Command & Conquer: Generals

Developer: Westwood
Estimated Release: December 2002

Movie time

At E3, we didn’t get any hands-on time with Westwood’s newest RTS and newest installment to the Command & Conquer universe: Generals. What we got was a 15 minute presentation of the game in a theater, with the action controlled by a Westwood representative going through a canned mission. The presentation showcased the game fairly well, giving us a good glimpse of the game’s 3D engine (this isn’t Westwood’s first foray into 3D – Emperor Battle for Dune was also 3D), which they call “SAGE.” Unlike Emperor: Battle for Dune, which featured a lot of barren wastes, the SAGE engine is very comfortable and capable of rendering complicated urban maps with destructible buildings.

Speaking of destructible, Generals promises to offer a lot of interaction with the maps, just as you may remember with previous titles like Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun where you could take out bridges and buildings. In Generals, we might see this interaction on a larger scale – in the presentation GLA rockets destroyed a large dam on the map, creating a huge tidal wave of water that swamped an entire village and armies caught within the dry river valley.

American tanks taking on GLA trucks

Aerial dogfighting

Chinese and American armor

A relevant, modern storyline

One thing that sets Generals apart is its storyline, set roughly in the present day. The three main sides in the game are: the United States, with its high tech, expensive military; the Chinese with its massive infantry that swarms to its advantage, and the Global Liberation Army, a terrorist group that uses primitive weapons (truck mounted machine guns and rockets, etc) and stealth. Each side is struggling for global power, although the wary enemies of China and the US may find that they have to team up against the threat of the GLA.

Another important feature is the presence of Generals on each side. There are three different Generals per nationality, and depending on which one you take, you will get a unit specialized for that general, and specific bonuses for your army. The US generals include a tank specialist and an air force specialist. Naturally, if you pick the tank oriented general, you’ll get bonuses and incentives for your mechanized units, while the Air Force general would bolster the aircraft in the arsenal. The Chinese have a Secret Police Chief with the ability to spot and capture hidden enemies.

Outnumbered but have elevation

Chinese nuclear missile launch

Burning down a GLA encampment

What do we fight with?

Each side of course, has unique units. The US has Comanche gunships, Paladin battle tanks, and Aurora strike fighters. The Chinese strength is in infantry, and in the demo we saw a huge band of about 50 chinese infantry take on and swarm over GLA entrenched defenses. The Chinese also have a lot of fire and flame based units, like the Dragon tank, which unleashes waves of flame on the battlefield. The GLA resemble a low-rent terrorist army, with many of its vehicles based on modified jeeps and trucks with mounted machine guns and rockets. However they also have special units like the “Angry Mob” and the ability to build tunnel networks on the map that allow for instant transportation from one side to another. Think StarCraft Nydus Canal.

And no Westwood RTS game is complete without weapons of mass destruction – each side has a unique one. For the United States, it’s the Air Fuel Bomb (commonly known as a fuel air explosive). The Chinese have the Nuclear Missile, which we saw at the end of the presentation, with its huge destructive capability and mushroom cloud. The GLA have the “Scud Storm,” which we assume is a rain of Scud missiles over a small area.

One of the big questions about Generals is the changed interface. No longer do we have the familiar Westwood toolbar sitting on the right side of the screen from which we can build. Instead, players will be going to specific buildings to create their units, which is more of a standard style. According to Westwood, the change was made to “open up the number of special abilities assigned to each unit.” Since the demonstration was all combat and no building up, it’s hard to say thus far how dramatic the change is. We’ll have to wait until we get some hands-on time with the game to see. Until then we’ll be eagerly awaiting and keeping tabs on the development of C&C: Generals.