Legacy Wildrider and Blitzwing

[KELPIE]

Thumbs up that post.

[Tha_Phantom]

Thank God. I display my robots facing backwards, so I'm glad the back pack can fold up.

You might be missing some context. So first off...

Oh dear, that's disappointingly back-packy. And the other two are likely to look like that as well.

I am hoping that it's a mistransformation.

That alt mode looks absolutely sweet. The lazy backpack being the tradeoff for it.

Nice car mode, the roof mounted guns are cool, but ooof...that backpack. I hope the rest of the carbots have cleaner robot modes.

I didn't really care about the backpack to begin with, but there were a number of comments about it earlier on in this same thread (as well as pretty much everywhere else on the internet), so I posted that update for the benefit of those concerned about it.
That said, I do think it looks better folded up and since the option is there may as well use it - or you can leave it as is if you prefer that.

[griffin]

Toys are primarily designed for playing not displaying... so the smaller you can make the kibble, the better its play-value.
And even for posing and displaying, the bigger the kibble, the worse it looks on display (hello, Kingdom Arcee!).

[Seraphim Prime]

I think it was a case of the designers trying to make the car bonnet less intrusive in robot mode by reducing the single mass - but by separating the pieces out and flattening them it actually made it stick out more.

The angle of the photo probably doesn't help either, so this might just be more of a in hand choice.

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

I think it was a case of the designers trying to make the car bonnet less intrusive in robot mode by reducing the single mass - but by separating the pieces out and flattening them it actually made it stick out more.

The angle of the photo probably doesn't help either, so this might just be more of a in hand choice.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was an attempt to make the individual limb-bots look a bit more distinctive from each other, as well as give a bit more bang for the buck in terms of transformation. Drag Strip is pretty distinctive but other than him it's probably harder to sell 3 car-hood-on-back guys to parents than 3 different-looking guys, even if it's not G1 accurate and they're part of a combiner. The non-Drag Strip Stunticon limb-bot visual design was pretty lazy after all, even if the legs gave a bit of engineering variation.
Plus it'd be more interesting for the designers.

Either way, I like the cleaner look of Wildrider here better (it looks better from the front like that as well IMO), but the pictures of the Motormaster/combined form didn't really do it for me. It'll probably be a pass for me unless the finished combined form looks a lot better than it looks so far.