Sabtu, 11 Februari 2012

Command and Conquers Tiberium Wars

When I look back across my gaming life, I realize that I've pretty much played every RTS known to man. The reason for that was the original Command & Conquer. When it first came out in 1996, I was fascinated by this new form of strategy. Sure, at the time the grognards said that RTS games weren't "real" strategy games. RTS fans shot back that on a real battlefield, commanders don't have the luxury of unlimited time to choose their next move. Me, all I cared about was that Command & Conquer let me exercise both halves on my brain -- the part that relishes thinking, planning and planting my boot on another player's face and the part that enjoys watching stuff blow up real good. That's why when the opportunity came up to go to EA's Los Angeles campus and go hands-on with the long-awaitedCommand & Conquer 3, I had to go. Could the new C&C recapture the visceral magic of its series predecessors?

My answers would come in the form of casual conversation I had with C&C3 producer Amer Ajami while we played several multiplayer games. My first surprise came the instant we started up the game. The sidebar control system is back. For those unfamiliar with the sidebar control system, build orders in C&C 3 are given via a group of nested and tabbed buttons on the side of the screen rather than selecting them from buildings. They also can't be queued up. When players select a building, it gets built and then must be placed. The only way to build more than one thing at a time is to build cranes on the battlefield which provide a new build tab on the sidebar. This was an updated version of the control scheme the previous games had, and revisiting it wasn't like seeing an old friend so much as using muscles you haven't exercised in a while. I could practically hear the rust flaking off of mental gears that hadn't spun for the better part of a decade as I tried to get my head around the control scheme.

When I mentioned this to Ajami, he acknowledged my difficulty but said that there were deliberate reasons why the team went with this control scheme. "For one thing, it brings back the classic C&C feel," Ajami said. He also pointed out that old C&C fans like me really liked it once they got into it. It turns out that non-RTS gamers who had been drawn into the genre by the Battle for Middle-Earth franchise also found it an easier control scheme.

Ajami was right about old C&C fans, at least. It didn't take long before I was clicking through the interface like it was 2001. In doing so, I noticed that the sidebar has been significantly updated. Players can't queue buildings, but they can queue soldiers, vehicles and air units. Players more familiar with the current generation of RTS games can also build units straight from buildings. "Going back to the sidebar doesn't mean we reject all the innovations that have come along since the original," Ajami said.

As I played my first game, I realized that Ajami might have something here. The sidebar interface might not work for every RTS, but as I built up my GDI base and started constructing units, I realized that the sidebar worked really well for the strategic biases ofCommand & Conquer 3. Put simply, this game is fast. I had a solidly working base pumping out tier 2 units in about 10 minutes (which is practically instantaneous in RTS terms).

The game is also pretty small in terms of the number of buildings and units available to each of the three sides. Unlike most RTS games in the post-Warcraft III era, C&C 3 doesn't rely on "hero" units, special abilities or intricate tactical micromanagement. The game is a throwback to an era of cheap, disposable purpose-designed units that contribute to a down-and-dirty back and forth feel to the gameplay. Expect a lot of units to die and a lot of stuff to blow up in a game of C&C 3. After the last few years in which "elegance" was the RTS watchword, it felt really good to get back in the mud again and throw lots of stuff at an opponent. The sidebar seems to be a compact and very usable system for the relatively small number of build options in the game.File is available for secure downloading