COMMAND & CONQUER: GENERALS
There’s always been something innately comfy about C&C games. Despite their flaws, and there have been many throughout the seven-year history of the franchise, the games have always achieved immense playability through addictive gameplay, a somewhat cheesy sense of humour and an aura of toy-like wonder built into every single unit. After Westwood’s Dune series went 3D last year in Emperor: Battle for Dune, it was only a matter of time before the C&C games would follow suit. After several years of virtual bangs, whistles and whoops behind a curtain of secrecy at Westwood’s satellite studio EA Pacific (the developers behind Red Alert 2 and the Yuri’s Revenge expansion) the result was revealed earlier this year as Command & Conquer: Generals. For the first time we get our hands on the code and find out just what you can expect to see when C&C is reborn.
RETURN TO THE OLD
Westwood’s traditional three-way war, pioneered by the Dune games and picked up in the C&C games in RA2: Yuri’s Revenge, is the central gameplay premise for Generals. This time it takes place in the near future between the USA, China and the terrorist organisation of the GLA (Global Liberation Army) within the structure of a continuous campaign, with eight to ten missions for each side, 20-25 maps and a skirmish mode. “People like quality rather than volume,” claims producer of C&C: Generals, Harvard Bonin in defence of the three-sided war which still seems slightly antiquated when compared to the multiple sides found in RTS games such as Cossacks and Warcraft III. “The more sides you have, the harder it is to make them distinct and the harder it is to make them play together, You’ve got the high-tech USA, the low-tech GLA and the middle guys who are China. The Americans are really about saving people, the GLA are like ‘we don’t care about people’ and China think along the lines of ‘we’ve got people so let’s use them in war’, so they play off each other well. The idea is to keep quality high at the expense of quantity.” Generals also marks a return to the more serious style of gameplay and narrative seen in the original C&C, which is somewhat ironic since EA Pacific drifted so far left of field with the slightly goofyish RA2 and Yuri’s Revenge that, although the gameplay was still highly enjoyable, it actually seemed to be parodying itself. “It was intentional to stay away from the goofy comic-book stuff,” explains, Mark Skaggs, the executive producer of Generals. “We also stayed away from the science fiction which Tiberian Sun went into. Tiberian Sun was also very serious and hardcore and we wanted to do something that was in the middle. So we’ve got modern-day war stuff, but that doesn’t have to be hardcore and we’ve had fun designing the units and their battlefield reactions. Our goal is to make a game that’s like a Hollywood action war movie that has this feeling of fun, so when you walk out, you feel good. It’s not serious kind of stuff like Saving Private Ryan.”
BLOWN AWAY
If you’ve been following our previous coverage of C&C: Generals or you’ve seen the movie trailer on this month’s discs, you’ll know that one of the most striking things about Generals is the graphics, which are simply stunning. The explosions look like they’ve been taken straight from a film, with realistic physics and miniature showers of debris and flying bodies. The developers have certainly played on this, as well they should, with paused explosions during the in-game cut-scenes that show off the might of the newly created Sage engine and 360-degree rotations, that could have come straight out of Swordfish. Generals will also bring the player a greater sense of interaction with the environment, so they don’t just feel that they’re pushing tanks around on a carpet. Vehicles will leave tracks and push over walls and trees, rather than just rolling through them like they did previously; rangers will drop down onto the top of buildings to flush out enemy troops. “That kind of realism really appeals,” says Skaggs. “It’s like little computer people - that’s what people love, which is why The Sims does so well.”
AI TO AI
The C&C games have been criticised in the past for repetitive scripting. In gameplay terms, this meant that if you worked out the pattern the enemy units would follow, you could frequently beat them with ease. This is something that EA Pacific is trying to address in Generals, along with creating a generally more realistic style of play. “As a player, you’re going to see the ‘behaviour’ of the AI,” explains Skaggs. “You’re not going to care how many brain cycles a second it has, so we’re focusing on what the player sees. We’re putting in special script triggers so it will do certain visual things to counter-attack you. That’s really more about taking our designers’ and our own players’ experiences and coding it into the game to make it feel like you’re playing a real person.” But as usual there will be the inimitable C&C detail, according to Generals’ senior designer Dustin Browder: “We talked about adding emoticons to the game, so there’s some way of seeing the emotions of your units. So, if a unit uncloaks nearby, your soldier will have some kind of ‘Wow a stealth unit has just appeared!’ reaction. We thought about having little bubbles above their heads so you can see what they’re talking about, like guns or food. So you’ll see a couple sentries and it’ll be like ‘Hell yeah, guns!’ or ‘Let’s go and get some food.’ But that would purely be for a solo experience.” Could we possibly have ‘The Sims Go To War’ on our hands here?
