Developer Interview with Greg Black, Amer Ajami & Chris Corry

[Saracen 16]

Media and Hardware Online Magazine Digital Chumps have been at E3. Soon enough they tracked down Greg Black, Amer Ajami, and Chris Corry. Without Hesitation, the unsuspecting developers were pulled to one side and were given an "off the bat" interview about Red Alert 3. So without further ado, here's a sneak peak at one of the questions.

 

Steve (DC): Could you tell us a little bit about your philosophy on the balancing for the super-powerful-type stuff we’re going to see in the game for multiplayer?

Greg: Yeah, so, we’re basically trying to continue the trend from Red Alert 2, which is the feeling that, you know, everything is sort of overpowered. For example, “Oh my God, this Kirov (blimp) or this Apocalypse tank is way too powerful,” but in context, it just sort of works out. We’ve carried that over into the Japanese faction. The big gameplay change this time is that this is the first time in a Command & Conquer game that every unit has its own special ability. So there aren’t any caster units like in a game that just has a bunch of them, but every single unit has just one. There are three types: there’s instantaneous abilities, which—you remember the spy from Red Alert 2? It does the same thing it did before, being that it can disguise itself as anything, go infiltrate buildings… but it’s got this secondary ability now which is Bribe, which costs money to use; it’s like $1,000… it’s like one of two powers in the game that actually costs money. And so you can disguise yourself as whatever, sneak up to the enemy units, hit the Bribe button, and everything within a radius is basically going to transfer over to your side.

The whole interview is 3 pages long, and is more of a rolling dialogue of sorts. But there's a good amount of information to get you up to speed, and perhaps a few little extra things you may or may not have heard about yet. So click here to read the interview.

[recover 2]

A really great interview.

The only thing I'm worried about in RA3 is the resource collecting, I feel that just building an ore node thingy and then forgetting about it removes an aspect of the RTS genre. We'll see how it turns out when it ships though...