Command & Conquer 4 Interview

We'd seen Command & Conquer 4, but we needed more information; we needed to know what was really going on. Our elite IncGamers commando was tasked with getting us a chance to interrogate EA producer Jim Vessella, and – naturally – he succeeded. With Vessella in the IncGamers cells, Tim McDonald turned on the tape recorder and began the questions.

So first things first, what's new? What're the really big new things about Command & Conquer 4?

C&C 4's top cool feature is the player progression. Player progression is the idea that, no matter what mode you play, be it campaign or skirmish or multiplayer, you're going to gain experience towards this overarching progression tree. As you gain experience you'll unlock new toys, meaning new units, powers and upgrades, and you'll be able to do that for many hours as you go through the game, unlocking these units and our different classes.

We have three classes in the game for each one one of our factions – Offence, Defence and Support – and each one of those classes plays in its own very unique way. Defence will be building up bases, firebases and turrets; Offence will be very brute, building up tanks and rushing your enemies like you'd normally do in an RTS game; and Support will be more healing, casting player powers – kind of a behind-the-lines kind of player who likes to support their allies.

Also on the story side we're trying to conclude the Tiberium saga. These 15 years that C&C has been around have been building up to this climax. Kane has had this agenda the whole time with the Brotherhood of Nod and that's finally going to come to a close. We're going to answer all those questions, reveal what Kane's been up to, and finalise the C&C saga.

We're also trying to make C&C 4 a bit more of a social experience. What that means is that for online play we're focusing on 5 on 5 gameplay. It's going to allow the game to be a bit more accessible, so that you're not just going to get rushed in the first five minutes and kicked out of the game. We've got respawning mechanics, so that when you lose your Crawler - which is our front-line builder unit - you can just respawn that Crawler if it happens to get destroyed, and when you respawn you can also spawn as any of those classes so it plays in there in terms of evolving on the battlefield. We're also going to have a cool party system where you can join up with a group of friends and play multiple games in succession with the same group.

We're doing a lot of things with C&C4, and we hope that the fans respond well to it.

So why have you decided to do these massive changes? There have been a lot of games that changed the way people look at RTS. Looking at Dawn of War 2, for instance – have these games influenced you much?

They have. We've been doing the classic RTS formula for the past seven or eight years, and it's really worked to cater to our more hardcore, classic audience that like that kind of base-on-base gameplay. We've really hit that home, and I think Red Alert 3 is a great example of achieving that type of gameplay. But there've been some other great players in the RTS genre, like Relic with Dawn of War 2 and Company of Heroes, and then there have been games like World in Conflict where they've tried a different approach to RTS. Those have been really cool too, so we've tried to take the best of both worlds that we've seen from our classic C&C experience, and also some of the cool things that those other companies are doing with their games, and trying to merge those together.

The reason for that is that we've seen that with that classic RTS formula, the audience has kinda stagnated. We felt like we were only catering to that audience and it wasn't bringing in a lot of new players. We think that with this formula we're going a bit more casual, a bit more accessible, a bit more social, we can bring in some new players to the strategy genre and allow a new generation to experience these games as well.