IGN sat down with TF2 writer Roberto Orci to try and get some scoops out of him, noth­ing major was revealed but it is good to see some of the rumors float­ing around being con­firmed by an offi­cial voice; Rav­age and a Pre­tender are in Revenge of the Fallen.

IGN: Last time we spoke, you revealed that Sound­wave was in the movie and hinted at the pos­si­bil­ity of Rav­age, so I’m won­der­ing if you can say any­thing more about what new char­ac­ters will be in Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Orci: So I said Rav­age… maybe?

IGN: Pretty much, yeah.
Orci: [As if giv­ing a big reveal] Ravage!

IGN: [Laughs] Damn, I should have told you that you said Rav­age for sure!
Orci: Hmm… I’ll give you an exclu­sive here. There is a Pre­tender. I’m going to get killed for say­ing that.

IGN: Sto­ry­wise, how does the sequel com­pare to the first one?
Orci: It’s an extreme [jump] from the first one. The out­ra­geous, crazy humor is more out­ra­geous, but then so is the seri­ous side of it and so is the stakes of the Trans­form­ers plot and the seri­ous­ness with which some of their mythol­ogy is treated. So it kind of swings wildly between those two extremes, and that I think was one of the suc­cess­ful parts of the first movie. Again, some of the die hard fans will be equally annoyed at some of the things they see, but I can also say they will be more grat­i­fied than they were for the first one, to see how some of the Trans­form­ers story and how their bat­tle takes place in the sec­ond one.

IGN: There was a leaked image the other day of a Side­swipe toy. I don’t even know if Side­swipe is in the movie, since the toys some­times include extra char­ac­ters, but the look of this toy was more like the orig­i­nal Trans­form­ers than the first film. On the design side, are the Trans­form­ers look­ing the same in this one, or are there some tweaks?
Orci: Well, you know, your favorites – Opti­mus and Bum­ble­bee – look the same. Some of the new Trans­form­ers com­ing up, even the old Trans­form­ers that we had, have ben­e­fited from the fact that — I actu­ally heard this from ILM — because they had all the ren­der­ing and the stuff from the first movie, they were able to get much more spe­cific and artic­u­late with their range of motion and emo­tions in the sec­ond movie, which has a big­ger bud­get and it has all that research and devel­op­ment sunk into the orig­i­nal mod­els. So there’s going to be more artic­u­la­tion of the char­ac­ters facially, so I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing that. I have not seen how far they’ve taken it.