Entwicklerinterview auf Digital Chumps

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): 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.

Steve (DC): Yeah, you’ve pretty much hit on all the points that I loved so much about RA2 myself. Earlier today someone mentioned to us some pace changes that the team has taken into account as well… could you tell us a bit about that?

Chris: Yeah, the online matches are going to be more nuanced. I think the more advanced players get better at spinning up on micro(managing) between their primary and secondary abilities. And as people start to understand the strategies that you can use with combos, with powers… like, “Oh, wow, the shrink ray… I can use that on my own units now to make them fast. So now I can get an engineer, march him at twice the speed,” you know.
Greg (DC): In my opinion, one of the main things separating most RTS’s from the older Command & Conquer games was the ability to only build one building at once. Whereas in many other RTS’s, it’s like you’re building units, where you build 50 things at once, and it gets so complex that you don’t even know what to do. So I feel like that’s definitely a great change.

Chris: So in Red Alert 3, just like C&C 3, you can actually have multiple production units. So you can still actually get that production capacity very wide. The problem is that you almost certainly can’t get the necessary resources to execute on that. And again, that’s a very deliberate decision on our part. The designers want to throttle that. So late game, if you can pull lots of resources, you might actually be able to get multiple production queues going, but that is certainly not going to be an early game strategy.