>>8472914they said when earthrise rolled out that the story was about GETTING to earth, not being on earth.
So my guess is, they'll be travelling towards earth, stopping at various planets, meeting quintessons and all that jazz, then finally reach earth, take new alt modes (bumblebee and wheeljack were already using earthrise models, soundwave and megatron are retools of the existing one) and then Scorponok attacks, following them from Nebulos. They try to space bridge him out, shenanigans ensue, and Optimus ends up back in time.
Then Kingdom will be Optimus getting chased down by the future decepticons, being helped by animals that turn out to be transformers, and then the rest of the autobots come in to rescue him.
Probably pretty restrained, model wise.
Also it's not like they pull a Transformers Cybertron. They do some actual modelling on their own, and deformations (mouth animation, all of Arcee)
I mean, Siege only had a fraction of the characters from the toyline. No battlemasters or micromasters at all, only one weaponizer model, no Springer or apeface, etc.
I wouldn't expect a lot of characters, probably just the core ones, Primal and Cheetor (who will likely stay in robot mode almost the entire time) Blackarachnia and BW Megatron (who will likely have some animal scenes) and of course the fossilizers won't really need deformations at all.
