Platform Online Interviews Louis Castle

[[NE]Fobby[GEN] 10]

The co-founder of Westwood Studios and former EALA employee Louis Castle did an interview two weeks ago for Platform Online. This detailed interview is a must-read, as Castle shares his thoughts on Command & Conquer 4, and many other C&C and RTS topics.

 

Platform Online: The charismatic Joe Kucan is now a cult figure. Do you think C&C would be recognised as it is now if he wasn’t the face of the series?

Louis Castle: I think it’s very difficult to take anything as complex as a hit franchise and take out one element. People would say: “It wasn’t a success, except for (blank).” But I think you could say it might not have been a success if it didn’t have everything. So, I don’t know that C&C would have been what it was without Joe. Probably not, and maybe without the full motion video stuff it wouldn’t even have been successful as a game. Who knows? It’s very difficult to say. Clearly, it added something to it that I thought was very valuable. Based on what we saw with Generals as a franchise and Red Alert and C&C, the FMVs, the actors, they brought something to the game and to the story that I think was quite enchanting. Until such time that we can do games that look as good as Benjamin Button… and even then you’ll still need actors, but maybe you could go to full CG. But CG characters still feel pretty obviously non-human. So, yeah, I think he had a huge contribution and without him it wouldn’t be the same.

 

Platform Online:EA released C&C4 earlier this year as the final chapter to the Tiberium arc. How do you feel about the ending to C&C4?

Louis Castle: I think that the team they had doing it was a very talented team, they worked on a lot of the other C&C products. They were seriously resource constrained when it came to trying to make the product they wanted to make. I’m a little disappointed by the product at the end of the day. Not because the team didn’t do a good job with what they had, I just think it was under resourced to be the finale. I thought the story was interesting. It wasn’t the way we had originally envisioned it, but that’s OK. They were the ones who were in charge of the canon at that point, so it’s up to them to decide how it ends.

Check out the full interview right here.

[Gben 20]

I finally had the time to read this, good find Fobby.

 

Nothing really new, but I always like the new shades of information we learn from each interview.

 

Getting to the gameplay itself, how did you go about balancing the forces of GDI and Nod in the original C&C and beyond?

LC: At the very beginning we talked about the game in much the same way as a sport, we wanted it to be fair. The original C&C had multiplayer over LAN cable, but not over the internet. In that game, many of the units were very similar, so the balance was a little bit easier because the sides were subtly different, but they weren’t dramatically different. The superweapons were more different than the base units, but the base units; you both had troopers, you both had tanks. Really, Red Alert was the first game where we tried very hard to make those sides as different as possible. I would say it reached its climax with Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge. With Yuri’s Revenge you actually had three completely different sides, each of which had to be played completely differently to be successful, each of which had very equal balance. When we put it out in the world you could see it was almost equal in the people that were successful in the rankings of which side they chose.

 

The way we balanced that was we just test the crap out of it. The testers usually figure out all the exploits and they figure out how to maximise each side. So you keep balancing it till you get roughly the same number of people passionate for each one of the sides that they believe is going to be successful. It’s very difficult to do. One of the things that C&C always had were these hordes of units. Putting unit caps makes it a lot easier to balance, but it always felt artificial to us. It was just hard work. It was one of the reasons that the first C&C was so later, it took us well over a year longer than we thought.

 

I particularly liked this quote about RA2 balance and different gameplay styles... When I think of RA2 I think of Kirovs v Harriers & Rocketeers. I loved the balanced but diverse gameplay.