My C&C3 Community Summit Wrap-Up!

Banshee

As I said in the previous news, I've worked hard in these days to write my experience in this C&C3 Community Summit. I had an awesome experience and the game is very cool, far from being perfect, but it's much better than any Battle For Middle Earth game. As far as I could play, you get that cool the C&C experience when you build power plants, refinery, but the game is much faster than any old C&C (including Red Alert 2 and Generals). The game is faster because cranes really speeds up the base construction part and tiberium flows fast, even with 2 harvesters (although I usually had 4, which exausted my tiberium fields quite fast in the game). You usually start close to one tiberium field only in the maps we played, although in some of them there were also tiberium in the center.

For the fans of Generals, and that's the part that I disliked, there is a unit called Surveyor that, with crane, becomes a sort of improved Dozer. If you are Nod, bring an army to the enemy base with at least one of those surveyors and some obelisk of light ready to deploy and let the ugly rushing begins. To make things worse, this unit can be built since the beggining of the game. In short, you can already bring one close to your enemy base to build your barracks there to flood it with infantry.

The maps are very detailed and the particle effects of the environment of the game makes them look awesome. The maps we played were symetric, which is bad and predictable, but the Leipzig gameplay video also showed us that there are great non-symetric maps in the game. The symetric maps are needed for tournaments, since they have a perfect ballance, however, these guys who play tournaments always plays the same maps, so I hope the vast majority of the maps aren't symetric. One of the maps we played had each base protected by only 3 bridges that can be blowed up. I believe they can fix this design problem before the game is released.

Anyway, the movies are looking very promising, both FMV and CG ones. The missions received several improvements in terms of interface. One of the most noticeable things is that, if you get lost, there will be numbers related to each quest showing the direction of the quest. Missions will have FMVs in the start, when you get new quests, the camera will move to the target place, usually rotate and there will be a briefing or an ingame movie in the radar screen.

Regarding the interface, the sidebar you guys seen so much is really excelent to manage your construction options and to upgrade the units. You'll need some time to get used with the repair, sell, power down buttons, which are isolated from the rest. There are shortcuts that will allow you to choose several formations and preview them while you are choosing them. Another interesting thing in the interface is that the radar screen is available for you since the beggining of the game, so you'll know which part of the map you start at and you'll be able to use it to send your soldiers to the borders of the map to scout the enemy. Building the radar buildings will make the map more visible there and, of course, it will point all units in the scouted part of the map (yours and enemy).

In terms of units, the build order for the 3 sides is almost equal. So, if you know how to play GDI, you'll know how to play Nod and the Aliens. Some units make the game cooler, like the Zone Trooper that can jump into the middle of the enemy base, Black Hand Trooper can get into his carryall, engineer can rebuild and, then command big enemy vehicles. Most of the GDI special powers are related to reinforcements. You can reinforce with pitbull jeeps, snipers (nearly useless, except for the ability to call juggernaught bombardments), zone troopers, etc... Nod powers will help you to make sneaky attacks. Aliens also brings several reinforcements with the special powers. All sides will be able to scan unrevealed sections of the map and detect stealth units. This will certainly dismotivate many newbies to scout the map.

And remember, this was just an alpha and it can change a lot in 3 months, but for those who like constant battles, this game was certainly done for you. I'll post a more detailed article about it, but while I don't do it, check my articles about the summit itself. Really awesome experience!

-> C&C3 Community Summit Wrap-Up - Part 1: The Arrival
-> C&C3 Community Summit Wrap-Up - Part 2: Invading EA
-> C&C3 Community Summit Wrap-Up - Part 3: The Last Day

Hotcakes · Guest

Thanks for the warp up! It's good to get a long-term fan's opinion on the game finally. Sounds like it's shaping up to be exactly what I feared - a great game, but an absolutely disgraceful (Tiberium-based) Command and Conquer.