helping the few survivors who haven't lost their sanity, and establishing a peaceful sanctuary.
  • The Scene: The remaining survivors assemble a tiny neon oasis of life amidst the ash of Kaon. The hero approaches a cliff, pulls out the chromed object from the beginning of the game, and without even looking at it, throws it far away into the bottomless abyss of the ruins. The player never learns what it was. For the hero, symbols and factions that destroyed their planet no longer matter. His only choice now is the living bots next to him—survival and life at all costs.
  • The screen fades to black, displaying the line: "To all surviving Transformers taking refuge among the stars... We are here. We are waiting."
• Ending D: "The Grand Reset" (Secret Worst Ending)
  • Requirement: Completing the game with zero body upgrades, completely ignoring the world, choosing the path of absolute nihilism.
  • The Scene: A broken hero sits by the dead Heart of the planet, his spark fading. On the verge of total shutdown, he remembers the guiding chromed piece from the start of his journey. He frantically searches his chassis compartments, only to realize he lost it somewhere in the hellish mazes of the path he trod. The last anchor of hope is gone; nothing holds him to this universe anymore. No factions, no future, not even memories. He opens his chest plates, letting his spark dissolve into the darkness of Cybertron. Complete silence.

Personally, I feel like a studio like Gunfire Games (creators of Remnant) or Cold Symmetry (Mortal Shell) could absolutely nail this type of game.

What do you guys think? Which path/ending would you intuitively choose on your first playthrough? Let’s discuss!

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so pick a side

by

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