Vessella On C&C 4 Page 2

12 Aug 2009 at 18:01:16 by Tim McDonald

Are you worried about what the old players are going to think of it?

Ever since we've announced the game a few weeks ago we certainly got feedback from our veteran players! Some people are really excited about the changes, others are definitely wary about what it means for C&C. We're certainly listening to that feedback and we're trying to see where we can find the right balance between trying something a bit new but also keeping that kind of flavour of classic C&C.

What I want to encourage is that just because we're changing up the formula a bit, it doesn't mean that we're removing strategic depth. We've just taking it in a different area. What used to be finding the perfect build order and then executing that at the fastest APM possible, we're transitioning into “Okay, you've got this big toy chest of stuff.” Customise what you want to have, and then how you're going to react to that on the battlefield and how you're going to incorporate that with the team-based atmosphere.

And at the end of the day, there may be some people who are a bit turned off by the changes that we're doing. We encourage people to try it and give it a shot, because it's really fun, but we also hope that it's going to allow us to bring in a lot of new audiences into C&C, and so it's evolving with the times.

Speaking of the balance between old and new, are you going to have a co-op campaign, like in Red Alert 3?

You will be able to play the campaign via co-op. We're not going to have the co-op AI feature that we had in Red Alert 3, so if you want to play the game solo, you're playing the campaign solo like you would most RTS games. If you want to bring in another player, you can go ahead and do that, and then there'll be two of you playing through the campaign.

So will the campaign automatically balance for the second player?

We're still working on how the difficulty will work when you bring in extra players – whether we just increase the difficulty of the opponents versus changing the amount of respawns you have with the Crawler... I think there's a few different levers we can pull in terms of adjusting the difficulty when we do the co-op but we certainly want to make sure it's balanced for both experiences.

Speaking of the Crawlers, then, just how different are they? You've got three - Offence, Defence, and Support - but do they share units, for instance?

Nope. There's only one shared unit between all classes, and that's the engineer. All of the other units for each class are unique, and play into the gameplay of that class. The Crawlers themselves all have similarities in that they can all build the units, they all have a repair radius right now although that might change – but most importantly they all have unique upgrades.

Every Crawler has a different weapon set, which is also based on your faction, so all six Crawlers (if you add them all up) have a different weapon set and they all have unique upgrades as well, so when you get to Tier 2 and Tier 3 which unlocks the different levels of units you can field, there are also additional upgrades you can purchase for your Crawler. One might give you stealth on Nod, whereas one might give you extra armour and speed on GDI. Lots of different things that we're playing with in terms of making those Crawlers asymmetric.

Is the Defence Crawler the only one that's actually going to be able to construct any buildings like turrets and so on, or are there some for the others as well?

No, Defence is the one class that can build turrets. There are a few support powers for the Support class that can spawn a defensive structure in a certain area, and the other thing we've done with those is have them tie into the Defence class as well. If you use that power near a Defence player, they'll act in synergy. There are a few ways to get structures out there, but 95% of the time they'll be from the Defence class.

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