You could say Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is a game that was 15 years in the making, as it draws to a close the epic Tiberium universe storyline—started by Westwood in 1995 with the original Command & Conquer and now capped off by Pandemic Studios and EA.

The villain we love to hate, Kane, has emerged from seclusion with a technology he claims can stop the spread of the toxic Tiberium crystals and save humanity from extinction. With little other choice, the Global Defense Initiative enters an unsteady alliance with its nemesis, The Brotherhood of Nod. 

For 15 years (coincidentally?) the two sides work together and Tiberium is, apparently, tamed. However, anyone who’s played even just one of the previous C&C games knows that the peaceful union between GDI and Nod can’t last. GDI, Nod, and Kane face off for the final time, and Tiberian Twilight is your chance to witness the conclusion to one of gaming’s longest-running stories. 

And the action promises to be fast and furious, thanks to an epic design change that centers mission structures around a massive, mobile, all-in-one base called The Crawler. Now, you’ll have fewer units to manage—and no massive bases to build—so you can get right to the destruction. 

“The game plays a lot faster now, too, as the emphasis is no longer on coming and bashing the [@#$!] out of the enemy base—it’s on capturing points, so the action plays out quicker,” says Mike Glosecki, senior producer for C&C 4 at Pandemic.

In addition, Pandemic has introduced classes to the C&C recipe, with both GDI and Nod having offense, defense, and support classes, which Pandemic hopes will make the game appeal to even more players by offering more freedom in how you choose to play. 

“Each [class] has a different role in the game,” says Glosecki. “But they’re not narrow in their abilities—they’re more like MMO classes in that they have a purpose in what you should be doing. But, if you have to, you can stand toe-to-toe and fight it out with another class.” 

The classes—each with unique sets of units that reflect the core strengths (and weaknesses) of their class—have obvious uses for multiplayer games. However, Pandemic has gone through considerable effort to make the classes an integral part of the single-player campaign, as well. For example, if you start a given mission with the offensive class and don’t like the way things are going, you can switch mid-stream to either of the remaining classes. And, if you are finding a particular mission too difficult, you can switch classes, ratchet down the difficulty level, and hit it again with access to more powerful units. 

Without this class system, your tactics were more limited in a given mission in C&C 3, which did not help with the rather intense difficulty level of the game. Pandemic is aware of this and has made these design changes to ensure that more players finish the game and get the Tiberium storyline pay off. 

“The difficulty curve on [C&C 3] got really challenging near the end, which is something we usually find about later—after the game ships,” says Glosecki. “C&C 4 is challenging as well, but I don’t think you’ll find it as difficult campaign-wise. We want people to play to the end—we want them to find out what happens to the Tiberium universe, and Kane,” Glosecki adds. “This is very important to our [design] strategy.”

While C&C 4, like its predecessor, is a DX9 title, that doesn’t mean the design team still doesn’t have a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to bells and whistles. A significant new technical feature Pandemic has added to the game is deferred lighting, according to Lutz Latta, senior software engineer. Essentially, deferred lighting is a technique that allows more lights to be placed in a scene. “In the past each object—units, buildings, terrain—could only be lit simultaneously by eight point lights,” says Lutz. “With this technique, we can pretty much allow for an infinite number to be used without a performance hit.”  

"From a visual perspective, this gives us a lot of cool things in the game that we haven’t been able to do before,” adds Glosecki. “Because we have these extra lights, for example, when a weapon hits a vehicle we’re able to get the splash effect of the weapon as it hits to light up the vehicle and the terrain. We couldn’t afford the overhead of this before deferred lighting was implemented—it just ran too slowly.” 

Deferred lighting also allows the headlights on vehicles to be projected onto the terrain (similar to the classic “Batman searchlight” effect), and for all units and structures in the game to have a glow that’s based on the House color they belong to in multiplayer games. 

And, while the number of units you’ll be able to direct on-screen at once is roughly the same as before (about 20), which is due more to a limit of the CPU, the units will look better. Pandemic’s art team has doubled the size of the textures used on the models versus past C&C games. (The amount of polygons and the level of animation are about the same.) 

Other visual improvements include a post effect that is being used to create a vignette than will enhance color and improve the overall look of the game. Buildings and units will now show progressive levels of damage during a mission, as chunks get blasted off during the fighting. And finally, the number of samples used in shadow maps has been increased, resulting in softer shadow effects that add realism to snowfall scenes, for example. 

C&C 3 veterans will also be pleased to discover that the game maps are bigger—close to two times bigger, in fact. Plus, the hard black border effect has been ditched to “give you more of the feeling that you’re part of a world rather than playing on a strip of land in space,” Glosecki says. The major reason for increasing the size of the maps is that you can now have true five-versus-five games, whereas in the past the max was four-on-four.

“C&C 4 is intended to be played with 10 people at once, so we absolutely had to make sure the maps were bigger,” Glosecki explains. “It sounds chaotic—but it’s not as chaotic as if you were just trying to kill each other. In C&C 4 you have goals: There are five structures that need to be captured and your team gets points for holding those structures—first to 2,500 points wins. It’s sort of like Battlefield in that respect.”

For the first time in a C&C multiplayer game, you can respawn and come back into a game when you get killed, which is another effort Pandemic has made to speed-up the game style and keep players interested. “This is important because if you’re playing even a 20-minute match with your friends, and you get knocked out in the first two minutes, you’re not going to sit there for 18 minutes waiting for the next game.”

We couldn’t agree more: These days who’s got time to sit around and wait? Plus, the recipe of “build a massive base and then rinse and repeat with the next mission” (started by the original C&C) is getting very “long in the tooth.” And we can’t wait to find out exactly what happens to Kane….