JMoe: The Mastermind

While browsing around the C&C community for interesting news, I happened across an article which includes a design for the “perfect” C&C game mode for Tiberium. For those who many not know, Tiberium is a first person shooter set in the Tiberium universe (created by the original Command and Conquer, along with Tiberian Sun, and Tiberium Wars). It’s not part of the C&C franchise, it instead shares the same universe setting-wise, but is a separate branch. This allows a lot more freedom.

While the game mode in the article is interesting, it has two major flaws.
1. It doesn’t fit with what the apparent design goals of Tiberium are.
2. It sounds an awful lot like Renegade.
For some people, #2 isn’t really so much a problem as a great thing, but Tiberium isn’t Renegade. Renegade was an attempt to create an FPS that was a C&C game. Tiberium is an FPS that happens to be in the same universe as the C&C games. They’re not really the same at all.

My own design for a team based multiplayer mode for Tiberium comes after the cut.

Disclaimer: While I was employed by Electronic Arts Los Angeles, which is where Tiberium is being developed, I had nothing to do with the Tiberium team, and this article is entirely speculation on my part. It’s not anything official, and is just me being a back seat designer (hence the article title), which lets me play with completely off the wall ideas.

With that out of the way, on to the mode design itself. I don’t have a name for the mode, so let me know if you can think of a good name for it. It borrows a bit from the Conquest gamemode of the Battlefield series, but it’s adjusted to fit with what I understand is the design philosophy behind Tiberium. As I see it, the key thing in Tiberium is placing the player as a commander on the field, with the ability to call in support squads (including vehicles) and fight their way through the map. To turn this into a team based approach is fairly straightforward.

You’d divide the players into two teams. Each team would start with a base, and around the map would be a bunch of neutral capture points. Each one would start neutral, and could be captured by either team. You’d capture a control point by using an engineer squad (which counts as a squad for your reinforcements). To prevent it being too easy to capture however, each point would have defenses (borrowed from Kane’s Wrath) that activate after they are captured. You’d have to deal damage, either to the structure or to the defense generator to knock them down, and get your engineer inside. This takes advantage of one of the key metaphors of C&C games, mainly that you use engineers to capture points.

Once a point is captured, it would serve as a player respawn point, and a reinforcements drop zone. One of the key points of Tiberium is the ease with which additional player reinforcements can be called in. The control points would allow them to be called in easily, and allow players to move forward from their bases, without relying on spawning in a single fixed location.

Is this a perfect multiplayer mode for Tiberium? Probably not. However, without knowing more about the game, and the intended play style, it’s hard to create something that fits. I do feel that this fits in with Tiberium the game as I understand it much better than the proposed C&C mode. Mine also borrows a few elements from the C&C universe, in keeping with how the Tiberium setting is shared. It also keeps all of the players involved in the action, instead of removing one to function as commander. It also solves the resource gathering problem with the C&C mode (where does gathered money go, is it team wide, what if someone spends money the commander was going to use on a building?), and fits more with the design philosophy of Tiberium as a squad control shooter, rather than a more “true” FPS game.