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C&C - Free to Play - A Letter from JVC About Press Coverage

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Victory Games' General Manager, Jon van Caneghem, has posted a personal letter to all fans on the Official C&C Site, in which he talks about the recent major press coverage of the new Command & Conquer, answering what it means for C&C to be "free-to-play" and how do the Generals work. And, for the first time, he briefly discusses how monetization will be handled for this game.

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Hi everyone,

I can’t state how excited everyone here at Victory Games is to have finally released more information and shown the gaming press our sneak peek of the game. We had great feedback from them (and from our community summit back in December) and are really looking forward opening up Command & Conquer to more people soon.

I want to highlight a few of the areas that we’re hearing great feedback on:

  • Our #1 priority and focus is on building a fun, balanced C&C game with old-school RTS game-play: base building, harvesting, and massive armies.
  • A varied set of Generals to play as, opening the door to many different strategies and a whole matrix of possibilities within each game mode and each match.
  • We’ve officially announced the Asia Pacific Alliance as our 3rd faction, rounding out with the European Union faction and the return of the Global Liberation Army.
  • The impressive visuals and physics based destruction from the Frostbite engine really enhance the overall intensity of the experience.
  • New game modes such as the cooperative objective based Onslaught mode, where you partner to fend off waves of enemies, are really fun.
I also want to dive a little deeper into what it means for C&C to be "free-to-play", and explain a bit about how Generals work in the new Command & Conquer. It’s our goal to give players full access to a fun RTS game with no barrier to entry. All factions, units, maps, and game modes will be available to everyone from the start. Our monetization will revolve around 3 core pillars, common in successful live services that want to avoid "pay to win" issues, and will be available with both earned and paid currencies:
  • Gameplay – mainly the Generals, as outlined below, all balanced against each other.
  • Customization – the ability to further personalize your Generals and other aspects of the game with varied visuals and audio.
  • Convenience – for those with less time, the option to assist in levelling up faster for more choices.
Generals are the most exciting part of this new game to me. You may remember how Generals worked in C&C Generals Zero Hour, back in 2003. It’s very similar thinking – each General has unique advantages, and are balanced with disadvantages against all of the other Generals. We will be continuously adding new Generals for each faction, each with a combination of unique units, player powers, and taunts. Different Generals are ideal for different strategical play styles. Whether your strategies are typically around base defense, stealth, rush, tank power, or other – there are many different Generals to learn to play as and against.

Here’s an example of what you might see from a General focused on Air Power. This General comes with 2 specific Air Units that replace or upgrade other Units within their Faction. However, as with any RTS, there are trade-offs when it comes to modifying the tech tree; given that this "Air General" is stronger in the air and more capable of fielding aircraft early in a match, they are weaker on the ground, lacking certain high tier vehicles or upgrades that would otherwise form a key part of their endgame strategy. Obviously, that is a relatively broad example, but we’re tuning and tweaking each General’s tech tree to make sure that they fit well within our overall game balance.

Beyond Unit and Upgrades, this "Air General" would also come with unique Player Powers, perhaps an Air Raid or similar large AOE direct-damage power that you can call in against an opponent. These "Generals Powers" are unlocked and upgraded throughout each match, increasing in power, effectiveness and even core functionality, and can be called upon to dramatically shift momentum during a heated battle.

Again, we are all very excited to build this game with the full feedback of our fans and our community, and want to reiterate that this is just the beginning. Being a live service, we have many years to continuously build upon and optimize the experience that we are bringing to you all.

If you haven’t already, you can register for the closed beta here.

Thanks to all of our fans and we look forward to seeing you in the game.

Jon

 

The original post can be found here.

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Gameplay – mainly the Generals, as outlined below, all balanced against each other.

Now we're getting somewhere.

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They've promised they will be balanced before, but the more variables they throw into the pot, the more difficult it will be to uphold that promise. It sounds like they want to add a large number of generals over time, and this could make maintaining the balance quite challenging. I doubt they will be able to release very many generals without later having to revisit them to correct imbalance issues.

 

I'm not saying balance can't be achieved, in fact I'm sure they will take advantage of their frequently-updating game model to fix those types of problems. However, I am a bit concerned that this will lead into a problem some free to play games have, where the paid for content starts detracting from the free content and creates an elitist community where the paying players demand their content receive higher priority while the free content slowly starts getting ignored, eventually damaging the entire game from its foundation.

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They've promised they will be balanced before, but the more variables they throw into the pot, the more difficult it will be to uphold that promise. It sounds like they want to add a large number of generals over time, and this could make maintaining the balance quite challenging. I doubt they will be able to release very many generals without later having to revisit them to correct imbalance issues.

 

I'm not saying balance can't be achieved, in fact I'm sure they will take advantage of their frequently-updating game model to fix those types of problems. However, I am a bit concerned that this will lead into a problem some free to play games have, where the paid for content starts detracting from the free content and creates an elitist community where the paying players demand their content receive higher priority while the free content slowly starts getting ignored, eventually damaging the entire game from its foundation.

 

The best place I can point to show that it works is League of Legends. The game has 111 champions. Each on obviously needs to be balanced or everyone would play this champion, and so far they are doing a fairly good job of it :D

 

Furthermore it sounds like they are heavily basing their model off of LoL, which means new generals can be obtained by grinding in game currency through matchs. But if you don't want to grind you just spend some cash to get the general faster

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Well I will say this, if this game allows you to get 100% of its non-purely cosmetic content for free just by playing it enough, I will consider its microtransaction model tolerable and will say no more against it. I doubt that will be the case.

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Well regardless of the micro-transaction stuff, it sounds like they are finally starting to listen to the community, which is good. I realise this should be common sense for developers, but I've only started seeing major games listening to their consumers in the last couple years.

 

I hope major games companies continue to lock the lawyers out of the development meetings.

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