AusGamers Command & Conquer 4 Preview

[Sonic 298]

AusGamers have posted a new Command & Conquer 4 preview based on their experiences an Gamescom. A few interesting bits are mentioned in this preview. Plus they raised their concerns over the internet requirements as well. Here's part of it.

 

Electronic Arts demonstrated a brief segment of the recently announced Command and Conquer 4 at GamesCom, providing a tantalising glimpse at the next in the popular series of real-time strategy games. EA Senior Producer Mike Glosecki (aka "Big Mike") was on-hand to run us through a small mission and answer a few questions.

 

The first thing to note is that the term "conclusion" was thrown around here in the context of the story - C&C4 aims to wrap up the chronicle of the previous titles. A big goal of the game is to answer all the questions raised in the "Tiberium saga". This possibly-final title sets the scene with the Earth only having a few years to go before it is rendered uninhabitable by Tiberium. Mike kicked off the demo with a recap of the teaser trailer - the short full-motion video providing the introduction with Kane talking to the GDI honchos for a mysterious purpose. Sorry, we didn't get any more information about this.

 

"Conclusion" was part of what EA are calling "the four Cs of C&C4". I forgot to write down what the other three were so I assume they're not very importa- oh wait, I did write them down: "classes", "crawler", and "career" - these are the three major changes in the game, although there's one other doozey that I'll save until later.

Click here to read the full preview.

[Gben 20]

4C's... neato!

 

Crawlers, however, respawn once they are taken out. This instantly raises a few interesting points about strategy. The first one that leapt to my mind was related to spawn camping (having observed this phenomenon in almost every multiplayer FPS game since the dawn of time), but Mike quickly mentioned that this was quickly observed in play testing and they've mitigated it by the simple expedient of basically exploderating the entire area around a spawning crawler to render camping a less effective tactic.

 

Nice implementation.

[Nmenth 292]

Of course if you switch classes, all your units blow up, so it doesn't really matter if they are spawn camping within the blast radius, they can just wait for the explosion, then rush you with all their units that didn't suicide. Guess you're stuck with your first class choice, hope you like it.

[Mighty BOB! 5]

exploderating

Lol. Awesome.

 

 

About the no-offline bombshell, was that before everyone yelled about it and EA said they would consider it?

[mirza044 4]

About the no-offline bombshell, was that before everyone yelled about it and EA said they would consider it?

It seems that EALA is very persistent with their little undercover DRM business, they are not going to give up from all-time-online thing easily. Now we getting mixed reports, one where Apoc or some other dev said that they are considering offline mode and other where producer Mike claiming that there is no (and not going to be) offline mode (I think that he said same thing about no-offline mode in his blog "The big questions answered" or something like that).

Edited August 28, 2009 by mirza044