It's hard to talk about Westwood Studio's upcoming Command and Conquer without talking about Dune II. Anyone familiar with the latter game will recognize that Command and Conquer is an evolution of the real time strategy engine that, according to our own marketing blurbs, is "addictive fun." When dealing with a situation like that, the science of design becomes rather poignant and self-directed. How do you improve upon a game without ruining the delicate balance of gameplay, which in Dune II's case was the mixing of real time combat with base building and resource gathering.
The first principle is to acknowledge that this indeed was fundamental to what made Dune II work. One clue to this truth is the actual number of letters, actual, shocking hate mail, as well as the warm fuzzy kind, that requested, demanded, and cajoled for a scenario disk for Dune II. In fact, and I hope this placates those who threatened to blow up our humble little offices because we didn't release said scenario disk, the original, core development team on Command and Conquer are those who were assigned to the creation of a Dune II scenario disk.
It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be only a couple of months work, max. But then silly designer questions came up. Ones like, "Can we vary the terrain a little bit? Maybe introduce more terrain obstacles, or perhaps a different terrain entirely? Can we experiment with some rendered art here? What can we do to improve the enemy's tactics? How about some new vehicles?" And the worst yet, "How about network and modem play? Can you imagine...two player Dune II? Perhaps, four player!?"
All of which had the poor coders screaming, "It's just a scenario disk!"
If you want to become a game designer, follow this first cue; never acknowledge reality. All of these stupid, silly questions were of course what the working engine wanted, and of course impossible to implement on a single scenario disk. Or two. Or eight. All these were good ideas (we think) but on a different game entirely.
So we made a different game entirely. Or not. Command and Conquer is the next step in Dune II, but again we hearken back to the same principle; if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The Dune II formula worked. We aren't going to mess around with harvest-build-fight. Unfortunately, when you concentrate on scenario design for three years it kind of messes you up. You do not, for instance, want to be on sand, sand, sand. Aside from living and working in Las Vegas (sand, sand, sand and casinos)you get tired of Arrakis and the way it looks on a computer screen. There were intriguing possibilities: a temperate terrain, jungles, urban settings, snow, night scenes, but unfortunately Arrakis was a barren planet.
In the end, we decided to go with the Earth. We could have made up a different planet, but it was intriguing working at home. Besides allowing more interesting terrain that was familiar, we've also found that our players liked choosing their own destinies and picking their own fights on a map. The most intriguing map was, to us, Earth's. If you're going to fight for the fate of a planet, it's kind of fun realizing you've just won Germany, or are making moves to take the Ukraine.
All of this spoke to "story." Games are valued in the "story" category not necessarily for a plot and script that are going to compete against the likes of "Pulp Fiction," but for how integrated and justifiable the game's total experience is for the player. With a few games recently released, and some that we're going to see in the next year, it becomes clear that you can wrap any setting, any story, any pretext around Dune II's basic real time strategy engine and still have a fun game. We could have done classic wars. But which "story," which setting, which pretext would have accelerated the action and intensified the experience most? That was the key question.
Think about what Command and Conquer is. You look upon a battlefield from your computer monitor. You're fed vital information via an omniscient and impersonal computer, but your mind is focused on what your enemy's going to do next, and how you're going to counterstrike. Enemy position. Relative strengths. What can you scrape up with the troops still standing? How to spend those last few dollars? Maneuvering room. What to surprise him with next. What ugly surprises his new technology has in store for you, and discovering what new technology can turn him for a loop. Timing.
It's a mix of familiar conventional warfare, with the shining, double edged sword of new technology and discovery. Knights and peasants in a medieval setting? Too slow. Cavalry and muskets in a Civil War setting? Too familiar. Space ships and ray guns? Too alien.
Command and Conquer found its answers in a battle for the future of Earth, about ten years from now. You now have access to all kinds of interesting technology that lets you do horrendous things to soldiers' minds, the Earth's precious ecosphere, and your favorite enemy. You're still using soldiers and tanks, but you get to outfit the grunts with napalm and grenades, and defense contractors are playing around with stealth technology for tanks. You'll have to deal with satellite uplinks, trench warfare, the good old Ukraine, and the strange, newly transformed landscapes that are the unpredictable result of the New World Order.
Thanks to the demands of the setting, the Command and Conquer art team has had to push Westwood's homefront art technology. Because everything had to be modern looking and also look like live, from the field, satellite uplinks to your computer monitor, the y render, digitize, and meld renderings and full motion digitizing just to stop the designers from whining.
This setting also opened the door for all kinds of intriguing and interesting scenarios, rather than the kill-kill-kill fare that was the realm of Dune II. Some of the new missions include objectives that require you to capture, not destroy, your target so that new technology could be acquired. There will be escort missions. Seek-and-tag as well as seek-and-destroy missions. Rescue missions. Recovery. Rebuilding. Defensive. As well as the good, old fashioned, highly gratifying kill-kill-kill (it's a matter of pacing).
The challenge was to offer the player all of that without losing the precious balance of harvest-build-combat. This required our smart-mouthed designers and coders, who grumbled that "a Dune II scenario disk would have been much easier," to construct a sharper, more responsive, more challenging AI for enemy play. A good percentage of design effort, as well as the dedication of at least one programmer for two years, was spent on making an AI to analyze not only the player's general strategy and respond accordingly, but field-group units that could respond more flexibly at a smaller level to a unit-on-unit skirmish.
But just to throw a wrench in the works was the feature that was the principle reason for creating Command and Conquer as a separate game; network and modem play. With the majority of development effort spent on designing challenging one-player scenarios with a responsive enemy, it's a little disheartening to realize that the best scenarios in your game are the multi-player net-modem ones. There's just no way to beat the fun and challenge of a human "AI." Even now, in the early constructs of the working game, everyone's clamoring to "test" the two to eight player scenarios.
Well, we'll all see! We're working hard and long on this one, and as is always the case, the network/modem efforts are proving a challenging design issue, along with the many others we set ourselves for Command and Conquer. We hope you find this upcoming design from Westwood/Virgin as much fun to play as we've had putting it all together!
