Each side will start out with a bulldozer, which acts as your construction vehicle funny, but I've always been under the impression that bulldozers were meant for knocking things down.
These can erect new buildings anywhere on the map, as opposed to just within your base. EA Pacific is hoping that this will open up a whole new array of tactical possibilities in Generals. Resource collecting will revolve around pick up trucks and supply depots.
Will they fall to the floor and pound the earth with scab-covered fists and shout:. The combination of the two is being called the Sage engine. Now this is an odd one. The 3D engine is one big reason and seeing it running at E3 proved that Westwood has gained from biding their time and watching otl ler strategy games make the mistake of going there first. Mark Skaggs, executive producer on the game, ran us through a typical mission, which kicks off with a botched political assassination in a small fishing village.
A UN envoy, being escorted to Kazakhstan, is ambushed by two vehicles that explode and take out the escort vehicles, giving us the first taste of the cinematic quality of the visuals. After a hefty firefight Skaggs settles in control of a US and allied Chinese base and orders the construction of a nuke. A bridge separates him from the enemy GLA base, and a huge dam is located upstream.
Instead of leaving this to your imagination, the new engine enables you to track major events like this and witness the fallout, in this case the sight of the villagers attempting, and ultimately failing, to outrun the water. Of course, being a Westwood presentation, Skaggs gets his ultimate revenge by calling a nuclear strike and obliterating the GLA troops.
Westwood always manages to get fun into its games but the build-and-rush tactics of old are getting stale and it needs to move on. Despite their flaws, and there have been many throughout the seven-year history of the franchise, the games have always achieved immense playability through addictive gameplay, a somewhat cheesy sense of humour and an aura of toy-like wonder built into every single unit.
This time it takes place in the near future between the USA, China and the terrorist organisation of the GLA Global Liberation Army within the structure of a continuous campaign, with eight to ten missions for each side, maps and a skirmish mode. The idea is to keep quality high at the expense of quantity.
Tiberian Sun was also very serious and hardcore and we wanted to do something that was in the middle. Our goal is to make a game that's like a Hollywood action war movie that has this feeling of fun, so when you walk out, you feel good. The developers have certainly played on this, as well they should, with paused explosions during the in-game cut-scenes that show off the might of the newly created Sage engine and degree rotations, that could have come straight out of Swordfish.
Vehicles will leave tracks and push over walls and trees, rather than just rolling through them like they did previously; rangers will drop down onto the top of buildings to flush out enemy troops.
In gameplay terms, this meant that if you worked out the pattern the enemy units would follow, you could frequently beat them with ease. This is something that EA Pacific is trying to address in Generals. So, if a unit uncloaks nearby, your soldier will have some kind of 'Wow a stealth unit has just appeared!
The Chinese and GLA can also take enemy units prisoner. The GLA use tranquiliser darts to knock out enemy soldiers and special snipers that can fire through armour to kill tank drivers and capture their vehicles. The Chinese opt for rubber bullets and take their prisoners of war back to their propaganda centre where they are brainwashed until they turn into Chinese units. Even the buildings have unique attributes. For example, the Americans fill theirs up with rangers that spill out of them when the building is destroyed, and the Chinese have mines all around their base building, so approaching them is potentially lethal.
But perhaps the most interesting, is the sub-basements of the GLA, which allow a building to rebuild itself from the basement up if only the main part of it is destroyed. This is something that will undoubtedly come in handy during some of the more powerful strike attacks. Every side has a choice of three Generals at the start of each mission, each of which gives their side various benefits, upgrades and unique units, rather like the sub-races you could ally with in Emperor: Battle For Dune.
And like a king, when their command centre is destroyed, they are very weak, with only a pistol to defend them. The top brass in the GLA train up their units to veteran level much quicker and turn them into superior guerilla fighters.
They can also be a dab hand at biological warfare too. They also have a Warlord General who gives the Chinese tanks a horde bonus, making them an incredibly powerful siege force when kept together.
A little been there, done that," explains Browder. We want to make great games, not great games mixed with bad TV shows! Another familiar part of the Westwood games, that of resource management, has also been revamped for Generals.
The USA use helicopters to pick up resources from supply piles and return them to their base, whereas the GLA use people to do the same thing. The Chinese concentrate on hacking the Net for resources. China is a technological superpower that uses propaganda and the Internet to fuel its war effort, and the primary reason every one is going to war at all is the nefarious GLA, a terrorist group who are developing weapons of mass destruction.
Starting to sound familiar? However, this doesn't mean it's just a brushed up version of Red Alert 2 with a few new units chucked in, there's far more happening beneath the surface than that. However, this seems like gimmickry when compared to the tiny details you keep noticing out of the corner of your eye, which really add depth to the game.
In fact, in many ways Generals is a more accurate portrayal of war than many official news reports. By now little things like this seem so fundamental to strategy games that you have to wonder why Westwood clung to their antiquated system for so long. The traditional upgrading mode has been enhanced on several different levels. There are upgrades for some of the buildings and numerous upgrades for the units that endow them with extra weapons, speed and gain attack bonuses.
Alongside that, as a player you gain promotions based on your performance during the game, which in turn allows you to access new technology. Resource gathering has been refined as well, so you're no longer worrying so much about little piles of tiberian or gold. Controlling stockpiles and the various civilian buildings like hospitals and oil derricks is still an important part of gameplay, but each side has been given imaginative means of creating resources from inside their own base. The Chinese use hacker units to steal money off the Internet while their supply trucks gather the meatier resources.
Chinooks are the favoured transport method of the US and they also have supply drops to bring in extra resources. The GLA are very versatile when it comes to bringing in the moola, and use workers to gather from the stockpiles and black markets to boost up their economy. They can also gain resources from the scrap left by burnt-out enemy vehicles.
There are still the chubby pictorials for each unit and upgrade, vehicles and troops are still over and undersized against other units and their environment. But what EA Pacific has retained from previous games is carefully chosen and spruced up for Generals, such as the always strong skirmish mode in which you have a choice of 24 maps. Genuine innovation in gaming is a rare and precious thing, and the Dune Ils, the SimCities and the Dooms of this world are getting fewer and fewer, as regurgitation becomes an all too frequent development technique.
While Age Of Mythology retained strong gameplay and upped the ante storyline wise, Generals has earned its Essential award through sheer level of detail, dribblesome graphics and a game that, above everything else, is extremely good fun to play. Being purely at the mercy of a set of linear missions is getting rather stale now.
Previous Westwood games experimented with this mildly, by allowing players to choose which areas to attack so the gaming experience wasn't always the same, and I'd hoped that Generals would offer at least this, if not more. This transition of the classic RTS series into the 3D arena was hardly unexpected after Emperor: Battle For Dune, but perhaps more surprising is that the gameplay and style marks a conscious return to the original games, despite the fact that developer EA Pacific only worked on Red Alert: 2 and the Yuri's Revenge expansion pack.
This time the game opts for a three-way military struggle between the forces of China, America and a terrorist organisation called the GLA Global Liberation Army. As with the Dune games there's been a lot of honing done, so they're distinctly different both in terms of units and buildings, and also those intrinsic details that affect how a side physically plays - like resource management and secret weapons.
Rather than being just a visual overhaul, EA Pacific has tried to integrate the new 3D environment into the very fabric of the game. The GLA also has the power to construct cheap fake buildings that can serve as decoy bases.
China can now protect her valuable hackers by building an Internet center to house them; no more crippling the Chinese economy when a single soldier stumbles across her hackers crouched over their laptops in some remote field. The new Helix helicopter is the equivalent of an airborne Overlord; it is a powerful fighting unit that can mount upgrades and transport other units.
Some of the AI limitations have been dealt with as well. Even better is the way it seems to react to defenses. Instead of sending a steady stream of units into the teeth of a line of turrets, the AI appears to try a variety of approaches until it finds an undefended area. At its core, however, the game fares better as a frantic multiplayer oriented experience.
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