Command & Conquer 4 Multiplayer Preview [PC]

16 Nov 2009 at 17:00:18 by Tim McDonald

Command & Conquer 4 appears to be the full package. I've re-written this opening sentence far too many times to guess, focusing on different things each time, and this time, it's true – for all the talk of the single-player campaign finally closing off Kane's story, and the new gameplay mechanics focusing less on base-building and more on the action, there's also plenty of focus on the multiplayer. It's hard to say “C&C4 is all about the single-player revamp” when there's so much work going into every other aspect, too.

The multiplayer is one of the aspects getting an absolutely huge overhaul, and what was initially entirely separate to the single-player campaigns is now being turned into something that links into them through the new progression system. The idea is that, no matter what mode you're playing in – campaigns, or skirmishes, or multiplayer – your profile is constantly earning experience and levelling up, unlocking new units and abilities for you to use in any of the other modes. Stuck on a mission in single-player? Go off and do some multiplayer, then, and get some new units, although EA has been very careful to point out that all of the starting units should be sufficient to win a battle, and that the unlockables are more useful tools for specific situations.

We were playing with everything unlocked, so we can't really comment on that. What we can say is that multiplayer is anarchic, chaotic fun.

We played a few games of 5v5 multiplayer, GDI vs Nod, on one map. The goal was to capture and hold five areas on the map; holding more than your opponents raised your team's points faster than theirs, and the first to reach a points cap won. Actual cash appeared to have no relevance whatsoever, but matters were complicated with occasionally-spawning Tiberium crystals. When brought back to friendly bases, these furnished your team with upgrade points that could be used to increase, say, railgun range, or explosive damage, or even level up your Crawler further.

Despite all of the changes – no real bases, Crawlers are mobile and can respawn, lack of cash, take-and-hold gameplay – it felt familiar enough that it was very, very hard to shake off the usual concepts of the genre. As soon as I began, I sat my Crawler down and had it start pumping out as many units as my command cap would hold. Then I realised that two of my allies had started wandering off towards points with their Crawlers, building units on the way.

Ah. Right. I don't have to stay at the starting point.

That's not to say that there weren't advantages – the starting location was defended, quite heavily, by turrets. Whether or not this really is an advantage is something to wonder about though, because as in most multiplayer games that aren't real-time strategy, you have respawns. If your Crawler - your all-important tank/base/unit factory - is destroyed by enemy fire then you can get another one back a few minutes later. If sitting behind turrets to keep it safe prevents you from moving it up to the frontlines to join in with the battle and pump out troops to hold off an enemy attack, then clearly, it wasn't worth it.

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