Gentlemen, it’s a nuclear device
Going into the show, my younger brother Greg Schardein and myself were quite excited about the prospect of playing the newest installment in the Command & Conquer: Red Alert series, Red Alert 3. Westwood Studios’ Red Alert 2 has always been at the top of our list of favorite real-time strategy games of all time, so you could probably imagine how thrilled we were when we were met with the opportunity to speak with three of the most influential names behind Electronic Arts’ RA3.
These names are Greg Black, Unit Designer; Amer Ajami, Senior Producer; and Chris Corry, Executive Producer. Let me tell you straight away that these three know the series like the collective backs of their hands—if ever you were concerned about how RA3 will turn out, this interview should help to set your mind at ease.
The DigitalChumps staff member (Steve, Greg) dialogue is in bold to keep things from being confusing (seeing as there are two Gregs in the first part of the interview—one from DigitalChumps and the other from EA).
First, we sat down with Greg Black in an interview that was in planning for no longer than two minutes total; no prepared questions, no scripted topics—just dialogue about the C&C universe.
Steve (DC): Greg, first off, thanks for sitting down with us. I know we don’t have a lot of time, but could you introduce yourself quickly for the record?
Greg: Sure; I’m Greg Black. I’m the, like, Lead Unit Balance, you know, Gameplay Guy.
Steve (DC): Awesome, I love the highly official title there. I’m actually going to call you that in the interview if you don’t mind.
Greg: Sure, no problem! If you play multiplayer, chances are I’m the one that screwed it up.
Steve (DC): Fantastic. Then I’ll be sure to yell at you.
Greg: All right.
Steve (DC): Okay, Greg… I don’t really have any questions prepared here, so I figured we’d start with your specialty. Could you tell us a little bit about your philosophy on the balancing for the super-powerful-type stuff we’re going to see in the game for multiplayer?
Greg: Yeah, so, we’re basically trying to continue the trend from Red Alert 2, which is the feeling that, you know, everything is sort of overpowered. For example, “Oh my God, this Kirov (blimp) or this Apocalypse tank is way too powerful,” but in context, it just sort of works out. We’ve carried that over into the Japanese faction. The big gameplay change this time is that this is the first time in a Command & Conquer game that every unit has its own special ability. So there aren’t any caster units like in a game that just has a bunch of them, but every single unit has just one. There are three types: there’s instantaneous abilities, which—you remember the spy from Red Alert 2? It does the same thing it did before, being that it can disguise itself as anything, go infiltrate buildings… but it’s got this secondary ability now which is Bribe, which costs money to use; it’s like $1,000… it’s like one of two powers in the game that actually costs money. And so you can disguise yourself as whatever, sneak up to the enemy units, hit the Bribe button, and everything within a radius is basically going to transfer over to your side.
Greg (DC): Nice.
Greg: So, it costs $1,000, right? So if you get a conscript, you got ripped off. But if you manage to get three Apocalypse tanks, you’re pretty stoked.
Also, one of the things that I really wanted to do was give the units abilities to help them deal with things that are normally their hard counters in the combat chain—help units do what they normally do better. So an example of that is the Japanese cruiser, it’s just this torpedo boat… but if you hit the secondary ability, it fires off this spread of like five dumb-fire torpedoes that go in every direction, and they just keep going until they hit the shore, or a boat, or whatever.
And then there are abilities that help the player maneuver around in the combat chain a little bit. So normally, this thing would kill me, but if I’m smart and I use my special ability, maybe I’ll have a chance to escape or counterattack or something of that nature. The Japanese have a couple of those units—you were playing with them. When they’re on the ground, they’re going to murder infantry, but the second a tank rolls up, you want to transform those bad boys into their airborne form to either get away or to fight back.
So there’s lots of skill differential in the game. Players that can really use their special abilities and micromanage really well, they’re going to be able to stomp players that can’t. And we’ve gone with a lot of hard counters and specialized units, so there’s a lot of unit mixing. One of the design problems we had in C&C 3 is that there is a lot of single-unit spam, but there’ll be none of that in Red Alert 3. If you’re spamming nothing but tanks, the other player’s gonna scout it, he’s gonna see it, and he’s gonna murder you hard.
Greg (DC): That’s exactly how Red Alert 2 was. If you’re just pumping out Kirovs, you’re going to get destroyed.
Steve (DC): And people did that, too. And they did indeed get destroyed.
Greg: Yeah.
Steve (DC): So all the other stuff’s still intact, then? For instance, units can still gain levels/ranks (veterancy)?
Greg: Yeah, the veterancy’s still there, and we’ve incorporated a sort of player power system that you’ve seen in other games like C&C Generals, Company of Heroes, etc., where you gain points, and as the battle becomes more intense, you gain them more quickly. But what we’re doing that’s interesting and unique is that we’ve built in this negative feedback loop on the player power points, so that if you’re losing the battle, you’re actually going to gain powers a little bit faster than the guy who’s winning the battle. That’s to help counter the slippery slope problem. So, you know, “I’m losing, I’m losing… but oh, I’m starting to get my powers a little bit faster!”, so if I use it just right, maybe I can come back.
Steve (DC): So that doesn’t translate into cheapness over the internet then, does it?
Greg: We haven’t seen anything like that yet.
Steve (DC): Okay, good; so you can still destroy people if you’re really good then?
Greg: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The delta between the guy who is losing and winning is not that wide; it’s just a little bit. And in the powers, something that we’ve tried to do is to give players powers that you can, you know, use against yourself or the enemy. For instance, the Iron Curtain’s really cool, because, you know—“Oh, I’ve got a commando in my base, I’m going to use the Iron Curtain to kill it.” But other times you are going to use it on your own stuff to make it invulnerable.
So, for instance, one of the Japanese superweapons is like that as well. It’s kind of hard to describe. You sort of just launch it down an area, so you could cast that on your own base right before a superweapon hits to protect a bunch of your own units.
One of the Allied units is called the Cryocopter, and it’s the only pure support unit in the game. Anywhere that I wanted something that, in the previous game, you would only be able to build one of them, I just made that a secondary ability on one of your normal units. So the Cryocopter is the only pure support unit, and its main weapon is this freeze beam. Thus, it’ll target a vehicle or an infantry or whatever, and it’ll basically just slow the thing down—you know, its rate of fire and all will slow—until it’s completely frozen. And then any unit, pretty much, can just run up to it and one-shot it. It’s like a big block of ice—boom, it explodes. And then its secondary ability is a shrink ray, so it will shrink a unit, and that unit now moves faster (you know, cartoon physics… and we pitch up their voice; it’s really funny… [laughs]).
Steve, Greg (DC): [laughs]
They move faster, they shoot faster, but their damage is lower, so again, it’s the type of thing that—if you had an Apoc tank in your base, you could shrink ray it and then use one of your tanks to run over it. It’s awesome. So, you know, if you want to get your MCV all the way across the map really fast, you can shrink it, zip it across the map, and hopefully by the time it gets to where it wants to go it’ll wear off.
So we’ve tried to do a lot of that stuff, and have a lot of wacky, crazy unit interactions. [Greg then began to describe to us a maniacally brilliant analogy, but before he could finish explaining, Chris Corry came to retrieve him for booth work].
