Electronic Arts demonstrated a brief segment of the recently announced Command and Conquer 4 at GamesCom, providing a tantalising glimpse at the next in the popular series of real-time strategy games. EA Senior Producer Mike Glosecki (aka "Big Mike") was on-hand to run us through a small mission and answer a few questions.

The first thing to note is that the term "conclusion" was thrown around here in the context of the story - C&C4 aims to wrap up the chronicle of the previous titles. A big goal of the game is to answer all the questions raised in the "Tiberium saga". This possibly-final title sets the scene with the Earth only having a few years to go before it is rendered uninhabitable by Tiberium. Mike kicked off the demo with a recap of the teaser trailer - the short full-motion video providing the introduction with Kane talking to the GDI honchos for a mysterious purpose. Sorry, we didn't get any more information about this.

"Conclusion" was part of what EA are calling "the four Cs of C&C4". I forgot to write down what the other three were so I assume they're not very importa- oh wait, I did write them down: "classes", "crawler", and "career" - these are the three major changes in the game, although there's one other doozey that I'll save until later.



The class system basically refers to the fact that when you are playing, you'll pick from three high level overall strategies - offence, defence, or support. Each of these has different (and fairly obvious, just from the names) unit types, advantages and disadvantages. We only got a brief look at these due to a software crash so not a lot to say about this, unfortunately.

The crawler is probably the most interesting innovation from a gameplay perspective. The game begins with your crawler - you can pick a location for it to spawn and presto, there it is. Your crawler is basically your home base - it is a massive walking base (think AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars) that forms the basis for your game. All your units will be built in your crawler and deployed from there.

Making your base some big slow moving target sounds like it might lead to a lot of really, really short games as everyone targets crawlers to wipe them out. Crawlers, however, respawn once they are taken out. This instantly raises a few interesting points about strategy. The first one that leapt to my mind was related to spawn camping (having observed this phenomenon in almost every multiplayer FPS game since the dawn of time), but Mike quickly mentioned that this was quickly observed in play testing and they've mitigated it by the simple expedient of basically exploderating the entire area around a spawning crawler to render camping a less effective tactic.



The crawler also has a healing effect on all units within a certain range, providing a pretty powerful defensive bonus. Part of the reason for the respawning and hard-to-kill crawler is to make the game more accessible to gamers - EA have long observed the frustration in newbie gamers when they get wiped out early on in an RTS game. This way they can stay in the game longer and - it is hoped - get more enjoyment out of it.

The final "C" is the career aspect. You'll have a persistent character throughout your game with which you can earn XP each time you kill units. You can then level up which will score you access to new units and new weapons. This is so depressingly console-like and such an increasingly common gameplay mechanic there's not a lot else to say about it - plus we didn't get a lot more on it anyway. Other than it occurs in multiplayer as well, which raises the usual obvious questions about play balancing issues when players of different XP are competing. Stay tuned.

The game engine has been tweaked a little bit to provide improved visuals - you'll now see subtle dynamic lighting effects on the terrain when laser blasts are flying around and rockets are exploding everywhere. There's a new destruction system as well; bits and pieces go flying off targets in a most satisfactory manner as they're getting strafed by your units.



Multiplayer will, of course, be a big part of the game - C&C4 will support up to 5v5 players in various game types and configurations, as well as the usual support for AI players to fill in the gaps. Mike mentioned the multiplayer focus is more on completing objectives, rather than just crushing the enemy into smithereens. Also interesting is some of the new matchmaking stuff that will let you join up with your friends easily (... I've heard that before) and stick with them for the duration of an entire series of online games without having to go back to any lobbies.

At this point Mike dropped a bit of a bombshell, almost incidentally. One of the other journalists asked if there would be an online sign-in for the multiplayer aspect of the game, to which Mike replied there indeed would be - and it would be also required for the regular single-player stuff as well. There was a bit of a dumbfounded silence for a second and I clarified, asking if that meant there'd be no offline mode at all - and Mike confirmed that was indeed the case. So, I hope you all have some juicy Internet.

We really only scratched the surface of Command and Conquer 4 at GamesCom - no doubt like almost all RTS games it is fractal in nature with untold amounts of detail just waiting to be explored. The new bits and pieces certainly promise to shake up the scene a bit (poking around on various forums reveals a lot of people already up in arms about the crawler concept) and avid C&C fans will be keen to find out the conclusion to what has been one of the longest and most successful series in RTS history.

For more info and media, check out our locally hosted Command and Conquer 4 game page.