Free-To-Play Command & Conquer – New Details Unveiled


Command & Conquer Generals 2
Back in December, EA hosted a C&C summit, in which the company invited twelve community site heads to play this new, free to play, Command & Conquer game for two days and give feedback to the development team about their impressions. As a result of this summit, we got some new information about EA’s upcoming strategy game (thanks to NeoGAF for spotting them), as well as a new video that can be viewed below.
Contrary to other summits (each and every time there is a new C&C game, EA hosts a summit), this time the playtesters had their hands on an early build of the game, meaning that their impressions and suggestions could influence the development of this title.
Command & Conquer F2P will be similar to its old parts, thus PC gamers can expect to build their bases and collect their resources. And as you may have expected, there will be three factions to choose from.
An interesting feature of this new C&C game is a fragile, harassable builder unit. By killing this unit, players can cause a building to stop constructing. Now that’s a brilliant idea and will bring the franchise closer to Starcraft. Not only that, but there will also be a new resource that serves the same purpose as SC’s vespene gas, though this resource (which is oil by the way) will be automatically collected by a building and not by units.
Players will have to expand their bases in this new C&C title as resource nodes now have a maximum optimal number of harvesters, meaning that the rate at which you can collect resources from any given location is gated. In addition, Supply Drops and Black Markets have been removed so that it is actually possible to run out of resources on a map.
Each faction will be able to tech up in unique ways, and their tech trees will be similar to Red Alert 3 rather than Generals.
What really troubled us is the fact that players will be able to control squads as a single unit. In other words, don’t expect to be controlling individual soldiers.
Regarding the available modes, C&C F2P will feature a Skirmish, as well as additional PvP and PvE modes.
Last but not least, the team aims balance the title from both a numeric (damage/unit cost) and usage (strategy) perspective.
Enjoy the following video!
Command & Conquer Community Summit 2012 Trailer (English)