Command & Conquer 4 Q&A - Exclusive First Details
Get the first details on the final chapter in the Tiberium series from designer Samuel Bass.
As you may have recently read in our retrospective story, the Command & Conquer series has been around for nearly 15 years. Nearly 15 years of harvesting resources, building up bases, and churning out squadrons of tanks to crush the enemy. Nearly 15 years of live-action cinematic cutscenes with Hollywood talent hollering and yelling during mission briefings. And now, the series that began with two factions, an energy-rich crystal substance, and a commando with "a present for ya" will come to a close with Command & Conquer 4--the final chapter of the Tiberium saga. You know the saga--the war between the "good guy" Global Defense Initiative and the "bad guy" Brotherhood of Nod. Yet EA plans to have the series go out with a bang because C&C4 will offer a ton of new stuff to play with, including co-op campaigns, a new class-based game system, persistent experience points, mobile bases, and five-on-five multiplayer. Designer, storywriter, and campaign lead Samuel Bass explains these new features and confirms that the game will have no digital rights management software. He also confirms that, yes, Joe Kucan, the actor/director who plays Kane will return and that although the saga is ending...we may not have seen the last of Tiberium.
GameSpot: We're pleased to be the first to officially reveal Command & Conquer 4 to the world. Give us an overview of the game...we understand there will be many changes and new additions.
Samuel Bass: Command & Conquer 4 is pretty different from anything we've done before. While we're staying true to the core of real-time strategy play, we've also dug deep into what makes Command & Conquer the series it is and come up with a game we're really excited to finally reveal [to] the world.
The most immediately impactful piece of information is that with Command & Conquer 4, we're finally taking the story arc that began with Tiberian Dawn to its dramatic conclusion. After years of enigmatic references to "Kane's plan" and "ascension," we felt it was high time we pulled back the curtain and really explored the what, why, and how of this universe we love so much.
However, that's just the story. There's a ton more that's new to C&C4 besides--notably our class system, our RPG-like elements and persistent player profiles, our massively revised multiplayer backend, and a hundred other things worth talking about.
GS: We understand, for instance, that the game will be "class-based." Can you explain how this system will work? For instance, will there be specialized "hero" characters that you can choose to play as?
SB: We've subdivided each of our factions into three upgradable classes. Each class--outside of a few standard units, such as the engineer--consists of an entirely distinct set of units, structures, powers, and upgrades; the equivalent of a full RTS faction.
Our "offense class" is your classic RTS faction, tank-oriented and focused on frontline combat. With the "defense class," however, the emphasis is on infantry, bunkers, and turrets, which lets you build complex defensive grids and really hold down a section of the battlefield. Lastly, we come to the "support class," which is based around utilizing a selection of aircraft and custom vehicles to traverse the environment. Once engaged in combat, support players can fight directly or assist their teammates with a variety of powers and [healing abilities].
It should be noted that while each class has a specialized focus, we are designing all three to be entirely competent as a direct combatant. Whatever class you're playing--offense, defense or support--will be more than capable of taking out your enemies on the battlefield.
GS: We also understand that the game will introduce the kind of persistency that people might expect from a massively multiplayer online game--that players will gain experience from both single-player and multiplayer matches that they can carry over to a single profile. How will this system work? How will the single-player experience be balanced out against the multiplayer experience?
SB: Essentially, whenever you play Command & Conquer 4, be it in single-player, co-op, skirmish, or online, you earn experience that collects in your persistent player profile. Within the profile, you use your experience pool to level up your classes, earning new units, structures, powers, and upgrades. Since your profile is persistent across the game, you can then take your new toys and put them to use in any of our game modes.
Beyond the obvious compulsions this adds to the game, the player progression system lets us tackle one of the biggest issues we've encountered as RTS developers. To put it simply, when--as an RTS newbie--you install the game, enter your first match, and find yourself faced with 13 units, 10 structures, and an ungodly number of additional powers and upgrades.
Where do you start?
By having our players enter the game with a limited but carefully chosen selection of units, we create a much smoother learning curve, giving you time to come to grips with our core gameplay systems before we bombard you with added complexity. However, since players are guaranteed to receive a steady drip of new toys, they soon become conversant in the deeper gameplay elements and can compete at a higher level.
Of course, we also want to make sure our more hardcore players gain access to the stuff they want when they want. The better you are at the game, the more quickly you'll advance through the levels. Command & Conquer 4 has more units than any RTS we've ever developed, so we've got more than enough toys to go around.
As a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we'll be shipping without any form of DRM.
GS: We also understand that there will be several new units in the game, including a real-time strategy first. Can you explain?
SB: Every time we launch into a Command & Conquer game, we try to maintain a healthy balance between the classic units of games past and new ideas we'd like to explore. Of course, both the fiction and the RTS genre as whole continue to evolve, so with each historical unit or structure, we had to stop and ask ourselves "How would this fit into the world and game design of Command & Conquer 4?" and evolve the design appropriately. While we're still deep in the design process, we can confirm that our fans will definitely be able to get their hands on updated versions of some classic Command & Conquer units, notably the Nod Scorpion, Stealth and Flame Tanks, and the iconic GDI Mammoth.
However, the biggest surprise on the vehicular end would be what we call the Crawler, our class-specific, all-in-one mobile base that doubles as a powerful frontline combat unit. One of our goals with Command & Conquer 4 was to come up with a more flexible, streamlined approach to base building, and the Crawler was the end result of that investigation. Rather than construct a series of structures to build and modify your army--as you would have in previous C&C titles--everything you can create, be it unit, structure, power, or upgrade, comes from your Crawler.
Some [players] might understandably be concerned that we've sacrificed depth of play in favor of flexibility and ease-of-use, but nothing could be further from the truth; our internal play tests are consistently uncovering new Crawler-derived tactical approaches. This is especially true in multiclass co-op, multiplayer, and skirmish play where the class-specific attributes of each Crawler really come into their own.
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