With the hard-core capitalist mindset that some of EA's executives no doubt have, there would be no reason to go back to Command & Conquer and remaster it. Strategies don't sell very well on consoles, full-motion video with B-level actors has long since replaced motion capture for A-level actors, and the competition in this niche is very high. If EA were going to revive Command & Conquer , why not just keep releasing free-to-play mobile strategy games that have already served the company well?
Fortunately, while capitalism continues to dominate the planet ( but not space ), a development team from EA, Petroglyph, and Lemon Sky Studios have teamed up to revive the series.Command & Conquer in Command & Conquer: Remastered , a port of the first two Command & Conquer PC games . The port contains a variety of user-friendly updates while striving to recreate the experience of the original games as closely as possible.
Last month, GDC Twitch producer Jim Wessella summarized how the company improved its low-resolution graphics, made it online, and handled the telecommuting work of COVID-19. Here are the main takeaways that Wessella shared on stream.
Improving resources
Command & Conquer: Remastered is the fourth major strategy franchise to be remastered in recent years. According to Wessell, his EA development team took note of the success of the Starcraft , Warcraft III and Age of Empires remasters , and began to test the waters in the Command & Conquer community , trying to figure out what players want from a full remaster.
However, in order to satisfy the fans' demands, the team needed to restore the Command & Conquer source code first . Although EA acquired Westwood in 1998, the studio's merger with EA Pacific in 2003 resulted in a code loss. Fortunately, Petroglyph Studios, founded by three former Westwood employees, was able to restore it.
Through source code restoration, the C&C: Remastered development teamWessell said she was able to implement an essential feature that has become the standard for remasters: real-time switching between classic and new graphics. Malaysia-based outsourcing visual resources studio Lemon Sky Studios examined concept art, imagery from the original game and other sources, creating new 3D assets that match the pixelated graphics players are accustomed to.
Wessella said that the whole process was like developing graphical assets for a brand new AAA game. After creating these 3D assets, the studio staff ran them through the rendering pipeline, resulting in 2D sprites. "Usually all the cars in the game are displayed at 32 angles, and the soldiers at 8 angles, so the studio had to re-animate and export them every frame to match the sprites when switching the graphics modes in real time."
The work on updating the Lemon Sky resources even touched on the ancient conspiracy theory that arose back in the days of Command & Conquer.... In one of the first missions, a blurry, pixelated sprite can be seen at the edge of the map, next to which players rebuild their base. By pressing the spacebar and switching to the new graphics, you can understand that this is a downed helicopter - a completely common occurrence for a war-themed game as it was presented in the 90s (below is a comparison of old and new graphics).
However, the creation of this sprite made Wessell laugh: it turns out that this "downed helicopter" since 1998 was the cause of the wildest speculations . For many years, fans thought it was a UFO, a reference to the sci-fi surroundings that subsequent games in the series acquired over time. All the while Westwood insisted it was a helicopter. However, it appears that modders on the Steam Workshop are already in the process of "fixing" this unique sprite.
Initially, the real-time graphics switch was intended only for the redesigned campaign modes, but following fan requests, the original game's developers said they were looking to enhance the player's ability to switch between "classic" and "HD graphics". “The real-time switchover was primarily due to the technical magic of Petroglyph and Steve Toll, the lead programmer of the original 1996 Red Alert. Initially, we only managed to achieve the graphics switch in the campaign, ”explained Wessella.
But after the start of playtesting, Toll insisted that players be able to switch graphics in any of the single-player game modes. While this feature did not make it to multiplayer, it was a great achievement that will allow new players to see what strategy games looked like in the 90s.
Command & Conquer: Remastered contains some interesting improvements that reflect the progress of games and the desire to solve the difficult task of preserving old games. One of the notable changes was the renaming of two vehicles: Humvee and Apache became "light scout" ("light reconnaissance") and "attack helicopter" ("attack helicopter"); thanks to this, the developers avoided copyright battles with the owners of the corresponding brands in the world of military equipment.
The developers of C&C: Remastered had to face the unique reality of the game, which used full-motion video - all cutscenes and their sound were originally created for machines with low audio and video quality. In addition, the terms of the remastering of their work were not always stipulated in the contracts with the commercials.
Some of the actors are no longer with us. “We were very saddened by the passing of the actor Eric Martin, who played the role of General Sheppard. He didn't know we were going to remaster the game, ”says Wessella. “But we contacted his family. His family was thrilled to have his legacy live on in the updated version of the game. "
In terms of sound, the music composer of the original game, Frank Klepaki, helped the developers connect with Kia Hatzinger, who voiced the in-game messages. She agreed to record her voice again. EA has previously reported that all of its original recordings have been lost.
Voiceover of Electronic Video Agent (EVA) messages from the original game to the music of Frank Klepaki
Another interesting aspect of "retouching" was the balance in multiplayer. In the single player mode of the game, the task was reduced to the most accurate recreation of the original gameplay. But if C&C: Remastered has a vibrant community of multiplayer players, they will be demanding better balance for the game, which was designed over twenty years ago.
And despite the controversy, Wessella said these balance fixes will be made. One of the elements patched after our interview was support for players who were defeated in multiplayer, but not yet completely destroyed in the game. According to the original design, they were essentially the losers, although “in theory” they still had a chance to win.
According to Wessell, “If you are running low on electricity, then you are essentially completely out of the game. If there is not enough energy, then it takes 27 times more time to build any object ”. From EA's point of view, this fix is more like a bug fix than a balance change that is done in games like Valorant.... Wessella says that other fixes are being considered, but even if EA turns out to be conservative about these improvements, it's worth noting that it was not the first developer to "update" older games. For example, when the Age of Empires remastering team began reworking the franchise , they started with new content that would impact the game's multiplayer.
Meeting the virus
In a sense, any story posted on Gamasutra in 2020 will be affected by the spread of COVID-19. The worldwide pandemic has impacted developers in many different ways. In the development of Command & Conquer Remastered, the transition to work from home fell on the stage of "polishing" the game, when the most important were the elimination of bugs and the final playtesting.
EA and its development partners were probably the most vulnerable at this point. Although the team is accustomed to working remotely due to the large geographic distances between EA, Petroglyph and Lemon Sky, they have lost the ability to use EA's wide range of testing tools. “Our QA department is located overseas in EA studios in Europe and India,” explains Wessella. “We couldn't use the largest test offices with PCs because we didn't have access to them. We were unable to fix some bugs and make optimizations. "
It was an odd time to release - the game was of course tested and not on par with Early Access games, but it didn't go through the same rigorous quality assurance process as other EA games.
And yet, despite the worldwide epidemic, the trio of companies involved in the revival of Command & Conquer were able to release their product and revive a series of strategies that had been dormant for more than a decade.
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