Steve (DC): So Amer, with regard to online play, it’s always been huge in the C&C series of games. There was always a breadth of options to wade through, and when Greg Black mentioned earlier that they were taking out the Superweapons toggle, at first I thought it was going to be some kind of crisis. But he convinced me that it’s actually not a bad thing because the superweapons are so meticulously balanced in this game.
Amer: They are. And one thing that we really wanted to do, as he might have mentioned, is make superweapons that can be used both offensively and defensively. So, take the Iron Curtain for example, which we bring back from RA2. You can either cast that on your own vehicles and structures to protect them for a certain period of time, or you could use it against an enemy if he has unexposed infantry and kill them. Or, and you mentioned the Chronosphere—you can Chrono your own units to safety or you could Chrono enemy units out to the ocean (or naval units onto the land) and kill them.
Steve (DC): Yeah, I loved that.
Amer: Yeah, so we feel that superweapons aren’t really the game-changers that they perhaps were in Red Alert 2. We feel that they just add another layer of nuance to online games, so they won’t be so devastating to everything.
Steve (DC): Great. So I’ve actually got just one last question while we’re on the subject of online play. Will we see significant pace changes now that our superweapons won’t be as game-changing, for instance?
Amer: Yeah, so in our testing with our developers, we’ve found that the matches run significantly longer than they did with C&C 3. And I’m kind of pulling this number out of my ass, but it seemed like C&C 3 matches ran between 7 and 15 minutes, depending on the skill of the players, whereas matches [in C&C RA3] run 15, 20, 25 minutes. So that’s a factor of the more nuanced units that Chris was mentioning earlier. You know, knowing when to utilize units’ secondary abilities, knowing that you could utilize some abilities on your own units.
And that kind of all stems from the fact that we’re also gating the economy much, much tighter than we did in C&C 3. In that game, you had a field full of Tiberium, and you put a sort of arbitrary number of Harvesters on it, and just reap a whole bunch of money. And that let you spam, you know, a whole bunch of units and overrun the enemy forces in a matter of minutes. Whereas I don’t know if you guys saw what we are doing, but we have these ore nodes that you can only build one refinery onto. If you wanted to, you could throw a bunch of harvesters onto the ore node, but it’s only going to generate the same amount of cash flow.
Steve (DC): So people don’t get flooded with money.
Amer: Exactly. So we know exactly how much money a player is going to be making as they start out a base and as they expand, so it’s much easier to balance things like unit cost based on that. And that puts the responsibility on the player to manage his force composition much tighter, and to scout the enemy and figure out what the enemy is going to be bringing forth and be able to counter that.
Greg (DS): Yeah, and focus on the strategy elements. I actually have another question if you don’t mind. I know there are the three factions: Japan, the Allies, and the Soviets. But are there going to be specific factions within those, like, for instance, Russia, or Cuba, who has terrorists, and so on?
Amer: Not in this game. In RA3, it’s just those three primary factions. We talked about doing subfactions; we talked about just keeping two factions—just keeping the Allies and the Soviets and then doing subfactions within them. We talked about holding factions. But none of those felt like really Red Alert. Adding Japan into the mix felt like it might be kind of an experimental thing early on, but when we announced the Japan faction, people instantly got it, and we felt good about that.
But yeah, I loved the subfactions and kind of the specialty that you got with each one. And who knows what we’ll do after E3?
Greg (DS): I mean, there’s always add-ons and expansions too.
Steve (DS): Crates?
Amer: You’ll still see crates.
Steve (DS): Turn-off-able?
Amer: I don’t know if they’ll be togglable or not. They could be though.
Steve (DS): I mean I like playing with crates on personally, I was only curious. And the World Builder/map editor?
Amer: We’ve always released a World Builder tool with almost every game that we’ve done. This should be out the same day as Red Alert 3; we’ll probably ship it on the disc, or if not, we’ll make it available on the web site. The mod SDK will be a few months out however.
Steve (DS): I think we’ve covered a wide range of topics. If there’s anything else that you’d like to talk about, we’d love to hear it though!
Amer: Next month or so at the Leipzig games convention we’ll be talking more about the single-player campaign, and what we’re doing with the co-op gameplay there. And we’ll talk some more about the cast. If you thought the actors in Red Alert 2 were great, wait ‘till you see who we’ve got for some of the characters in RA3. It’ll be a lot like RA2, except with the budget of C&C 3… although I think we actually have a bigger budget this year than we did last year. The style is much funnier. You know, in C&C 3 they kind of tried to play it serious because the fiction is kind of dark, but in Red Alert, it’s fun, it’s tongue-in-cheek, and the actors are great. I wish I could talk more about it here.
We’d like to thank Greg Black, Amer Ajami, and Chris Corry for taking time out of their extremely busy E3 schedules to sit down with a bunch of Chumps like ourselves. Hopefully soon we will be getting our hands on a beta build of Red Alert 3, and if we do, we’ll be certain to post plenty of detailed impressions for you. Stay tuned.
