New Red Alert 3 Interview with Chris Corry

[Sonic 302]

IGN have a new feature interview with Red Alert 3 Executive producer Chris Corry where he talks about the Hollywood production, naval battles and the how important the Co-Op game play is. There is also a new launch trailer for you to check out. But first, here's part of the interview.

 

IGNPC: A big staple for the Red Alert series has been its live-action cut-scenes, yet they're rarely done for games anymore, especially when pre-rendered CG or in-engine cutscenes are less expensive. Why has C&C stuck with them?

 

Chris Corry: Well, I think you'll find that well done pre-rendered CG cutscenes are more expensive to produce than live action, but the truth is that we don't do our cinematics this way to save money. It's a stylistic choice; one that we believe is a perfect fit for the tongue-in-cheek settings we find in the Red Alert universe. The humanity of people thrown into unfathomable circumstances would be extremely difficult to capture without a real human performance behind it. One of our main goals was to have our cutscenes paint stories of desperation -- over-the-top characters thrown into circumstances that they take very seriously. But what makes the Red Alert universe so approachable is that these desperate situations tend to be altogether ridiculous. Watch JK Simmons earnestly proclaim that the "Red Menace" is a threat to our way of life as he prepares to fire a massive laser cannon out of Teddy Roosevelt's stone head on Mount Rushmore. If that doesn't bring a smile of satisfaction to your face, you have a heart of coal!

 

IGNPC: It seems that Red Alert 3 is going for the very traditional RTS experience with its base-building and resource gathering aspects. What does the game have to offer to an RTS fan looking for a fresh and innovative experience?

 

Chris Corry: There no shortage of innovation in Red Alert 3. It's most obvious in two areas: the co-op campaign and the naval gameplay.

 

There have been RTS games that have claimed to have co-op gameplay in the past, but these have been skirmish-oriented experiences. I'm not implying that the strategy or gameplay experience of these games has necessarily been light, but without the story and those big fiction moments, it's the same as going online and just playing "comp stomp." In Red Alert 3, for the first time the story-driven campaign has been built from the ground up with co-op in mind. That means that the designers of all 27 missions knew that the experience had to include two players at all times. Now you get to experience those cinematics and story beats online with a friend, and it's often presented in a way that requires collaboration for you to be successful. And all of those tightly scripted moments, those surprises that we've designed to surprise and delight the player, are co-op accessible.

 

There's another great consequence of having co-op in the campaign. I'm man enough to admit that I start playing a lot of games but seldom finish most of them. This is particularly true of RTS games. At some point I invariably run into a wall mission, one of those missions that I struggle to figure out or is too tedious to finish. It's always my intention to return to it, but invariably something else comes along and before I know it a few months have passed and I can't remember the game's hotkeys or tech tree. If a game has co-op, I'm much less likely to fall into this trap because I can have a friend jump in, help me get past the difficult part, and then I'm rolling again.

Click here for the full interview. Jump directly to the new trailer right here.

[sith_wampa 6]

Great video.