C&C; 4: Tiberium Twilight

Format PC

Developer EA Games

Publisher EA Games

Genre Sim / Strategy

5 Comments

The eyebrow raised by Sam Bass, head of story on the Command & Conquer series, points to an epic conclusion. It points to the end of an era. And it points to rebirth. In the fourth C&C; strategy game, EA are upfront about ending it all. They're putting a full-stop to Command & Conquer. This will be the last in the Tiberium series, and the last of the games that stars Kane.

But, at the same time, that eyebrow also points to a rebirth of a franchise that has started to turn stale. PC gaming is a very different place to what it was 15 years ago. Game design has moved on. C&C; hadn't, until now. The clichés - fixed bases, long supply chains of trucks and harvesters, and epically swift tank matches - are being replaced with a true 21st century strategy game: a 'sticky' online experience that will continue to evolve well past launch. One which players will return to for that extra hit of XP. The team talk about respawning, about mobile bases, about classes. Oh, and Kane will almost certainly die in newly credible cutscenes. For good, this time.

C&C; 4 is being produced at EA LA - a stern and anonymous building just off the LA coast. The studio began life as part of Hollywood - the games division of Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks Interactive - but was bought by EA in 2000. The Hollywood connection lives on: the C&C; team have their own studio for filming episodes of Battlecast (their multiplayer community TV show) on the ground floor, while above, away from prying eyes, Spielberg still pops in to work on unnamed collaborations.

This is a smart place to be right now: the C&C; team is a place of swift promotion and innovation, fully engaged with PC gaming. It's led by the ebullient Mike Gloseki - a man who rearranged his desk and cubicle so that he never has to sit down: his PC is suspended at shoulder level. He, more than anyone else, appears to be the driving force behind Kane's last stand.

"We didn't want to do just another Command & Conquer sequel which ends with an enigmatic fade to white and Kane saying something mysterious. We wanted to really bring that story arc to a close."

It's a complicated story to finish. The mysterious Kane is the leader of an ancient cult called the Brotherhood of Nod. Having designed technologies to extract power from tiberium, the poisonous crystals seeded on Earth by an equally enigmatic alien race known as the Scrin, the Brotherhood aimed to spread the toxic material worldwide. This put them in opposition with the Global Defence Initiative, the military force of the future world government.

Sam continues: "We want to have a lot for our long-term fans, people who've been playing the game for 14, 15 years, and me. But there are people who are not going to want to go back and play Tiberian Sun or Tiberian Dawn and we wanted to make sure there's an entry point so they can get into the universe. We want it to be friendly."

"The game begins in 2062, which is about ten years after the end of Kane's Wrath," Sam continues. "Humanity is pretty screwed. The things that we used to keep the crystals from growing aren't working any more. By the end of 2068 we will have no air, no water. We're doomed and there's nothing we can do about it." This is when Kane steps in. The one common fixture of the series, neither death nor time stop Kane. As Sam puts it: "He's the centre of the universe." He does the unthinkable: he offers the GDI an alliance. He has designed a system to control the growth of tiberium worldwide, but he needs GDI's resources to help build it.

While there are fundamentalists on both sides unhappy with the arrangement, the surprise is that it works. The C&C; universe enters its own cold war, and for 15 years the world is re-built. Tiberium is controlled, its power harnessed and the once ruined landscapes are terraformed to look like the fading memories of Earth's past. "The result is these pristine, beautiful environments that are a little bit artificial. It's a little bit creepy. You know when you go to one of those outdoor malls that's meant to look like a small town?" Not really. "And you're like, there's something a little bit Stepford Wives here."

Naturally, that truce isn't going to hold forever, and the Nod and GDI factions supply Command & Conquer 4's two campaigns. "On the GDI side we have this campaign we're currently calling The Man Who Killed Kane, and it's designed to be a fast-paced action-oriented science-fiction story. A little bit Bourne Identity, a little bit 24. We find people play the GDI campaign first, so this is also designed to be accessible, to fill in the gaps, explain the lore."

Despite the success of the alliance, there's a sense of unease. Why would Kane, a man who has tried to spread tiberium across the world and destroy the GDI for 60 years, suddenly change his mind? Exploring his motivations features heavily in the Nod campaign.

"We're calling this All Things Must End. This is the big one. This reveals the truth behind Kane's plan, what Kane was doing, who he is, what he wants, and why. This is the one that's likely to get a lot of attention from our fan base. It's more nuanced than the action-orientated GDI story, it's got some real depth to it, and it's got some real sadness, getting to know Kane."

In the early games, the GDI and Nod campaigns would contradict each other - whichever faction you played, your side would win. With Command & Conquer 3, efforts were made to have each storyline exist logically side by side. Now when you play the Nod campaign, you'll be seeing your actions on the GDI side with new eyes. C&C4;'s team are hoping the change in perspective will make you think twice. "Maybe what I was doing is not so much saving the world as making it worse," says Sam. But it's Kane that's the focal point. "It's a chance to see the real Kane. Everyone knows the evil Kane standing at podiums, being dramatic, but he can't be like that all the time. We want to see who Kane is; this being who doesn't age much, who's very devoted, very driven... We want to provide this for the really hardcore fans, for the people who follow the franchise. This is their ending."

But it's not where the C&C4; team's ambitions end. While the story is about tying off loose ends and closing the tiberium chapter, everything else is about new beginnings. "Every unit you kill in C&C4; is going to give you experience points, which is going to help you to level up, and that's going to give you new toys," explains Mike. "One of the things with RTS games is they tend to give you all the toys at once. They're like, 'Here's 16 units, here's 30 upgrades, here's 12 buildings, work it out.' We want to play a game that eases you in and gets you used to it, but starts the compulsion of playing an RTS very quickly."

You'll be able to gain those experience points in any of the game's modes, whether in one of the campaigns, in skirmish or online. Any unit unlocked in one mode will work in the others. If you get stuck in the singleplayer, you can play skirmish to unlock new units to help you out. Similarly, if your friends are thrashing you online, playing more of the singleplayer campaign might unlock units that will give you the advantage.

"As I'm playing the game everything I'm killing is going to give me experience points." Mike continues. "At the end of the mission, if I've earned enough experience points to level up, I will, and the screen will show me what I have access to for the future." Those upgrades will be new units, new powers or upgrades, and there may be new content after release.

Experience points and unlocking units turns out to just be the first major new addition. "We have class-based play." C&C; has classes? "You can play as one of three classes. You have the Offence Class, which primarily deals with units and upgrades to those units. You have the Defence Class, which primarily deals with defensive structures and defending points on the map. And you have the Support Class which has flying units and deals with buffing and healing powers and range powers." Command & Conquer is going to have buffing.

Like Team Fortress 2 did for the first-person shooter, the hope is that these classes will make overt the already innate ways people play strategy games. Some people enjoy turtling, and now they can play a Defence Class tailored specifically to them.

Major changes like these are a result of the development environment C&C; has become a part of at EA, where each new game in the series is being turned around almost with the same pace as some of its sport or racing titles. People join the team, work on a game and an expansion, and often quickly move elsewhere within the company. That means a constant infusion of new ideas, new energy, and people who want to do things their own way.

The borrowing of elements from other genres doesn't speak to any great dissatisfaction with the tropes of strategy gaming as they stand, however. "I don't think we're trying to avoid a problem as much as we're trying to make our own game," Mike says. "We're trying to make something different than we have done in the past. We have done C&C; with a certain type of play for a long time, and we have some different people involved, and we want to evolve it. That's what we're doing, more than having a problem."

A traditional hour of play in any of Command & Conquer's last three games would have begun by watching a campy cutscene, invariably featuring famous actors hamming it up and chewing the scenery. These movies were your mission briefings, your bosses explaining the mission to you, the implication being that you were never in the room with them.

Consequently, the mission that followed wouldn't feature any of those characters. Instead you'd be plopped in the middle of a shrouded environment with a couple of tanks, a few soldiers and your Mobile Construction Unit. Using the latter you'd position and build your base, command your units and, with time, conquer your enemies. Evolving C&C4; means changing, adapting or throwing out these key elements.

First, those famously camp cutscenes. Story king Sam explains their thinking for C&C; 4: "There's this belief that [FMV is] inherently campy, but the goal of the tiberium universe is actually pretty serious. It's not a happy fun tale. So what we wanted to do now is - technology's improved, you don't have to be quite as stylised as we used to be. We want to go for a grittier, more serious tone."

That means removing the barrier between the player's unseen character and the action he's witnessing. Instead of static briefings, the camera will move around and interact with the environment. "When I went to Mike and the people who run C&C; I said, 'I want to put the player there, have real environments, and have you move through them.' We did a test shoot a couple of months ago to see if we could make this work or not. We cast real actors, I wrote the script and we went and shot in a set primarily used by CSI: New York in downtown LA, and did this little standalone cinematic, which contains a couple of hints of our story."

Sam rolls the video for us. It starts in a dank prison cell, filmed entirely in first-person, via what appear to be hand-held cameras. Flanked by guards, a stern and unfamiliar man in a black suit points to you, and demands that you are released. You're frogmarched out of the cell and into a reception area, where you're handed identification papers and told that your only choice is to agree to your new master's demands. Reading between the lines, it appears that you're going to be the one to hunt and kill Kane, at the behest of the shadowy Global Defence Initiative.

The video contains no famous faces. This is what Sam meant when he said 'real actors.' After the video, Sam continues. "To be entirely fair, the C&C; series has gotten a little Shatnerian. It's gotten a little into the dramatic monologues and lots of sound and fury. I think it detracts from the story a little bit, because you see Joe [Kucan, who plays Kane] on a pulpit wearing a leather glove and waving his arms. So you can see we're trying to get the standards of performance and acting up a little bit, make the characters more convincing. We're trying to cast people who can really play the characters, as opposed to just be famous, and thus get us attention."

Putting the player in the thick of the action also means trying to explain why they'd suddenly have a bird's eye view of the action. Where, in relation to the battlefield, does the player actually exist when he's commanding and conquering?

Enter the Global Stratospheric Transport, an enormous command ship that floats high above the Earth and contains your faction's key characters - including you. We were shown the third mission of the GDI campaign, in which the GST has been shot down. Smashed into the earth, burning, crumpled. You have to set up a base of operations on the ground until you can repair and relaunch the GDI's main base. The battle takes around 10 minutes, and is transformed by the new units and ideas.

Building your base is no longer a case of positioning and unpacking your Mobile Construction Unit, and then setting up a War Factory from which to spawn tanks and other items of armoured destruction. There is no base building anymore. Now, you use The Crawler. Striding across the landscape like one of the massive AT-ATs from The Empire Strikes Back, the Crawler is everything in one. It harvests your tiberium. When you build a unit, it is held inside The Crawler - with a limit of four at a time - until you release it. Instead of having to switch back and forth between building and protecting your base, and managing the frontline of your attack, they're one and the same.

The units that come out of The Crawler can be tanks, or they can be some of the Epic units unlocked through hours of garnering experience. That unknown element means that you can use a lone, unprotected Crawler as bait, luring enemies towards you before springing enormously powerful defensive units from deep within its bowels. It's like a Russian Doll of tanks.

In this battle the Crawler walks up to a patch of tiberium and begins churning out units, as usual. But once the units are produced, it picks itself up and starts marching into the fire, all guns blazing. To put it into the clearest possible terms: your base is now a mobile superunit, deployed at will.

If your Crawler is destroyed, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the battle, as the death of your base used to. "This is a problem we've always had with RTS games, that the new guy joins his friends and the others gang up on him and knock him out in the first five minutes of play," says Mike. "What's he do? He leaves and does something else, or he plays with someone else. He leaves his friends, and the community's fractured."

So now, you respawn. There is no game over. "We're taking a first-person shooter mechanic here in allowing you to respawn into the game. The downside of respawning is you have to respawn on your side of the map and you can only do it once every minute right now. But otherwise the tech that I have earned, the units that I've earned when my Crawler is destroyed, are still in the map."

This has obvious consequences on multiplayer. In skirmishes against AI or online, matches have traditionally been lost when all of your units have been destroyed. Now, they're just going to reappear, meaning new multiplayer modes focus instead on the completion of objectives. "We have a mode called Domination," enthuses Mike. "There are five points in the map and the first team to hold all five points wins. We're keeping everybody in that experience until the end, keeping it very social."

Continuing the influence of roleplaying games into multiplayer, you can form parties with your friends and move from mission to mission together in co-op, or from multiplayer match to multiplayer match. "It's no longer the old mechanic of one guy creates a lobby and has to invite everybody for each round. We just stay together for the entire evening."

This is a model of a modern PC game. Online, sticky, learning the lessons of MMOs and post-release support. How the team articulate their plans is a problem: EA are keen to impress on us that, as a mega-global-corp, paid-for and free DLC as a 'new revenue stream' must first be announced to the city, rather than to fans. But the tone of their voices, and Mike's admitted love of Team Fortress 2, suggests they understand what modern PC gamers demand.

They're also keen to point out that the end of the tiberium saga doesn't mean the end of the C&C; universe. Given the vast changes in Command & Conquer 4, it may be just the beginning.

Graham Smith