C&C 4 Interview: Of Games and Garlic

Creating a Story

BT: So the decision to change the cut scene style wasn’t based on fan feedback and was mostly a design team decision?

Jim: It was mainly a team decision, yeah. The team is always trying to one-up themselves and so we had C&C 3 and then we had Red Alert 3, which was bigger and better and flashier and a bigger cast and a bigger shoot. Now we’re taking it to the next level, which means proper cinematic scenes and not just talking to the camera.

BT: You talked in your presentation about the pieces in play and how they’ve built up over the years. You’ve got The Forgotten and the Tacitus and so on. Was it always the plan to bring the series to this definite conclusion or is it being played by ear? Was Kane originally drafted with a specific story in mind, for example?

Jim: Well, what I will say is that we’ve known for a few years now what we wanted to do with Kane’s arc. This is definitely the climax of that plan. A lot of the side pieces though, like The Forgotten, are very project-to-project.


What we want to do now though is incorporate them into the gameplay though, so you can actually recruit and control Forgotten units whether you’re GDI or Nod. So, a lot of those smaller bits spawn out of the specific gameplay elements that we want.

We did try to play with some of those ideas in Kane’s Wrath a little bit, taking things back to the Tiberium Sun era and bringing back some of those old, fun units. We heard a lot from the fans though that they wanted more and how they wanted to find out what happened to The Forgotten and the Mutants and so on.

The Forgotten are especially interesting in this instalment too because, in Command and Conquer 4, Tiberium is just starting to be controlled on Earth. GDI and Nod have teamed up and got things pretty much in hand. Now though the question is “What happened to the people who were exposed to and transformed by Tiberium?”


BT: With Tiberium now under control in the game then is it still the main resource? We saw in the demo you gave that you took control of network hubs that spewed out provided your base with resources.

Jim: The resource system will certainly not be what you’ve seen in the past – no harvesting resources off the battlefield or that type of thing. Instead, we’re trying a few different things at the moment. Some of them you might no expect and are a bit wacky...

BT: Any examples?

Jim: We’ve tried ones that are based on a time mechanic, so you build units without a specific cost and they build themselves up over time. We tried one where you just have a constant stream of income and you kind of store and use it. We tried one where you do capture the Tiberium Control Hubs to harness resources. We’ve tried several different things. Some are really fun, some aren’t – but we haven’t settled on one for the final game yet.