C&C 4 Interview: Of Games and Garlic

Innovation

BT: Do you think that the RTS genre is one which is harder to innovate in than other genres? It seems that recent years parts of the genre have become stuck in tradition and convention and, while some people are trying to do different things, it’s harder to move away from the very traditional set-up.

Jim: I think it is hard to innovate in, yes. We’ve tried a few times to look at new things on our projects. On Battle for Middle Earth we tried the whole ‘Create a hero’ and ‘War of the Ring’ features, which some other teams have done too...it’s just really hard to do. Everything is just so...small that it’s hard to get any real affordance in there and see what everything is doing, how everything works. The balance is just so intricate and with so many different pieces.

Like, a shooter may have a lot of different weapons, but they all only have to shoot one thing – another character. Whereas in an RTS you have several different types of weapons and they all have to shoot 80 different unit types and they all have to react differently and it depends on how you’re shooting. The moment you throw one new cog into the system it builds and builds and creates a whole new set of design challenges.


I think it really is tough, but more importantly is that if you do innovate then you have to be really extreme with it.

BT: Like with Achron – have you seen that?

Jim: I...don’t know. What’s it like?

BT: It’s an RTS with time-travel in it.

Jim: Oh, yeah! Where you can go back in time and change events and create paradoxes? Yeah. That’s really cool and crazy, but again it’s really tough to explain to a new user and that’s one of the problems. Every time you change something in an RTS it’s difficult to teach how that new mechanic works – and it’s hard enough with a standard RTS game because there’s so many pieces to learn about and understand the balance of.

If you do innovate then you have to go really far with it, almost to the point of entering another genre. Like with Dawn of War 2, which many people would say is more of an RPG than an RTS.

Yeah, there’s room to innovate and I think we’re trying some really cool things in terms of new ideas like the respawning mechanic and the new classes. The progression through all modes too, which is something that hasn’t been tried before. We hope that works out, but...it’s really tough to do it in this genre.


BT: Do you think those new features, like the respawning and class divides, are going to go down well with the hardcore fans?

Jim: Well, since we announced the game we’ve had a very mixed reaction. We’ve had people who are really excited about some of the new stuff and we’ve had people who want the old base-on-base gameplay. We’re listening to all that feedback and we’re trying to find the right levers to strike a balance.

What I do want people to understand though is that just because we’re changing things up a bit doesn’t mean we’re removing strategic depth. We’re actually increasing it in some ways. Usually it’s just a matter of finding the perfect build order and then doing it as fast as you can and things get predictable. You can tell that someone is going for a certain build and you can predict what he’ll be doing ten minutes from now and you know you can counter it by sticking three annihilator tripods through a wormhole and calling it GG.

In this one though, we bypass some of that with the mobile base. You can go anywhere, build anywhere. Then, halfway through the match, you can respawn as a different class – so it’s really a different game. You can react to things so differently and we’re building a game which isn’t just based on APM and how fast you can do things. That’s what we want people to take away about the game.

And that’s it! Thanks to Jim and everyone else at Electronic Arts for helping out. Let us know what you think about C&C 4 in the comments.