Next, we wrestled Amer Ajami and Chris Corry away from their busy schedules to chat with us as well.
Steve (DC): By now, most of our readers are familiar with the differences between the main C&C series and the Red Alert series of games. But if you wouldn’t mind, we have just a few more in-depth questions about how you approached the development of Red Alert 3.
Amer: Sure thing.
Steve (DC): While plenty of gamers love the design of the more recent Command & Conquer titles like Generals and C&C 3, there’s also an audience who has been longing for a return to form of the more traditional aspects of the series. It looks like with Red Alert 3, you guys have recognized this desire and are working more within the mold of the Red Alert 2 style of gameplay. Could you tell us a bit about how your approach is different this time around?
Amer: Well, a handful of guys on our team worked on Red Alert 2, and a lot of others are huge fans of RA2. Speaking for myself, Red Alert 2 was, and remains (until we release RA3) my favorite RTS game of all time.
Steve (DC): Couldn’t agree more.
Amer: Yeah, I loved not just the campaign, and the gr—well, I almost said great, but it wasn’t great—the funny acting [laughs]… but it was also the units, you know? I mean, what other RTS game gave you dogs and Kirovs, dolphins and giant squids? So that’s really what we set out to capture with Red Alert 3. And while the squid didn’t make the cut, a lot of other RA2 units did. And then inventing the third faction, Japan, gave us a lot of opportunity to come up with units that were equally as crazy as some of the ones in RA2. So that’s really what we’re after: the sharp, competitive feel of Red Alert 2 combined with the silliness and wackiness, so we don’t feel constrained by reality or a fiction that doesn’t give us much room to maneuver.
Steve (DC): Yeah, you’ve pretty much hit on all the points that I loved so much about RA2 myself. Earlier today someone mentioned to us some pace changes that the team has taken into account as well… could you tell us a bit about that?
Chris: Yeah, the online matches are going to be more nuanced. I think the more advanced players get better at spinning up on micro(managing) between their primary and secondary abilities. And as people start to understand the strategies that you can use with combos, with powers… like, “Oh, wow, the shrink ray… I can use that on my own units now to make them fast. So now I can get an engineer, march him at twice the speed,” you know.
Steve (DC): That’s great! It’s kind of exactly what I was hoping to hear—the sort of longer matches of RA2 where you could control the pace better. I used to, for instance, build forests of mirage tanks if and when I got the chance, and that was a lot of fun.
Chris: Yeah, definitely. So I have a question for the two of you guys now that both of you have played. What do you think about the speed of the gameplay?
Steve (DC): It feels much closer to—well, like C&C 3, for instance. I felt that there was a little more power than I would have wanted at first. Like immediately you felt like you could just dominate anything. I didn’t like that as much in some ways, although I did enjoy the game a lot obviously regardless. With Red Alert 2 what I felt was so great was the balance—you know, a little more deliberate of pace, building up to those most powerful units. And it feels like on Red Alert 3, at least, from what I’ve played anyway, that it’s kind of like that. Am I right or wrong about that?
Chris: Yeah.
Amer: Yeah, that’s absolutely right.
Chris: Very intentionally we have tried to do exactly that.
Greg (DC): In my opinion, one of the main things separating most RTS’s from the older Command & Conquer games was the ability to only build one building at once. Whereas in many other RTS’s, it’s like you’re building units, where you build 50 things at once, and it gets so complex that you don’t even know what to do. So I feel like that’s definitely a great change.
Chris: So in Red Alert 3, just like C&C 3, you can actually have multiple production units. So you can still actually get that production capacity very wide. The problem is that you almost certainly can’t get the necessary resources to execute on that. And again, that’s a very deliberate decision on our part. The designers want to throttle that. So late game, if you can pull lots of resources, you might actually be able to get multiple production queues going, but that is certainly not going to be an early game strategy.
Steve (DC): Great, it sounds like it’s going to work out very much like in RA2 regardless; I love it.
Greg (DC): I know that Greg [Black] mentioned that if you’re losing a battle, you gain more points more quickly during the battle.
Chris: You mean the power points?
Greg (DC): Yeah.
Chris: So there’s three ways that you can gain power points. And I think Greg would have actually been the guy to talk about the actual rate at which these things come in.
Steve (DC): Yeah, we touched on the subject.
Chris: So the first way to accumulate power points is… nothing. Over time, you will get a bleed of power points, and that is very slow. The next thing you can do is succeed. You can go out and destroy other people’s units, and you will earn points proportional to your success. And finally, the third way that you can get power points is to fail. You actually get a little bit of additional trickle even when you lose. Of course, the rate at which we give you power points in each of these situations is different, and if I’m not mistaken, I think we give you a much greater rate of power points if you’re succeeding.
Greg (DC): That makes sense. How important are they going to be in actually swaying a battle?
Chris: So we wanted to make that dynamic of sort of saving your points and spending them when you get all the way down to the most powerful one really compelling and interesting and that can be one of the biggest payoffs of the game. So, to a degree we’re okay with there being kind of a race to the best powers. What we don’t want to do, though, is get to the point where everyone has a lot of those powers and is using them all over the place.
Greg (DC): Right. I felt like they got used a little bit too much in the last couple of games. Like if you had five good powers, you wouldn’t even have to build tanks, you could just use those.
Chris: Yeah, so we throttle those points so you can actually never buy everything. And, so—do we max out at ten? Is that the number?
Amer: Yeah. Ten points. So you can have a wide variety of powers with shallow efficiency in them, or you can kind of dig down into the power paths.
Chris: And, of course, veterancy is back. I think one of the things that really worked with C&C 3 is that if you could use one of your really special units, like for instance, a Mammoth [tank], and get that heroic, that was a unit that you were like, “Oh, yeah, that’s my guy.” So we still want to have that. I would think we might want to throttle that back just a bit perhaps. But we are big fans of unit veterancy because we feel like when something goes heroic, that’s a moment, and something that you want to hold onto.
Greg (DC): Well, that was one of the first main improvements in Red Alert 2. It was a nice addition.
Steve (DC): I agree with that. [To Chris and Amer] We’re totally on the same wavelength with this stuff; I love it. And that’s why this game is turning out so great.
[Chris excuses himself at this point to tend to some appointments]
