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].

Next, we wrestled Amer Ajami and Chris Corry away from their busy schedules to chat with us as well.

Steve (DC): By now, most of our readers are familiar with the differences between the main C&C series and the Red Alert series of games. But if you wouldn’t mind, we have just a few more in-depth questions about how you approached the development of Red Alert 3.

Amer: Sure thing.

Steve (DC): While plenty of gamers love the design of the more recent Command & Conquer titles like Generals and C&C 3, there’s also an audience who has been longing for a return to form of the more traditional aspects of the series. It looks like with Red Alert 3, you guys have recognized this desire and are working more within the mold of the Red Alert 2 style of gameplay. Could you tell us a bit about how your approach is different this time around?

Amer: Well, a handful of guys on our team worked on Red Alert 2, and a lot of others are huge fans of RA2. Speaking for myself, Red Alert 2 was, and remains (until we release RA3) my favorite RTS game of all time.

Steve (DC): Couldn’t agree more.

Amer: Yeah, I loved not just the campaign, and the gr—well, I almost said great, but it wasn’t great—the funny acting [laughs]… but it was also the units, you know? I mean, what other RTS game gave you dogs and Kirovs, dolphins and giant squids? So that’s really what we set out to capture with Red Alert 3. And while the squid didn’t make the cut, a lot of other RA2 units did. And then inventing the third faction, Japan, gave us a lot of opportunity to come up with units that were equally as crazy as some of the ones in RA2. So that’s really what we’re after: the sharp, competitive feel of Red Alert 2 combined with the silliness and wackiness, so we don’t feel constrained by reality or a fiction that doesn’t give us much room to maneuver.

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.

Steve (DC): That’s great! It’s kind of exactly what I was hoping to hear—the sort of longer matches of RA2 where you could control the pace better. I used to, for instance, build forests of mirage tanks if and when I got the chance, and that was a lot of fun.

Chris: Yeah, definitely. So I have a question for the two of you guys now that both of you have played. What do you think about the speed of the gameplay?

Steve (DC): It feels much closer to—well, like C&C 3, for instance. I felt that there was a little more power than I would have wanted at first. Like immediately you felt like you could just dominate anything. I didn’t like that as much in some ways, although I did enjoy the game a lot obviously regardless. With Red Alert 2 what I felt was so great was the balance—you know, a little more deliberate of pace, building up to those most powerful units. And it feels like on Red Alert 3, at least, from what I’ve played anyway, that it’s kind of like that. Am I right or wrong about that?

Chris: Yeah.

Amer: Yeah, that’s absolutely right.

Chris: Very intentionally we have tried to do exactly that.

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.

Steve (DC): Great, it sounds like it’s going to work out very much like in RA2 regardless; I love it.

Greg (DC): I know that Greg [Black] mentioned that if you’re losing a battle, you gain more points more quickly during the battle.

Chris: You mean the power points?

Greg (DC): Yeah.

Chris: So there’s three ways that you can gain power points. And I think Greg would have actually been the guy to talk about the actual rate at which these things come in.

Steve (DC): Yeah, we touched on the subject.

Chris: So the first way to accumulate power points is… nothing. Over time, you will get a bleed of power points, and that is very slow. The next thing you can do is succeed. You can go out and destroy other people’s units, and you will earn points proportional to your success. And finally, the third way that you can get power points is to fail. You actually get a little bit of additional trickle even when you lose. Of course, the rate at which we give you power points in each of these situations is different, and if I’m not mistaken, I think we give you a much greater rate of power points if you’re succeeding.

Greg (DC): That makes sense. How important are they going to be in actually swaying a battle?

Chris: So we wanted to make that dynamic of sort of saving your points and spending them when you get all the way down to the most powerful one really compelling and interesting and that can be one of the biggest payoffs of the game. So, to a degree we’re okay with there being kind of a race to the best powers. What we don’t want to do, though, is get to the point where everyone has a lot of those powers and is using them all over the place.

Greg (DC): Right. I felt like they got used a little bit too much in the last couple of games. Like if you had five good powers, you wouldn’t even have to build tanks, you could just use those.

Chris: Yeah, so we throttle those points so you can actually never buy everything. And, so—do we max out at ten? Is that the number?

Amer: Yeah. Ten points. So you can have a wide variety of powers with shallow efficiency in them, or you can kind of dig down into the power paths.

Chris: And, of course, veterancy is back. I think one of the things that really worked with C&C 3 is that if you could use one of your really special units, like for instance, a Mammoth [tank], and get that heroic, that was a unit that you were like, “Oh, yeah, that’s my guy.” So we still want to have that. I would think we might want to throttle that back just a bit perhaps. But we are big fans of unit veterancy because we feel like when something goes heroic, that’s a moment, and something that you want to hold onto.

Greg (DC): Well, that was one of the first main improvements in Red Alert 2. It was a nice addition.

Steve (DC): I agree with that. [To Chris and Amer] We’re totally on the same wavelength with this stuff; I love it. And that’s why this game is turning out so great.

[Chris excuses himself at this point to tend to some appointments]

Steve (DC): So Amer, with regard to online play, it’s always been huge in the C&C series of games. There was always a breadth of options to wade through, and when Greg Black mentioned earlier that they were taking out the Superweapons toggle, at first I thought it was going to be some kind of crisis. But he convinced me that it’s actually not a bad thing because the superweapons are so meticulously balanced in this game.

Amer: They are. And one thing that we really wanted to do, as he might have mentioned, is make superweapons that can be used both offensively and defensively. So, take the Iron Curtain for example, which we bring back from RA2. You can either cast that on your own vehicles and structures to protect them for a certain period of time, or you could use it against an enemy if he has unexposed infantry and kill them. Or, and you mentioned the Chronosphere—you can Chrono your own units to safety or you could Chrono enemy units out to the ocean (or naval units onto the land) and kill them.

Steve (DC): Yeah, I loved that.

Amer: Yeah, so we feel that superweapons aren’t really the game-changers that they perhaps were in Red Alert 2. We feel that they just add another layer of nuance to online games, so they won’t be so devastating to everything.

Steve (DC): Great. So I’ve actually got just one last question while we’re on the subject of online play. Will we see significant pace changes now that our superweapons won’t be as game-changing, for instance?

Amer: Yeah, so in our testing with our developers, we’ve found that the matches run significantly longer than they did with C&C 3. And I’m kind of pulling this number out of my ass, but it seemed like C&C 3 matches ran between 7 and 15 minutes, depending on the skill of the players, whereas matches [in C&C RA3] run 15, 20, 25 minutes. So that’s a factor of the more nuanced units that Chris was mentioning earlier. You know, knowing when to utilize units’ secondary abilities, knowing that you could utilize some abilities on your own units.

And that kind of all stems from the fact that we’re also gating the economy much, much tighter than we did in C&C 3. In that game, you had a field full of Tiberium, and you put a sort of arbitrary number of Harvesters on it, and just reap a whole bunch of money. And that let you spam, you know, a whole bunch of units and overrun the enemy forces in a matter of minutes. Whereas I don’t know if you guys saw what we are doing, but we have these ore nodes that you can only build one refinery onto. If you wanted to, you could throw a bunch of harvesters onto the ore node, but it’s only going to generate the same amount of cash flow.

Steve (DC): So people don’t get flooded with money.

Amer: Exactly. So we know exactly how much money a player is going to be making as they start out a base and as they expand, so it’s much easier to balance things like unit cost based on that. And that puts the responsibility on the player to manage his force composition much tighter, and to scout the enemy and figure out what the enemy is going to be bringing forth and be able to counter that.

Greg (DS): Yeah, and focus on the strategy elements. I actually have another question if you don’t mind. I know there are the three factions: Japan, the Allies, and the Soviets. But are there going to be specific factions within those, like, for instance, Russia, or Cuba, who has terrorists, and so on?

Amer: Not in this game. In RA3, it’s just those three primary factions. We talked about doing subfactions; we talked about just keeping two factions—just keeping the Allies and the Soviets and then doing subfactions within them. We talked about holding factions. But none of those felt like really Red Alert. Adding Japan into the mix felt like it might be kind of an experimental thing early on, but when we announced the Japan faction, people instantly got it, and we felt good about that.

But yeah, I loved the subfactions and kind of the specialty that you got with each one. And who knows what we’ll do after E3?

Greg (DS): I mean, there’s always add-ons and expansions too.

Steve (DS): Crates?

Amer: You’ll still see crates.

Steve (DS): Turn-off-able?

Amer: I don’t know if they’ll be togglable or not. They could be though.

Steve (DS): I mean I like playing with crates on personally, I was only curious. And the World Builder/map editor?

Amer: We’ve always released a World Builder tool with almost every game that we’ve done. This should be out the same day as Red Alert 3; we’ll probably ship it on the disc, or if not, we’ll make it available on the web site. The mod SDK will be a few months out however.

Steve (DS): I think we’ve covered a wide range of topics. If there’s anything else that you’d like to talk about, we’d love to hear it though!

Amer: Next month or so at the Leipzig games convention we’ll be talking more about the single-player campaign, and what we’re doing with the co-op gameplay there. And we’ll talk some more about the cast. If you thought the actors in Red Alert 2 were great, wait ‘till you see who we’ve got for some of the characters in RA3. It’ll be a lot like RA2, except with the budget of C&C 3… although I think we actually have a bigger budget this year than we did last year. The style is much funnier. You know, in C&C 3 they kind of tried to play it serious because the fiction is kind of dark, but in Red Alert, it’s fun, it’s tongue-in-cheek, and the actors are great. I wish I could talk more about it here.

We’d like to thank Greg Black, Amer Ajami, and Chris Corry for taking time out of their extremely busy E3 schedules to sit down with a bunch of Chumps like ourselves. Hopefully soon we will be getting our hands on a beta build of Red Alert 3, and if we do, we’ll be certain to post plenty of detailed impressions for you. Stay tuned.