Free from the corporate shackles, one of EA's leading Command & Conquer developers has offered a damning appraisal of the titles he helped churn out at the Los Angeles development studio before the axe was swung on the entire team:
You worked for EALA and helped develop some Command & Conquer titles such as Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3. How do you appraise these titles? What do you think about them? What was good?
This is a somewhat tricky thing for me to answer. In truth I was probably the harshest critic of our games on the EALA RTS team. I got started with C&C back in '95 and was instantly hooked. I loved the story, loved the gameplay, loved the setting, and loved Kane (in a totally platonic way). For me C&C was something of a sacred game and I desperately wanted to do the series justice with all the C&C games I worked on. Unfortunately although we had a very talented team of passionate gamers, EA simply would not give us the time we felt we needed to make a truly great C&C game. In the case of C&C:3 our development cycle was something like 11 months. Compare that to Blizzard or Relic who was spending 3-6 years on their RTS titles. Our longest development cycle was 18 months on RA3, but at that time the team was split in half and added another platform (PS3), so the extra dev time was kind of a wash. EA simply needed us to keep cranking out games to keep the LA studio afloat while many its other teams floundered. So to answer your question I was not happy with how C&C3 or RA3 turned out, our games were always rushed, our engine technology aged and degraded over the years, our path finding was horrible, our online implimentations were embarassing, and ultimately our games did not, in my view, live up to the orginal C&C, or RA2, or Generals (which I also worked on but in a very lowly capacity).
I do however have to give credit to the development team. Given the circumstances under which we were making these games, (crappy tech, super compressed schedules) I think what we were able to ship was quite impressive. Unfortunately the gamer who just spent $50 on our games doesn't have any clue how much time we had to spend on them or what the internal politics of EA were at the time, they can only see what is in the box.
Your departure from EALA was met with great dissappointment by C&C game players and fans. For what reason did you leave EALA?
It was not an easy decision for me to leave, EA is where my career in game development got started, but ultimately I needed to do something new. By the time I left EA ma y of my good friends from the RTS team had gone. EA had broken many promises to us and was continuing to make bad decisions at the expense of the C&C franchise and over the protests of the development teams. I just needed a break from the EA insanity.
What do you think about Command & Conquer 4? Many people are state C&C 4 is not a game true to the C&C franchise.
It's unfair of me to pass judgement on C&C4 as I did not work on it nor have I played the final game. I was however at the studio during much of C&C4's development and have played pre-release builds. The important thing to know is that C&C4 was never meant to be a true Tiberium universe canonical game, but rather an experiment in online play. It originally started as out an Asian market online-only version of C&C 3. At some point the company executives decided it made the most business sense to add a single player campaign, call it C&C4, and put it in a box. The team of course protested this change in direction but the decision stood. The team did what they could to make a good game given the realities inside EA, but ultimately it was the product of a dysfunctional corporate culture.
Working on C&C games was like a dream come true (although once in a while dreams can be nightmares).
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/55831/Ex-EALA-Command-Conquer-Developer-Berates-Recent-ReleasesI knew this but this q and a just cements the fact the ea and other major publishers only care about money and not about the games they bring out.
