It also proved the ”most successful” commercially, beating Tiberian and Red Alert. It ”felt like the right choice” with both of those factors rooting for it, but what about going free-to-play?
Victory and EA announced that Command & Conquer: Generals 2 was losing its subtitle and ditching the traditional retail model for free-to-play. Fans were obviously alarmed.
”The franchise has such a history, seventeen products and everybody has experienced it from a different direction. Of the three Command & Conquer fictions though - Tiberian, Red Alert and Generals - it had been almost ten years since Generals had been revisited so we were due to go back to that,” said Senior Development Director, Tim Morten.
”It turns out that Generals really was the fan favourite, too. It was one of the most successful selling universes and just the amount of requests on the forums for us to go back to that universe were astounding, so it felt like the right choice.”
Using the free-to-play approach enables the Victory team to keep working on it, and even applying new gameplay features and tweaks that better reflect fan feedback as opposed to infrequent and limited patches.
”I am really excited about this shift in how we develop. We didn’t necessarily know what to expect at the outset but we quickly started to realise that it’s very liberating for game development,” he explained.
”Before we had to finish every feature that we wanted to put in front of players for a deadline to get on a disc, to get in a box, to get on a shelf. Now, we still want to develop the same breadth of features, but instead of having it all done at launch we can start with the core foundation of the game and then continually add to it.”
”We can incorporate feedback while we do that too, instead of just guessing for day one.”
Command & Conquer is powered by DICE’s Frostbite 2 engine which the Battlefield series thrives on. Morten and his fellow developers are hoping that using such high calibre tech can go a long way in dispelling the negatives of F2P.
”I hope that the gaming audience starts to embrace free-to-play gaming as evocative of the same quality as in boxed products,” he said. ”There is a certain class of free-to-play games that are flash-based or mobile based that - not that they’re bad games - but they’re not at the same level as what we would describe as AAA quality.”
”So we’re very sensitive to the perception that quality will somehow be compromised by this approach. Thankfully, some other products - World of Tanks, League of Legends - have really shown that it’s not about the business model; it’s about delivering a good game. First and foremost that’s what we’re focused on.”
Check out our full interview with Tim Morten from Victory Games.
EA is now letting those interested register for a spot in the Command & Conquer beta.
