Command & Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight Multiplayer Beta Hands On

Every now and then a real time strategy title comes along that revolutionizes the genre and adds an extra spice to the point-click-build-attack multiplayer gaming experience. Others merely cash in on an established franchise, providing more content for fans, but little else. I was given the opportunity to sit down and play an early multiplayer build of the latest Command and Conquer title – Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight. This was an early beta with the usual bugs to expect, but there was enough meat on the bones to come to a tentative conclusion about where on that sacred spectrum of strategy gaming C&C4 would sit.

For multiplayer battling a game’s context is important. Even for the most seasoned C&C strategist an appreciation of C&C4’s back-story is helpful for putting the multiplayer experience in some kind of context. Tiberium Twilight takes place 15 years after the story of Command and Conquer 3 and the invasion of the Scrin. Tiberium has really got into gear and has spread all over the planet. In order to stop it once and for all, Kane and the Brotherhood of Nod strike a truce with the Global Defense Initiative (GDI). This uneasy truce lasts a further 15 years – until extremists from both Nod and the GDI revert to their old selves and start killing each other again.

It’s within that rubric that the Tiberium Twilight multiplayer experience kicks off. Once again Nod and the GDI hate each other’s guts and want a good old scrap. So far, so good. At the moment only the Nod and GDI forces are playable (a move that has angered some rather irate C&C3 fans, who had been perfecting their Scrin builds) but for long time fans of the series, a return to the main protagonists may be a welcome change. Currently the only available game mode is domination, ranging in size from 1v1 to 5v5. This mode suits me just fine when it comes to multiplayer gaming (I’m all about the dominating) but in order to increase the shelf life of this title EA are going to have to roll out some other modes to add some variability.

What C&C4 lacks in game modes is mitigated in part by the good work that has been done on the graphical side. Put bluntly, the game looks really good. The maps are well rendered, the textures look fresh, unit animations are on the whole interesting to look at and EA have managed to find a nice balance between frame rate and pretty effects. This is quite pleasing to see, many RTS gamers have long yearned for a title that they can enjoy playing competitively without killing their graphics card. The protean dichotomy of prettiness versus playability is not completely solved, but from what we’ve seen so far, C&C4 makes a decent attempt. Some criticism can be leveled at the level and unit design, hardcore fans might be put off by the slightly cartoony approach that the game designers have taken to the title. You won’t find much realism here. But then, when have you ever found much realism in a C&C game. That’s not, and has never been, its draw card.

C&C4’s draw card is supposed to be its game play. With the earlier release of C&C3, EA games announced their intention to treat the multiplayer experience as a “sport”. This new focus promised some interesting innovations in game design, and it also promised to make RTS gaming more accessible to new gamers. C&C4 attempts to put some of these new innovations into play in order to shift the multiplayer experience into a new gear. The result is a multiplayer RTS, that looks like a multiplayer RTS, feels like a multiplayer RTS, but is abnormally removed from any other multiplayer RTS we’ve yet seen. The basic game play architecture is the same – taking a page from THQ’s phenomenally successful Company of Heroes – victory is achieved by the capturing and holding of victory points. Also borrowing from Company of Heroes, is the ability to play as a certain class; offense, defense or support. Each class offers different units and different abilities. Interestingly, these classes can be switched throughout the game, and different team members can have the same class. This could plausibly make game play more flexible. But it’s also plausible that allowing team mates to switch classes at whim just removes the importance of picking classes in the first place.

C&C4 introduces three notable deviations from the classic RTS formula. Firstly, there is no need for established resource gathering or in game economies. The more control nodes (victory points) you hold, the more command points trickle into your coffers – which can be spent on troops. Secondly, instead of setting up forward or vanguard bases to protect Tiberium mining operations – the damn stuff just periodically falls from the sky and lands in predetermined locations for you to collect with any unit. It gives you command points and research points, which can be cashed in for unit upgrades. This is kind of hard to comprehend. A real time strategy game without micro-managed economies and base construction? What?

I must confess, I may be a bit affected. My usual strategy when playing RTS titles is to dig in and turtle. Such a strategy is now largely impossible – at least without the support of some fairly generous team mates. This frustration is exacerbated by a third change, your Mobile Command Vehicle (MCV) is now totally mobile. It has the ability to up ship and move from location to location before embedding itself again to churn out troops (all units are now made by the MCV). Now, this is not totally revolutionary. Mobile HQ’s have been in play since Starcraft. The kicker is that unlike Starcraft, or Dawn of War, or any other RTS, when your HQ is destroyed in C&C4 you can just respawn it by firing it back down from the heavens. That is not a metaphor. It is literally fired from the skies back down into the battle after a short cool down period. This innovation has fundamentally changed the way C&C4 multiplayer games play out. Instead of concerted and strategic assaults on key locations, the map is just overrun with hordes of spammed units who clash and then retreat around the central victory points. By downplaying the importance of MCVs C&C4 has inadvertently downplayed the importance of environmental tactics. In a strategy game, this seems like an odd thing to have done.

These new changes are rather radical. They have the effect of making C&C4 less about building tiers or holding points, but more about being hyper-responsive and flexible when it comes to what unit you want to spam. This is definitely a new take on traditional RTS game play, and it remains to be seen if this new fast paced style that values unit combos over tactics is going to be readily supported amongst competitive gamers.

If EA games wishes to drag the Command and Conquer franchise into the fast paced, action packed, and slightly disorientating world of competitive online gaming, then Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight could very well be their piece de resistance. For those competitive gamers looking for a more traditional tactical real time strategy offering, that doesn’t try to re-invent the wheel, then Tiberium Twilight may be worth a look, but nothing more. In sum, C&C4's multiplayer offering feels like a bit of a mixed bag. All the fundamentals of a good game are there, and it’s possible that its new take on the multiplayer experience will find some traction amongst a new generation of competitive strategy gamers. We may just have to wait until March 2010 to find out for sure.