TRANS

[DeepSnow]

TRANS is a game developed and published by Bulgarian company WizCom Entertainment in 2000. This is a third-person shooter/RTS hybrid built on proprietary engine "Wyvern", which is written on C programming language specifically to be used in this game. This engine wasn't used anywhere else from what I know. I looked everywhere around the internet where I could. TRANS is being compared to "MechWarrior", because of similiarities of some gameplay aspects, but this is a completely different game.

 

The game is freaking out if you try to run it on modern systems. The graphics turns out to be a "subaduwa-meee-booo-fuuuu".

But besides graphics engine wetting itself, the game runs pretty nicely and almost without bugs. It's still playable, at least on WindowsXP.

 

The only information I could find about the former developers is about their development manager Konstantin Vassilev.

Here is his profile on LinkedIn:

https://bg.linkedin.com/in/kvassilev

 

 

Speaking of the universe of this game, it is highly inspired by MATRIX concept. TRANS had a big potential in having a big and rich universe.

 

I don't remember the actual plot, but that's how I remember it:

It's the future, the world is in energetic crisis, many years after a war between two huge corporations which were fighting for remaining energy resources, we see that remaining humanity is connected to the mainframe and lives in an online combat simulation network called "TRANS". It was created to keep humans from killing each other because people always fight each other like animals bla-bla-bla... There is the only one safe place left, the city of Eladia. On the mission status screens you can read the diaries that tell you what is it like (I guess this city is almost like the one depicted in Matrix). Now here is an interesting moment. Besides living in TRANS, people can log out from it and come to the real world. Any user can log out from TRANS, but then he forgets his presence in TRANS completely, so for people in Eladia TRANS is just a dream they forget about every time they log out (the system erases their memory every time they log out). Suddenly one guy named Arthur Divine gets lucky and somehow accidently causes a critical error at one night and his TRANS account gets messed up, which allows him to remember his presence in TRANS and that hes not dreaming. He is confused, doesn't know how he got in here and gets in the action. He gets attacked by the "Valkyre" (sort of what Agents were in Matrix), but then a person named Keef saves him and vanishes Valkyre for a short amount of time and tells Arthur to follow him if he wants to get out alive. Arthur has lots of questions, but Keef doesn't have much time to explain what is happening. Later he explains what happened to Arthur and that the Valkyries are aware of Arthur causing a critical error and corrupting his TRANS account. They want to kill Arthur because he knows too much now and can be a big treat to TRANS. Now let's talk about another thing from Matrix. I'll put a quote from game here: "in 'Trans' weapons cause pain but don't kill. However, the weapon of a Valkyrie actually can. These transbots have enhanced weapon abilities and can kill you not only in Trans but also in the real world." So when you get killed by a regular user, you don't get killed in real life, but just get kicked to the real world and forget what you were doing in TRANS, as it was explained earlier.

 

I won't tell anything more about the plot since I don't want to spoil it too much, although I already did a lot. The only thing I want to mention about the storyline in this game is the cheapass ending. I guess the developers intended to make the expansion or maybe even a sequel. Who knows what this universe could've became... Also, besides the main campaign there is still a lot of interesting stuff to explore regarding the lore. For example if you will open the description of the units in "Training Deathmatch" gamemode, it will reveal some history about the universe and the events that predate the events in the campaign.

 

There is barely anything about this game on the internet. This game obviously is abandonware now, since the developer company is dead. It's very hard to find a working build on the internet nowadays.

 

WizCom Entertainment distributed a full v1.0 build of the game as a shareware, but almost all content was locked off until user bought the "Golden Key" for $14.95. I bought my copy on CD back in 2001, although the version I had bought for the actual money on CD was a shareware copy. It was a very common practice in Russia back in the day to buy the games that were supposed to be free, on a pirate CDs.

 

I recently found one copy on one russian torrent tracker and it's exact the same version as I had on my old CD, but the only difference in this version is that, it includes a crack with it, which allows you to unlock the rest of the content.

 

Also game was coming without cinematics, so you had to download them manually from the developer site.

The website is also dead now (http://www.trans-game.com) and we will never get a chance to see these cinematics as well as the new versions of the game sadly...

 

Also, worth to mention that there were actually only two versions. One was the said v1.0 build, which had all content, but there was also an unfinished Demo/Beta version with slightly different plot and lots of bugs. The only place where you still can download both versions is one russian gaming site "AG.RU". You can download both versions here.

Be careful though. I'm not sure if it's safe in there, since I haven't checked the files on that site last time I visited it.

[megabeast]

Wizcom aka Sciant, then sold to VMWare in september 2007 for about 6 000 000 usd.

One ot of the first Bulgarian hitech companies, born in Blagoevgrad city in 1996.

TRANS was the second Bulgarian game (Tzar was the first).

 

Instead of Konstantin Vasilev (KIV), these are other programmers:

Martin Gladnishki(gladeto) - lead 3d programmer. Developer of Wyvern with KIV.

Martin Krastev.

Julian Panov - Lead designer.

Miroslav Yanev - producer.

Angel Mitev - team leader.

The game budget was only 750k usd.