Red Alert 3 Q&A Feature

When Red Alert 3's Producer, Amir Ajami, invited our TVG correspondent into EAs private chronosphere to have a chat about the game, he was understandably a touch apprehensive. Time travel was a new experience to him and the nauseating effect made conducting the interview a bit difficult. Nevertheless, our fearless reporter got this transcript through to us, although the courier service that sent it over told us that they'd been holding onto it for over half a century and we haven't seen our reporter since before the interview - curious...

TVG: What can you tell us about Red Alert 3's story?

The story is a continuation of the events from Red Alert 1 and 2. It's not a true sequel because in-between the two previous games, we kind of used the notion of time travel to wipe the slate clean, so we're doing that again between Red Alert 2 and Red Alert 3. But the basics are that the beginning of the game is told from the Soviet perspective and the Soviets are on the brink of defeat by the Allies for the second time in a row. They decide to take it upon themselves to go back in time and remove or kill the one man that they feel is largely responsible for the success of the Allies against the Soviets, and that's Dr. Albert Einstein.

You'll remember from Red Alert 1 that it was Dr. Einstein himself who travelled back in time to remove Hitler in the hope of averting World War II, and he was successful in killing Hitler but not in averting WWII (without Germany, the Soviet Union was left unchecked and they went to war against the Allies anyway). The Soviets are successful in going back and taking out Einstein in Red Alert 3; they come back to their present time to find that, while the Allies have been reduced in their power, they haven't really gone anywhere (they're no longer at the gates but they're still a formidable force to deal with). And because Einstein was never around and wasn't able to develop nuclear technology, Japan has now risen to power and is one of the Soviet Union's mortal enemies.

So, continuing that trend of unintended consequences, the Soviet Union has gone from having one mortal enemy in the Allies to having two - and they've kind of made matters worse for themselves - so they have to figure out a way of getting through the mess that they got themselves into.

TVG: Units have always been one of the most appealing features of Red Alert games, ranging from those that offer megalomaniacal amounts of power, to those that are just downright whacky. How are EALA continuing this trend for Red Alert 3, particularly with the new Empire of the Rising Sun faction?

Japan is unique in that it's the only faction with transformable units. You have three or four units that are transformable and when they transform, their roles really change. One such unit is the Tangu, for which we've drawn inspiration from a Japanese anime called Macross (the Verita Fighter to be precise).

In its default state, the Tangu hovers over the ground and functions as a harassment vehicle - it's very good against infantry and lightly armoured vehicles. If you were to transform it and deploy it into its secondary mode, it becomes a fast attack jet that can only target air units. So, you can imagine that in the hands of a pretty skilled player (assuming they have three or four of these units flying around in their jet form and they run into a battery of anti-aircraft fire) then the Tangus can just be transformed into their ground form and they become impervious to that anti-aircraft fire. It's then possible for them to take out whatever is shooting at them. Japan has several of these units that can transform, which really changes their effectiveness depending on what type of forces they're going up against.

TVG: The interface (on PC) looks relatively similar to C&C 3...

Yeah, in terms of the sidebar it's largely unchanged. We spent a lot of time on C&C 3 perfecting that sidebar and we didn't want to change too much from it in Red Alert 3.

TVG: The interface for Kane's Wrath on Xbox 360 was a considerable improvement from C&C 3, and I understand that the Red Alert 3 dev team did a lot of work on that...

Yeah, the Xbox 360 interface for Kane's Wrath was developed by the Red Alert 3 team. They wanted to use Kane's Wrath as a sort of test-bed for the new radial interface, which is a lot faster than the old linear interface that C&C 3 and The Battle for Middle-earth 2 had on Xbox 360.

We were very happy with it in development. We still added a good layer of polish and some new functionality to the Red Alert 3 interface that wasn't there in Kane's Wrath. It's just a lot quicker to access your production menus; you don't have to move your cursor over your base; you can be focusing on a battle or anywhere else on the map. Pull that right trigger, bring up that menu, and then circumnavigate it with your right stick - it's a lot faster and a lot easier to use.

Red Alert 3 is going to be a slightly more nuanced game than Kane's Wrath was (in Kane's Wrath you can spam a lot of units and throw them at your enemies). There are less things happening at the same time in Red Alert 3, so the interface will be even more intuitive than it was in Kane's Wrath.

TVG: We've touched on the Empire of the Rising Sun, but what about the Allies and the Soviets? You mentioned that the Allies were a little bit weaker this time around...

It's not that their weaker. Fictionally, they're not as powerful as they were at the very start of Red Alert 3, meaning that the Soviets aren't at the brink of defeat. But they're still a very powerful faction. They still employ a little bit of time travel and chrono technology; the idea being that if you view time as a stream, changing something in the time continuum is akin to throwing a pebble in the stream - it'll cause a small ripple, but things are going to keep progressing. Even though Einstein wasn't the one to do it, the Allies figured out time travel technology - they still figured out many of the same exotic weapons that they had in previous Red Alert games. They've got some fun ones too, like the dog (everyone's favourite unit is the dog or the bear). They've got dolphins - it's always fun to play with dolphins - and they focus on a lot of high technology. They're not quite as exotic as Japan, but they're still fun to play with.

TVG: There hasn't been a new Red Alert game for eight years now. Has developing Red Alert 3 been a similar process to when EALA started work on C&C 3, or is it a different fan-base that requires a different approach?

It is a different fan-base and it was a little bit less challenging, I'd say, because the Tiberium fan-base is almost a religious one - they know what they want and if you stray from that too far, they'll really come after you and let it be known. Whereas the Red Alert fans are more open to new things. Because the franchise is so whacky and tongue-in-cheek, they expect you to continue introducing new units that are equally as funny as the old ones.

It was a little bit easier in that respect, but it was a lot harder to balance than previous games were because of the transforming Japanese units and because of the sheer number of units. We have navy this time around, which is just another layer of strategy that we didn't have to account for in games like C&C 3 or The Battle for Middle-earth 1. The way we addressed that is that, very early on, we tried to get all the units and structures done before we had any part of the game (it's called grey boxing). Even if a tank looked like a grey box, as long as it had the balance value of the final unit that was fine. We tried to get as many matches played as possible very early on before we built missions; before we built campaigns; before we shot a single frame of film. The primary agenda was to get those units up and running as fast as possible.

TVG: So naval combat will play a part in Red Alert 3?

Yes. So, for example, tanks are amphibious. They will go out into the ocean. Not every unit is amphibious, it's only a handful that are, but a lot of those units change their behaviour when they're on water.

TVG: How does that effect the maps? Will Red Alert 3's maps still be land primarily but with additional routes that open up over water for naval units, or will there be some maps that are just ocean?

We don't have any maps that are just ocean, but every map has a significant amount of water.

TVG: In terms of the gameplay style, will you be sticking with C&C 3's format of resource gathering, base building, and then overwhelming the enemy with a wall of units?

No, definitely not. Resource gathering is completely different in this game than with any previous C&C game. The War Nodes are gated, which means you can only put so many harvesters on them at any given time. It's not like a Tiberium field where there's no way in and out of a field and you can have 10 harvesters on it at the same time.

What that means is that you won't get the same inflation of economy that C&C 3 had or even Red Alert 2 had. You only ever have a trickle of money coming in, so you can't build a whole bunch of units and send them out. You have to carefully pick and choose what type of unit type you want to build and that depends on what type of unit the enemy has. So, you have to do a lot of scouting first to figure out if the enemy has a lot of Bullfrogs, in which case you probably don't want to build a lot of aircraft because they'll just get shot down. That's going to lead to matches that are a bit slower; they'll last a bit longer, and have a bit more strategic depth than some of our previous games.

At the same time we do release that, whether it was inadvertent or not, the 'tank rush' has evolved into...

TVG: An icon really...

Yeah, people like it and they want to build a bunch of units and throw them at the enemy, so one of the things that we've had to do is balance valid tank rushes that can be countered with more nuanced gameplay.

TVG: You mentioned that a British actress will be in the game's infamous live action sequences, although you're not divulging who that is yet, but can we expect the usual amount of live action in Red Alert 3 for a C&C game?

Yep, there will be about 60 minutes-worth of live action sequences - all in HD.

TVG: Are there any actors or actresses confirmed in their roles yet?

The only actress confirmed is Gina Carano as Natasha, but there are more to come soon.

TVG would like to thank Amir Ajami, the Producer on Red Alert 3, for taking the time out to talk with us about the game.