Interview: Inside The Heritage of Red Alert 3

[Sonic 295]

There is a new interview at GameSetWatch with EALA senior producer Amer Ajami and producer Greg Kasavin that talks about Red Alert 3's development, including the heritage of the series, the challenges in simultaneously creating PC and Xbox 360 versions, the history of the RTS dev team, and why the game is influenced by Red Alert 2 more than the first game. Its makes for some interesting. Here are two samples.

 

So how long were you guys in development?

 

Amer Ajami: Well, we officially started on Red Alert 3 about 18 months ago, about March or April of 2007, though a small group of the RTS team initially did a little bit of pre-production on RA3 back in late 2004, early 2005.

 

As the second team was working on Battle for Middle Earth II, they found out what they wanted to find out about RA3, and then they rolled on back into BFME2, and here we are years later.

 

We primarily have one main RTS team, and then we splinter off smaller groups of that to fulfill whatever needs the company asks from us [such as expansions].

 

It seems that EA is putting increasing focus on Command & Conquer as a franchise compared to how it was for a few years. A lot of the properties that EA picked up in the late 90s or early 2000s, especially the old school PC studios EA picked up, are not very prominent anymore. What gives you guys this kind of focus?

 

Greg Kasavin: What came to mind for me immediately is the success of Generals, although for a lot of hardcore C&C fans, the debates kind of rage on as to whether Command & Conquer: Generals is really a true C&C game or not, because it did a lot of things differently. But it was a successful game and many would hold that it's a really great game. And I think that kept Command & Conquer on people's minds.

 

Amer Ajami:: And I would argue the hardest core C&C fans hold Generals and Zero Hour to a much higher standard than all the other C&C games.

 

Greg Kasavin: That's true. Zero Hour is considered one of the best Command & Conquer games from a competitive standpoint and everything. Just gameplay-wise, it did a lot of cool things. So, I think, that helped make the reception of Command and Conquer three much more favorable up front. Because people were like, "Oh cool, it's the guys who did Generals, and Generals is awesome." Then, in the end, Command & Conquer 3 had to stand on its own legs now.

 

Amer Ajami: I think the &C franchise would have been successful even had there not been this gap. If you look at the reasons why there was a gap between Generals and C&C3, we had this opportunity as a company to work on The Lord of the Rings movie license. We're all C&C fans, but a lot of us at the time were also hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, so we really jumped at the opportunity.

 

That took the team essentially offline for three-plus years from doing C&C games, because we did two mainline Lord of the Rings games. We did one for the Xbox 360. We did an expansion pack. So now, when we got those out of the way, it was time to kind of go back to our roots.

 

C&C: Generals was my first game in the industry. And the engine that was developed for that game was also co-developed by the guys at Westwood Pacific in Irvine, California and the original Westwood team in Vegas. And at the time that we were working on C&C: Generals, the Vegas team was working on the original iteration of Command & Conquer 3.

 

It's actually funny. If you look at all of the different iterations that C&C3 went through, it's like the third or fourth iteration of the game was the one that was finally released.

 

Greg Kasavin:: If Lord of the Rings didn't exist, C&C3 would have probably come sooner.

Check out the rest right here.

[BioBen 3]

Apparently I'm not a hardcore C&C fan lol

[recover 2]

Pretty good interview.