Command & Conquer 4 Beta Impressions

A few weeks ago I joined the Command & Conquer 4 beta with an eye to writing up some impressions. When I started playing, I encountered a version of C&C that’s profoundly different from any game in the franchise. In place of the traditional base-building, an entirely new, decentralised system has been created. Players begin with a single command unit capable of constructing any and all units available to the player. The command unit is mobile, capable of planting itself in the ground to send out an army. Aside from the in-game mechanics, other changes have been made to the game’s multiplayer mode. After every match, experience is earned which eventually unlocks different units in the matches. The character-building of MMO’s and online shooters has been mixed into the RTS genre.

One of my earliest and least enjoyable experiences in the beta was of a particular scenario. I would send out a huge force with an equally sized build queue, this force would capture as many points as possible until eventually I encountered the enemy and slugged it out. As they moved their force on to one of my points, I would move mine on to one of theirs. Several matches devolved into a merry-go-round of units shuffling from one control point to another. It didn’t feel particularly satisfying and resulted in such narrow victories that they felt more like a product of good luck than strategic thinking.

Later on, I started playing a few larger matches with four or five players on each side. These matches encountered their own problems. The population cap that controls how many units are available is split between each player. This forces a profound level of co-operation on the teams if they want to win matches. In practice there wasn’t much communication going on and a lot of players just quit as soon as the match went the other team’s way. As an individual player, I felt neutered with no ability to strike out on my own.

The over-arching experience system wasn’t something I wanted or needed to be added to the franchise. I understand the logic behind it – if it worked for Call Of Duty and Battlefield then why can’t it work for Command & Conquer? The problem is that locking away a particular gun is wholly different to locking away a specific unit. A good FPS player can get plenty of kills with the starting weapon in any shooter. Regardless of skill, an RTS game requires the player to make full use of every soldier and vehicle at their disposal. I found that I experienced a great deal of self-doubt when playing C&C4. I would ask myself if I just lost a match because I wasn’t the best player or because I didn’t have the right units. Seeing an enemy crush my forces with a unit that I didn’t even realise existed was very demoralising.

C&C4 isn’t a complete shift into the ‘real-time tactics’ subgenre popularised by games such as Ground Control and World In Conflict. Instead, it’s an attempt to integrate some of those more action orientated mechanics with traditional RTS gameplay. I’m not convinced that they’ve taken the best elements of both genres. The choice of three different classes and experience based unlocks retain all the needless complexity of older strategy games. Without the base-building and economic aspects of older RTS titles, that complexity doesn’t seem to translate into depth. As far as modern RTS games are concerned, I’m more interested in the extreme fringes being explored by Relic and The Creative Assembly with their Dawn Of War and Total War franchises. C&C4, at least in terms of its multiplayer component, occupies a middle ground that I don’t find particularly interesting.