Patch 1.05 Developer Interview

[Sonic 297]

On the Official C&C 3 Site you can check out an interview with C&C 3 Producer Greg Kasavin, discussing the big 1.05 patch. Here is a part of it.

 

What was the motivation for creating a patch of this magnitude? What is EA's plan going forward with patch support for Command & Conquer 3?

 

The motivation was simply to make Command & Conquer 3 a better game to the furthest extent that we could in a patch. Beyond that, we wanted to give thanks to everyone who bought it and has been playing it. After the game shipped, we monitored players' feedback carefully and also polled the development team for all the little things they would have liked to see improved in hindsight. And we went in and hit a lot of that stuff.

 

As for the balance changes, once we'd settled on a direction, we brought in some of our top players from the community to hunker down with some of our best players on the team, and several days of nonstop tank murder later, we were satisfied with what we'd come up with. These guys gave us some great feedback, helped us polish up some of the interface improvements, and tune the new maps. Meanwhile, I also made sure to play through the entire single-player campaign again in order to confirm that the balance changes would improve it overall. Along the way, we went in and tweaked some of the missions, which should be more challenging now without necessarily being more difficult. For example, the GDI Croatia mission, while still tough, is tuned differently and feels better overall. And in later missions, don't expect Mammoth Tanks to be the perfect solution to all your problems. The Nod missions more interesting, too. Units like the Black Hand, Flame Tanks, and Avatars are all really cool but just weren't very effective in the campaign before. They sure are now, though.

 

As for what the future holds with our patch support for C&C3, updates should come regularly to continue to fine-tune the balance, address any remaining bugs, and grow the game in other ways such as by releasing the Mod SDK and the BattleCast Viewer.

 

How important was it to add in "classic" alternate mouse setup for the community?

 

It was the first additional feature we knew we were going to include in this update. We owed it to diehard fans of the series. While the standard control scheme should still be best for most players, longtime fans of the series should get a little dose of nostalgia from the left-click control scheme . In fact, in some types of combat situations, it's better to use than the standard control scheme.

To read more of this interview click here.