Last week I sat down Jim Vessella, one of the producers at EA LA working on next year’s Command & Conquer 4. In between having our ears blasted by someone testing the building’s fire alarm, which did admittedly add an appropriate sense of apocalypse to proceedings, we chatted about how and why the RTS genre has changed, the split between single and multiplayer strategy, and how seriously we’re really supposed to take C&C’s campy cutscenes. A couple of key facts to know if you’ve not caught any preview details on C&C4 – the traditional base-building is replaced by a mobile MCV that spits out units and turrets, depending on which of three player classes you choose. No harvesting, no building upgrades – just straight-up war, akin to Dawn of War II and/or World in Conflict. Oh, and you’ll gain persistent experience points as you play, which unlocks new units and abilities.
Has RTS failed – is it essential that there is a major change after years of this Dune 2-derived thing?
I don’t think that it’s failed. I think that it’s become a little limiting in terms of what players can come into the genre. I think in terms of serving the hardcore market, that we usually call the classic base-on-base RTS gameplay, we’ve served them pretty well. I think Red Alert 3 was a great game for that type of audience, Starcraft 2 is going to a great example of a game for that type of audience.
But what we found was that it’s really tough for new players to come in and play a game like RA3, especially those who didn’t grow up in the generation of that style, who didn’t go through the days of C&C, Starcraft and Warcraft II. So what you’ve seen is that the market’s just shrunk a little bit and shrunk a little bit and shrunk a little bit…
So what we want to do is try and open it up to a new gerantion of gamers who want to try strategy but are too intimiated to go and play online in a Starcraft II match, cos they’re gonna get Zerged rushed. So I wouldn’t say that the genre’s failed – I’d say that it needs a bit of a kickstart to bring in new players. It just needs to evolve a little bit. I think we’ve seen that happen in other genres as well, over the years.
Is that about today’s gamers wanting things to be easier and more accessible, or is about the genre stagnating?
Personally, I love it when games introduce me to the aspects and mechanics a bit more easily. Sure I love a great war sim that just throws you in there and it’s got all these layers of depth and tactical fidelity and stuff, but I also just love a game that handholds you through the whole experience. When it’s really just about having fun and you get to experience a great story and a great universe, and that’s awesome too.
If you look at the numbers, a lot of people feel that way. They just want an experience where they can get the game and have a great time over a 10 to 12 hour period – and sometimes it’s hard to do that in an RTS. So what we’re trying to do is take some lessons from some of the other genres out there, and hopefully it works out.
Is introducing the new elements, like the roleplaying system that’s similar to that in Dawn of War II or the class system that’s a bit like World in Conflict, something that’s happening as a general, unconscious trend, or are RTS developers actively inspired by each other?
Obviously there’s a lot of “you learn from this game, you borrow from this game” – whatever you want to call it – and you put that in yours. I think that’s great. As a gamer, I want to get a game and I want to have fun with that. If that means that 30% of your gameplay came from this other 90%-rated game, that’s fine. As long as you did something that also added to the value of that experience – you added something new here yourself.
In terms of the progression mechanic, what I’ve always thought is when I get a new RTS game and I try out multiplayer for the first time, all of sudden I’ve got 50 units, 20 upgrades and 30 structures just dropped on top of me. I’ve no idea what anything does, what counters what, what weaposn this is good against. I’m just so intimidated, and I get rushed, and then I die.
So what we’re trying to do is introduce you to things a little bit slower, so that you can learn what everything does, and by the time you’ve put those hours into it you have this big inventory of stuff, and you’re like “oh, I know what all this stuff does, I know exactly where it fits, and now I can start really thinking about the strategy of I can combine this with this and that’s going to great in that suituation…”
Are you confident that the singleplayer is going to representative of the online experience too? You’ve reference Dawn of War II as doing some similar things, but one of the places that did fall down is there was such a hard-shift between singleplayer and multiplayer…
Yeah, the first time you go online [in Dawn of War II], you just get [smacks table and makes squelchy raspberry noise]. It’s a totally different experience. So I don’t think that our transition from singleplayer to online is going to be as drastic as Dawn of War II. Your objectives are going to be very similar in terms of capturing some of these nodes, using your Crawler, building out units, switching between different classes…
A lot of that game mechanic is going to be very similar, from singleplayer to online. Another cool thing is in skirmish, even, you can do a comp-stomp and then that’s going to be very similar to the online experience. I think if you train up in campaign and skirmish then you’re going to fit right into online. And again, with online being such a social experience of 5-on-5 gameplay, you can kinda learn from observing the other nine players on the map, and you can lean on them in the first few sessions. It’s not just you alone in a one on one map, getting rushed.
Are there going to be options for guys who do want the pure, classic, hardcore play?
We are investigating options. We’re not saying it has to be a 5-on-5 match. We’re looking at ways so that players can have 1 on 1 or 2v2; what we might do there is fiddle with how many units you can control, how big the maps are and things like that. We’re going to have levers in there, we hope, for how players can experience that. But the game modes will probably stay the same, so we’re not going to have that classic experience of you each start at a starting point, you build up a base, and then you just attack each other. We’re not focusing on that this time around.
Are you expecting outcry from fans when you say “there won’t be that, the cutscenes are going to be less humorous”?
The Tiberium universe has always tried to be a bit more serious…
Really?
Yeah. We tried. It did end up being campy most of the time…. I mean, Red Alert 3 is blatant “we’re trying to be comedic”. So I think people are going to enjoy the grittier tone of the cinematics. I think it’s kind of a cool contrast to what we just did with Red Alert 3. In terms of the gameplay, since we announced a few weeks ago, we’ve heard the feedback. Some people are really excited about the changes, and some of the more veteran players, the hardcore guys, are a little more wary about what it all means.
What I do want to remind fans is just because we’re changing the formula a little bit and taking out the classic base-building, it doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily removing strategic depth. There’s still lots of options in there in terms of moving around the battlefield, where you build your firebases, how you combine your units and how you combine with other players to push direction. So there is still a lot of strategic depth there, and that’s what we want fans to remember.
At the same time you’ve got to be able to drown out some of the shouting voices on the internet, right?
Oh yeah, it’s great – those are the guys that are really passionate about the franchise, and we feed off that energy as well, even if it is a little, ah, critical at times. So I do encourage them to keep speaking up.
Going back – you generally reckon that C&C 3 and Kane’s Wrath, cutscene-wise, was a pretty serious game? That fascinates me, to the point that I wonder if it’s just my British sense of humour / inability to take anything seriously, misreading it.
We wanted it to be serious, but it just comes off as campy. I think if you look at our announcement trailer for C&C4, I think we get away with being fairly serious – not too much to laugh at in there, unless you laugh at Joe Kucan’s quirky smile or something.
I’m thinking more stuff like that ridiculous cyber-hat he wears in Kane’s Wrath…
Yeah [laughs]. It’s sci-fi, y’know. There’s a very easy line to cross when in you’re in scifi, going from campy to being like Battlestar serious. We’re trying. We do really want to tell a great scifi story, one that has a bit of emotional depth in there, and a good story arc and character arcs. But, y’know. It comes off as campy sometimes – we’re not perfect. In C&C3 it was a little deliberate in a way, we wanted to harken back to what they did in 1995. We were trying to make it a bit more serious, trying to improve, but it made us come off as campy again. As long as people enjoy it, then that’s fine with us.
Have you been able to experiment at all with other forms of storytelling, seeing as you’re pushing against the series’ traditions anyway? Given how much you’re evolving the game in other ways, it seems almost anachronistic to have the hard-stop now-here’s-a-cutscene-and-then-a-mission structure again.
With this one we’re not trying too much different, apart from shooting the cinematics in a different way – in terms of not being those monologues to camera. Y’know, “this is the situation, commander” [wobbles head like a Thunderbird puppet]. We’re trying to get it a bit more like it’s in a film, the scene is evolving and you’re a fly on the wall watching that scene. We get to try something new every time, and that’s what we’re going for this time. We’ll see how people react to it. If people love it, then we might continue that type of storytelling. If people still feel it’s a little too 1990s, then yeah, we’ll try something different next time. I think it’s pretty cool what we’re doing this time though, and it’s going to turn out well.
What are the major lessons learned from C&C3 and RA3?
The main thing from RA3 was that the game was very lethal. You’d come in and you’d have your tanks, you’d come into a battle, and within a few seconds that battle would be over. So with C&C4, we’re trying to pull the lethality back, have battles take a little longer, so players can have time to learn how everything works. We’re putting a lot more visual cues into there in terms of what counters what, by changing effects colours, and trying to get a really solid counter system between weapon and armour types, learning some of the things that games like Warcraft have done. We felt that the affordance, what we call teaching the player visually what’s going on, was as strong in C&C3 and RA3 as we wanted it to be. So we’re trying to double down on that a bit and really make it more understandable for players this time around.
C&C4 arrives at some point next year, and I’m planning to tap out a preview based on the code I saw last week very soon.
Oh, and here’s a bonus retrospective video, via German mag, GameStar:
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@Shalrath
Yup. I wish this new wave of “tactical” RTS games would take a few lessons from games like Close Combat and Combat Mission.
@jambe
no i disagree, im multi-player it boils down to who has the hardest and fastest Strategy, tactics are rarley involved
I wonder, why didnt they make the tactics side of the game more indepth instead of removing the base? Better defences where rushes dont work, but creating a diversion on its north side and then flanking it does work with limited casualties.
That kind of stuff, why didnt they do that?
Reading the IGN Preview it looks like Base Building isn’t totally gone as everyone fears, its just that you can get away with not building a base. Apparently if you pick the defender class you can build up a base.
Have a look it was definitely interesting there ideas…it looks like it could be fun actually.
http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/101/1012768p1.html
Jalf said: “So who cares if they remove base building? Honestly, we need a bit of experimentation in the genre.”
Which would be a fair point if it was said a few years ago. Every new RTS game is baseless. They would have been doing something different from the pack if they had of included bases!
Besides the C&C series, I can’t think of a single base-building RTS that has been released as of late. Age of Empires 3 was probably the last one of any note.
@Vandelay
Supreme Commander was initially about base building, although quite freeform.
This looks interesting, I’ll see how it pans out.
Base building has now become almost a seperate mini-genre (tower defence games).
There has been a general lack of decent base-building RTS games lately. The Dune series were fantastic, and the original Command And Conquers are still the only games I ever actually went to a LAN party for. They were brilliant. Age of [Random Noun] games were alright, but never had the polish and methodical base-building options of the old C&C and Dune games.
After spending far, far too much time in the MMO world recently I decided to go a little nuts on Steam for a few games. As much as it is critically panned, I personally love Warhammer 40k DoW 2. I do wish it had base-building in it on some level other than find power spike/buy power generators, but I find the squad-based tactics sufficiently entertaining. I am probably very biased by the fact that it is Warhammer, and anything Warhammer is by definition a holy thing that emits radiant light, bathing those around it in its nurturing glow.
I was actually excited by the idea of Starcraft 2 just because it is a throwback to the base building days, but the delayed beta and release have shifted that into some nebulous future where events are impossible to divine.
This interview is a disappointment though. Command and Conquer 3 was barely tolerable, and it seems the elements that made it so are what they built the new version around. What a travesty.
The days of building double-walled enclosures and funneled gauntlets of brilliantly shining and chained Tesla Coils seem to be fading into an ephemeral past.
So, any recommendations for truly amazing single player vs CPU base-building RTS? Something I can acquire off Steam would be fantastic.
“So what we want to do is try and open it up to a new gerantion of gamers who want to try strategy but are too intimiated…”
AWOOGA! AWOOGA! Dumbing-down detected! AWOOGA!
@MeanCoffeeBean: Supreme Commander, or predecessor Total Annihilation if you skipped over that? Increasingly rare example of an RTS that still has both base and units, rather than this aformentioned tower-defence/whatever-you-call-World-in-Conflict-ites divide.
I hate to be one of the angry internet men but suffice to say if RA3 was a ‘great’ RTS in the traditional and ‘hard core’ sense then I apparently have never played an RTS. I bought that abomination recently in hopes it was better then the beta had indicated and played for 3 hours tops and haven’t touched it since (2-3 weeks later). Of the dozens of games that I have collected in almost 15+ years as a PC gamer, I have almost 0 that were not finished 100%. I have been a fan of RTS since I first played the original C&C and have until RA3 owned every C&C game and addon, etc (I even quite enjoyed the FPS).
And while I quite enjoyed Dawn of War II (at least while I played it, I don’t see much/any re-playability from it and I feel the multiplayer is atrocious) it was not in any sense what I’d consider an RTS. It was an RPG. I may as well have been playing Neverwinter Nights 2. But with Space Marines instead of paladins, rogues, and wizards.
RA3’s expansion is the first C&C product I do not own (and will not buy) and C&C4 will be the first C&C game itself I will not own. The series was originally intended to be a trilogy and I will let it die as such.
EA needs to fix their DRM policies and stop putting out shit dumbed down games before they’re getting another cent from me. And no, I will not be pirating any of their games, I do not want to play any of them. And I will not sign up for EA’s version of Games for Windows Live. And Microsoft can be directed to the same note. Both companies have failed me as game makers/producers for too long. I don’t know how many years it has been since I purchased/played a new microsoft title and EA has now joined my list. Not that they care but its a damned shame that they both keep buying up perfectly good companies and turning them into this level of crap.
So it’s a mobile Mobile Construction Vehicle.
Reaper24:
It might put the focus on battle, but here’s the thing: Maybe I don’t want the focus to be on battle that much in a C&C game. Maybe I’m not looking for a dynamic, hyper-balanced multiplayer experience. Maybe, I’d rather lay out a base, manage resources and build half a dozen tank factories for a final, devastating blow. Strike the maybe, that’s exactly how I feel. And I’m not alone. :(
OMGYES. I do this all the time in campaigns. In C&C3 i spammed mammoth tanks and attacked the enemy base with about 30 of them. I loved the part where you set up your refineries, expand your base and wait while you harvest the resources, while defending from small enemy attacks. This part will be completely gone if basebuilding and harvesting are removed.
DOW2 campaign was fun because i enjoyed getting new gear and upgrading my heroes, while giving hand-me-downs to other units while some got better gear. At the end of the campaign it was pure carnage because my heroes were massively overpowered. I would like C&C4 to incorporate this, maybe with better weapons and tiberium-resistant armor.
C&C 3 attempted a mode with a Total War style world map, it seems EA are just experimenting about where to take the future of C&C games. I really wish they wouldn’t do it with my favourite RTS franchise of all time though, C&C 3 and 4 should just be C&C: Sub title.
Work on C&C 3 and 4 when you figure what the hell you want to do.
I’m a PC gamer and likely as guilty of this at various points as much as anyone else, but it does seem like PC gamers more than most have a sense of entitlement that ends up being used as a futile bulwark against the realities of the current market. Changes like this to long-running series are not the cause of a the shrinking market, they are an attempt to adapt to it or potentially reverse it.
I don’t for a second claim the PC market is dead (it’s where I do most of my gaming, after all), but even taking into account digital distribution, actual sales of full-scale, non-MMO PC games are clearly dropping. I think it’s great that developers of ongoing series like Command & Conquer are willing to take new design approaches to their games to try and hit on something different that might draw new players in. It’s better than simply catering to the same shrinking crowd of grumbly internet people.
Not that I don’t have a strong propensity towards internet grumbliness. But the thing is, next year we’ll have both StarCraft II and Command & Conquer IV, not to mention in all likelihood more Dawn of War II content or an expansion. Blizzard’s covering the modernized take on decade-old mechanics in a classic franchise, the EALA guys are trying a different direction in a classic franchise, and the Relic guys are trying to push boundaries in a relatively recent franchise.
That sounds like a great spread to me. I’ve greatly enjoyed DOW2, I can’t wait for StarCraft II, and I’m curious about Command & Conquer 4–which might miss the mark, but it’s far, far too early to be passing judgments on it as far as I’m concerned.
People complain about game franchises not evolving enough, but sometimes the remedy to that is that it doesn’t evolve in the way you’d personally have chosen. C’est la vie. Let’s wait and see how it turns out before writing it off.
learning some of the things that games like Warcraft have done
it’s about time!
Let’s wait and see how it turns out before writing it off.
But then what would we use the interwebs for?
This is why the C&C RTS series currently are failing hard;
-no base building in the upcoming C&C4 (WHAT?! WHY? That’s crazy. )
-no additional / new units (read: more kinds of units) , except for the basic ones in the last 4 games ( come on, get creative, add new stuff already!!! C&C Generals was popular because of the different stuff)
-no usage of 3D, even though there’s plenty of stuff the oldest games did in 2D that would be awesome, like underground units and such.
-speaking of base building, what’s up with buildings that snap into their place? that’s nuts and stupid.
-also … we all want to build cheap walls around bases
-combine units into new units
-get more creative, stop reinventing the wheel over and over
-stop the whole casualization thing that’s going on in every freaking genre. RTS games aren’t for everyone and shouldn’t be, this has nothing to do with simulations, as even the C&C games have never been very complex to get into!!!!
When i read; ‘Mobile base, no base building.’
I felt my anticipation to this sequel drop from 100 to 0.1 – 0.05 (approx ;) )
When i read; ‘If you look at the numbers, a lot of people feel that way.’
I knew its just to get the masses back. ( $ )
Played three games of DoW II, i missed base building in each of those three games, i dont see what the fun is in that its a big part of the classic RTS. It’s not strange that Warhammer used this gameplay, base building is not in their nature but i was just expecting something MORE then DoW had.
But im not going to be a grumpy interwebs people, instead ill just keep playing C&C:KW and other potentially great games where i can build my base, and let the ‘numbers’ play this new game.
But offcource it’s not yet released, i will give it a try if there’s a demo.