Command and Conquer 4 Preview

C&C 4 Impressions

There was a lot of information to take away from our look at Command and Conquer 4 – an awful, awful lot if you take into account what our expectations for the game were. We haven’t shared all that info just yet and there are definitely some details that are worth mentioning.

Like the transparency with which the persistent RPG side of things is worked into the game, for example. Every death we saw resulted in the usual spray of blood and shrapnel, followed by a little floating experience point declaration indicating what that kill was worth.

There’s the matter of the resources system too which, though the developers haven’t yet settled on the system they’re going to use, looks like it’s going to be location-based judging from what we saw. The storyline has shifted the tiberium infestation under the ground, with tiberium control hubs harnessing the power provided by the crystal. In the build we saw, controlling those hubs allowed you to access a constant trickle of energy and cash.


This brings up to one of the things that was reoccurring in our time examining Command and Conquer 4 – that the development team hadn’t yet decided on a final structure for the game and that certain features are very much in flux. That makes it pretty hard to know what to think about the game at this stage.

Not only that, but the on-going design changes set a slightly worrying precedent too. How smoothly can development go if the team isn’t clear on what the core features are and how they might affect the gameplay as a whole? Things change during development, that much we understand – but resource gathering is the first thing that players learn and care about. Should you know how it works before you start tinkering with the fundamentals of the genre?

The issue cropped up when we questioned the RPG elements of the game too, asking the producer what would stop players from artificially creating situations where they were harvesting XP to accelerate their persistent profile. This situation actually showed up at one point in the demonstration we saw, when the AI moved its MCV next to the player base and there followed a good few minutes where each base was spewing out the same units over and over in a perpetual stalemate. The only response we really got to our question though was a wordy version of “we don’t know yet”. The team is still investigating the matter of level caps and anti-grind, it seems.


That said, it may not be all that bad news. Command and Conquer 4 doesn’t have a release date announced just yet and it may be that, given enough time to try out new things, the dev team might eventually find a good balance. One area we’re not sure they can improve on though is the graphics, which were a lot more impressive that we’d been expecting and offered a high-fidelity, high-contrast take on the ever-camp C&C universe.

Still, we’re not sure how we feel about Command and Conquer 4 on the whole at this point. It has us interested, but potentially for all the wrong reasons and, though we’re looking forward to playing it, we’re not yet convinced that a strategy game with class divides and respawning teams will be fun to play. We’re not worried per se, but we’re definitely wary.

At the end of the day, the RTS genre has been in danger of stagnation in the past few years and, if Command and Conquer 4 is actively trying to fight off some of the dry-rot which has crept into the genre then, well, good. We’re still not convinced that it’s going to work or that EA is going the right way about it, but we’re willing to hold off final judgement until the game hits shelves. And we’ll be keeping a close eye on it in the mean time.

Command and Conquer 4 will be published on PC by Electronic Arts, though a release date hasn’t been announced yet. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.