Make Command and Conquer Great Again

One of the brilliant things nearly Command & Conquered Remastered is how information technology remains faithful to the original existent-time strategy archetype while updating it in all the correct areas.

Simply one surface area the developers left alone was a 25-year-sometime exploit. You'd think they'd want to fix information technology - just non this 1, because it gave players a fighting chance confronting the rock hard AI.

I'm talking nigh Control & Conquer's infamous sandbag exploit - aka the all-time strategy confronting the AI on the hardest missions.

For the uninitiated, Command & Conquer has an odd bug that causes the enemy AI to consider sandbags an impassable obstacle. And they don't seem interested in blowing them up, either. Weird.

Back in 1995, players discovered this bug and used it to their reward. They'd build long lines of sandbags, creeping out from their domicile base of operations and stretching across the map to wrap around the AI base, finer trapping the enemy in place.

This provided players with a crucial advantage: with the AI safely sandbagged in, the enemy couldn't send waves of soldiers and tanks onto your position. Enemy units would simply sit still, like gormless ducks, backside your lines of sandbags, clueless as to how to proceed, paralysed past an inability to nautical chart a path to your position, the idea of blowing one of the little sandbags up never popping in their little virtual heads.

This sandbag exploit is a broken, overpowered tactic that makes utilise of a bug - but given how difficult Command & Conquer was and remains, it was for a generation of players their only chance of completing the campaign.

Fast forrard to 2020, and I was surprised to observe the sandbag exploit present and correct in Command & Conquer Remastered. Had EA missed the bug? Or, was information technology left alone on purpose?

So I thought, if the developers left this bug in the game, what else did they leave untouched? What was their thinking?

I decided to find out, setting upwardly an interview with producer Jim Vessella to get stuck into the nitty gritty of Command & Conquer's bugs - 25 years after they were discovered.

Jim Vessella: When we kicked off the project and nosotros were speaking with Petroglyph - and specifically Joe Bostic, who co-created the franchise and was one of the pattern leads on the original game - we were trying to come upwardly with pillars for what creative decisions we we're gonna make and how nosotros were going to make them. The style he was phrasing it as a guiding vision was, if it was an obvious bug that, had they realised it dorsum in 1995 they would have fixed it, and then that'due south something we should consider fixing.

In that location's a few things like some crashes and some other items, typos that occurred in the original game that we ended up fixing along the way. But if it was something that was more of a feel item, and had become function of the DNA of the game, and had a long-ranging touch on balance and on the experience, that was something where we had to really be careful about whether we wanted to change it or not.

And the sandbag exploit, which, frankly, it is because the AI doesn't know how to react to sandbags - y'all can literally put them all the fashion beyond the map and the AI will consider it an impassable wall and they only won't exercise anything, and that gives you full protection from the AI - that was something that was and so cadre to the experience of the game, the game was almost balanced around that back in the day.

Even I remember every bit a kid, I had to use that exploit to crush the final mission of the GDI campaign. It took me over seven hours, I remember, to build an entire wall all the style from my base of operations in the top left, all the way over to the right, then all the style downwards the right side of the map so I could run engineers behind that wall all the way downwardly to where their tiberium silos were, and capture their money for similar an hour and a half, until the AI ran out of money and it would but commencement selling its structures until they would finally sell plenty that I could break through the base. That'southward what I had to do when I was 12 years old. It's stories like that, those are the ones that stick with us for 25 years. To take that abroad... we were really nervous about what kind of impact that would have.

This became even more evident, because there are a couple things nosotros did try and set up. A good example of this is, there'south a issues in the game where when the AI uses an airstrike against you, especially in the Nod campaign, the code stated information technology would always target the top-left enemy in the map. And then, people discovered this and what they would often exercise is they would just exit a unmarried minigunner up at the top-left of the map and the AI would always waste material their airstrike on that minigunner.

Well, we we heard that bug from the community, and nosotros're similar, oh, we should prepare that because plain that wasn't intended. That was a bug, a miss-programmed thing. And so we fixed it. Merely nosotros didn't actually empathise what the ripple effects of that were going to be. And once we released the game, nosotros started getting reports of the Nod missions condign incredibly hard because the AI was at present optimally using their airstrike and taking out cardinal base structures, taking out your commandos so you would lose the mission entirely.

All these things happened considering we unleashed the AI to now exist a lot wiser. And we're still tackling that issue. Information technology'southward taken u.s.a. two months to undo the impacts of that change. And then, you just think virtually, okay, what if we had fixed the sandbag exploit? And now, in all these missions, wherever in that location's sandbag walls the AI knows how to deal with them. It would have dramatically changed the feel and the balance of all those missions.

That was the main reason we didn't change the sandbag one - it was so core to those stories of how people experienced the game the starting time time. And then once we discovered what was starting to happen when we changed just very basic things in the AI code, it became evident how delicate the entire campaign was. So I call back that's one we will continue to forever go along in the game. It'll exist one of those iconic things of the original game.

And then what you're saying is, Control & Conquer is besides hard to crush without a crook?

Jim Vessella: Haha! Well, for me when I was a kid information technology was! Information technology was always a hard game. I think people will ever tell you Tiberian Dawn was a hard game.

I retrieve it being hard, but going back to it at present I think it's really hard!

Jim Vessella: It is really hard! It is. And, you know, even with all the exploits, I call back I couldn't trounce nearly of the expansion missions, the covert ops missions, and I still can't. They're still really tough for me. Simply something boosted we did is we added difficulty modes into the campaign for the remastered collection. A lot of core players and RTS veterans have been trying to play the entrada on hard, and the game was never balanced for that. It was never balanced to have a differential in terms of harm and health for the unlike units.

Some of those missions are but insanely difficult on hard. We were watching streamers play when the game launched, and people would have to restart a mission xl or fifty times to endeavor and become through a boxing. That was another consequence where it was only similar, wow, we just kind of made information technology worse by making the AI that much more powerful.

Sometimes you practice need those exploits to get through the campaign because that'due south only how it was counterbalanced around those back in the mean solar day. We nerfed the hard difficulty a bit in our patch at the end of June, and I think that's made it a piddling bit meliorate for people to get through that. But information technology'south just so fragile, that entrada. We would be a fiddling bit nervous about changing anything major at this point.

It's pretty crazy to think a video game has this fascinating balance debate 25 years subsequently, right? What other game has that after that length of time? The airstrike thing is a 25-year-old question!

Jim Vessella: It is. We've been tackling another one over the past week in our subreddit with the community, which is in multiplayer, i of the peak tactics correct now is to exercise the archetype engineer, APC rush, and information technology'due south become then abused... once more, that's simply part of the experience of the original game, but it's become so abused, nosotros decided it would be worth taking some activeness on information technology. So we've put a poll out to the community near how they'd like to see united states of america adapt this. Nosotros've been talking to a bunch of our community council members, a bunch of the community in Discord, and we came up with these 3 or four different proposals. And nosotros put that out to the subreddit and had the community vote on it on how to tackle this.

For multiplayer, what nosotros've decided to do, what the majority of the community voted to do, was to move the prerequisite for building the APC onto the repair facility, and so it pushes it back in the game past a couple minutes. That'south something where it's a balance issue we weren't really planning on tackling but has become so prevalent that we wanted to ready that up. But it's still debated. It wasn't unanimous. There was still a chunk of the community that wanted it to stay the way it was, considering that's just what C&C has been the past 25 years.

So we're trying to take all these changes very seriously and make sure we're getting the customs's feedback on it before we do it. Only hopefully it'll be for the better. That modify will be for skirmish and multiplayer only, and then that we don't uproot the entrada and cause any any major issues in that location.

Is it hard to desire to rebalance Control & Conquer knowing there volition be some people who retrieve irresolute it at all will ruin their childhoods?

Jim Vessella: Aye, absolutely. There's a community projection called C&C net - it's been around for over a decade - they have been a lot of the stewards of the legacy experience of the game. They try and proceed information technology as authentic as possible, and that was an inspiration for united states also. And so, we've included several of their developers onto our community council. And so we've been billowy ideas most the game with them for the past 18 months as nosotros were developing the game, then going through launch and even now, for adjusting some of these problems mail launch.

There are definitely people out at that place who want it to remain exactly the same as it was. I would even say that us as the developers, nosotros kind of lean in that fashion a little bit. That was one of our artistic visions: to continue it as authentic every bit possible to maintain that feel. Each ane of these is an individual case. We bring it before the community and sometimes they surprise u.s. and everyone'southward unanimously, 'please change this because it's just gonna make the game better.' A skillful example of that, which is as well in this balance discussion we're doing, is to remove naval structures from the new victory condition, considering people are putting a Naval Yard way off the coast, and that'due south stalemating games because people can't destroy it, and people are griefing information technology and information technology's making a bad online experience. That's one where even the purists are similar, 'yeah, delight change this because information technology's merely causing grief in multiplayer.'

Another one nosotros're changing in this balance patch is we're normalising the landing fourth dimension for the Nod cargo plane from the airstrip. That'due south some other ane that's been hotly debated for 25 years. Even the C&C net community has tried to solve this by speeding up the aeroplane so it goes at lightspeed across the map and drops off the thing. There's such a departure between where you spawn on the map to when you get your unit of measurement - betwixt like, one second and 19 seconds - and so it's a huge impact. And obviously you would never pattern an RTS game these days with that sort of variance. So that'southward something nosotros had pretty unanimous support for from the community, and is something we've improved in the patch.

It'due south not merely balance in terms of what'due south more powerful, or what'due south better. In June terminal month, I wrote an article about a weird UFO-looking tile in the original Command & Conquer. I didn't remember this from back in the day when I played the game, but I'm sure y'all'll know all about it. For the remaster information technology'due south been... is the word stock-still? I'm not certain what the right discussion is to depict what's happened to information technology! But information technology's conspicuously not a UFO in the remaster. I'd honey to go some insight into the internal give-and-take around that.

Jim Vessella: That was another 1 where at that place'due south a lot of backstory and history to it, a lot of which I wasn't even aware of when we kicked it off, but I learned most it myself as we went through the process. I kind of concord! It looked like a UFO to me when I was growing upward. And when yous look at the legacy game now it does, too. But there were evidently some statements from Westwood back in the twenty-four hours that, oh, it'southward actually more of a crashed cockpit and the community has interpreted it differently.

We had all the tiles assigned out to Lemon Sky, our fine art programmer. They took a pass at it, and they came back with this crashed Orca-looking helicopter cockpit. We thought it looked good and nosotros felt information technology would lucifer up with what some of the Westwood developers had stated dorsum in the day. And then nosotros decided to get forrad with that.

But at same time, I've really appreciated watching the customs modernistic scene, and some of the community content that's coming out. We're actually starting to incorporate some of the customs content into the official game - some of the maps. I remember one of the first mods that went up was a replacement of that tile to await more like an Hd version of the UFO tile. I recollect that's great! I retrieve that is admittedly what this ecosystem should be about. Information technology is for the community to have a voice, to create their ain content and to define it that fashion. I think that'south but crawly.

I think it will yet go on to be a hotly-debated field of study about whether the original Westwood vision manifestly of it being a cockpit, versus a hint of maybe something else to come. Information technology'southward but fun! It'south fun to have those things where the customs can actually arrive there and put their ain stamp on it.

When I was reporting that piece I was looking at what people thought nearly it dorsum in the day, and there were some hilarious things people idea it was. Someone said they idea it was a toilet for years.

Jim Vessella: Haha! That's the interesting affair about these old games. The pixellation was so smudgy, yous could interpret a lot of these things equally anything. When we were doing the war manufactory in Cerise Alarm, there are these little blue barrel things or something. We were similar, what are those? We don't even know what those are. We interpreted them as drums with water in them and it was like, okay, certain. You have to take your best judge and endeavour to find what some of these things are. But everyone's got their own vision, and that's what we love near the mods. People are welcome to do their own interpretation of it.

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Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-command-and-conquer-remastered-developers-left-in-a-25-year-old-exploit-so-players-still-had-a-fighting-chance

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