Command & Conquer 4 Developer Q&A #7

[Sonic 296]

The seventh round of questions and answers from the Command & Conquer 4 development team have been posted on the Official C&C Forums. There is lots of good information in the round of questions. Check them out below.

 

Will the player be able to use Forgotten units in multiplayer?

Yes! The Visceroid, Forgotten Ironback, and soon-to-be-named Forgotten Mutant Bus (http://contest.commandandconquer.com) are all playable units in multiplayer, built from the mutant hovel. Currently these units build instantly but have a limit per unit, allowing a player to quickly replenish their forces from a set point on the battlefield.

 

Does the defense class have any tank units?

The defense class utilizes several tanks oriented around a defensive focus. The Spartan Tank, for example, has less health than many other tanks, but turns into a stationary turret on death with heavier armor. The Rhino Tank is a long-range artillery that constantly fires off low-level sonic waves around itself when deployed, slowing and damaging enemies. Both units fit the doctrine of the Defense Class – get in, set up, lay down the hurt. Nod’s toys are even more fun, including the damage-reflecting Centurion and an enormous Tiberium vein detonator called the Aftershock.

 

Now that tier 3 aircraft have been created for GDI and Nod, what are some examples of these new flying menaces?

In the aftermath of a Tiberium-covered world, GDI and Nod have both put significant resources into creating a fleet of heavy capital ships. The GDI command ship, the Kodiak, sports three triple-barreled artillery cannons capable of laying waste to ground forces at range, as well as an array of anti-aircraft guns that can chew through light aircraft. When upgraded, the Kodiak can transform, becoming much more heavily defended, faster, but unable to attack. When in this defensive mode, it also grants an armor bonus to nearby allies. On the Nod side, the Leviathan mobile command facility can launch enormous fireballs from three devastating flame launchers and houses a hanger bay that can be upgraded with a wing of swift fighters. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

 

Do superweapons work in a similar way as previous C&C games? How hard is to tech up to build one, and how long is the cool down time?

In CnC4, we wanted to make an effort to make superweapons a little more interesting, but also less game-changing. With the removal of large, stationary bases, we also had to revisit what a superweapon actually did to change the battlefield, which ultimately unlocked us to improve the arsenal of both GDI and Nod in some very cool ways. The newest iteration of the Ion Cannon, for example, consists of six nodes that charge up individually over time. With each node that becomes charged, the weapon gains damage and begins to EMP enemy units. The Ion Cannon has a total of six charge states, with the final state taking about three minutes to charge up. A max-charge Ion Cannon is capable of decimating any small and most medium-sized units caught in the blast, and anything that survives will be EMP’d for a significant period of time. The Temple of Nod has received a similar facelift, and now constructs a missile in three distinct stages. At its base level, the missile does a good amount of damage, but over time Tiberium vapor pods are attached, creating a large, corrosive and damaging cloud at the blast site. If the missile is allowed to charge up to max-level, it gains a Tiberium catalyst, which arcs deadly waves of Tiberium across any units foolish enough not to avoid it.

 

Is the Nod Avatar returning? What is its combat role in the 4th Tiberium War?

The Avatar is back! In CnC4, the Avatar continues its role as an anti-tank walker, weak to concentrated blasts from powerful laser units. The Avatar can be outfitted with up to five cannons when fully upgraded, allowing it to do some significant damage to enemy forces. As it is damaged, these cannons are blown off of the Avatar, significantly increasing its speed with each cannon lost and allowing the player to retreat the unit to repair and re-arm.

Have a question of your own that you would like answered in the future. Then post in the Ask A Developer thread on the Official C&C Forums.

[Malevolence 6]

Something tells me that the avatar is going to be imbalanced, up to 5 cannons, lol. Let's hope that these drastic changes will not cause an outroar once this unit snapshots are out.

[ORCaLoVeR 0]

I have to admit, those capital ships in the sky.......

 

 

It sounds lovely. Really. This is something i want.

 

 

^5 for the GDI support class

[mirza044 4]

Does the defense class have any tank units?

The defense class utilizes several tanks oriented around a defensive focus. The Spartan Tank, for example, has less health than many other tanks, but turns into a stationary turret on death with heavier armor. The Rhino Tank is a long-range artillery that constantly fires off low-level sonic waves around itself when deployed, slowing and damaging enemies. Both units fit the doctrine of the Defense Class – get in, set up, lay down the hurt. Nod’s toys are even more fun, including the damage-reflecting Centurion and an enormous Tiberium vein detonator called the Aftershock.

It's is a tank which actually is not a tank?! A lapsus made by devs or else?

ps

it's off topic, but I found an interesting interview (Gamasutra) with Dustin Bowder:

Are there any specific RTS games you've played recently that you've liked?

 

DB: I certainly found [Relic's Warhammer 40,000:] Dawn of War II to be interesting, and I learned a lot about RTSes by playing that game because they've done some interesting things.

 

Did you bring any of your experience at Westwood -- I guess it's EA LA -- to Blizzard?

 

DB: At the end of the day, no. Not a damn thing. [laughs]

 

At the end of the day, I learned nothing. I thought I was more prepared than I was when I came here, because I'd made RTS games at that point for five or six years. I thought, "Okay, I've got some chops here," but Blizzard is really its own beast.

 

Blizzard has its own style, and more importantly, Blizzard has a lot of institutional knowledge, which a lot of other studios don't have about making these games and making them great. At the end of the day, what I brought was a basic level of creativity, an understanding of how these games are built, and... Yeah, that's all I brought. [laughs] And hopefully, a positive team working attitude, right?

 

But I had to relearn kind of all the basics all over again, because the games that I'd made before were fundamentally not designed be an e-sport. They were not designed that way.

 

Command & Conquer, and so on?

 

DB: Yeah. It's not a focus of those games. Command & Conquer 3 tried to do that, and they're going in a different direction. While I was there, certainly we wanted to make good multiplayer games, but e-sports in Korea, to the level that it is at Blizzard, was not part of our focus. Certainly, the kind of context that we have in the Korean community at Blizzard goes way beyond anything we had at EA at that time.

 

There was just a lot of relearning to do, coming into Blizzard, to truly understand what StarCraft was all about.

 

On a coincidental note, it's interesting that EA recently said that with Command & Conquer 4, they would be doing a lot of the online authentication processes with single-player that you guys soon after also announced -- really trying to link the single-player and multiplayer experiences. There definitely has been an outcry against both Blizzard and EA in response. Do you feel you needed to reach a certain point historically before you could just say, "Alright, internet is pervasive enough that we can just do this now"?

 

DB: I don't know what the thinking is at EA, but I know for us, we've seen the success of World of Warcraft. We know people have internet connections. We know a lot of them do. And every PC you bought for however many years now comes ready to go. And how common is broadband?

 

When we shipped the original StarCraft, you were looking at a game where a lot of people were on dial-up. Not everyone is up on dial-up. We built a game that was functionally designed to work on your PC, and if you have this piece of equipment and you know how to make it work, you can then play this other part of the game.

 

Now, looking at what the PC is today, that's not how the PC ships. The PC ships today with the internet. It comes with everything that you need to make that work. That is the machine we're building for.

 

That is the platform, so it just makes a lot of sense to us, since that is the way it's been now for many, many years. We've seen online-only games become a huge, huge success that it's something we can actually use.

 

We can actually leverage this now into our design process and actually do something cool with it, we hope, and have a fully integrated experience that shows you the news -- "Oh, there's the campaign right there," "Hey, my friends are on," "Hey, what are my friends doing?" You can just feel like you're all part of the experience.

 

Certainly, looking at what other companies have done, and looking at Xbox Live, which is just a blast to play on, you see another example there of someone who's fairly successfully integrated the whole experience in a really positive way. We hope to accomplish that as well.

Rest of the interview you can find here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4174...t_ii.php?page=1

Edited October 31, 2009 by mirza044

[BioBen 3]

This update pleases me.

[mirza044 4]

This update pleases me.

I Agree.

[ORCaLoVeR 0]

The support class gets better and better everytime it is mentioned in the update

[Luk3us 63]

I hope EA don't make the same mistake they did in C&C3 with the mutant hovels. That mistake being, making the mutants so totally useless no one ever built them.

[Malevolence 6]

I hope EA don't make the same mistake they did in C&C3 with the mutant hovels. That mistake being, making the mutants so totally useless no one ever built them.

 

and probably don't spend the effort capturing the hovels to begin with.

[PurpleGaga27 40]

I wonder if the question referring to Tiberium Harvesting will come back in a later Q&A or maybe it will be mentioned in BCPT's Ask A Developer.

[Malovolpe 3]

Command ships? I think this will make for some large air battles.