Remaster Update and First Gameplay Teaser

Fellow Command & Conquer fans,

Crazy to believe it’s nearly been one year since we formally announced the C&C Remaster and began development with Petroglyph Games and Lemon Sky Studios.  To celebrate this milestone, today we’re excited to showcase one of our biggest reveals on the journey so far - a first teaser of the game in action!  

And with this teaser comes an answer to one of your key questions from the past year:

• “Is the Remaster going to be in 2D or 3D?”

We’re ready to share the Remaster has been developed in the classic 2D visual style, unlocking our ability to stay as authentic as possible to the original games.  Below we’d like to provide more details on how we’re approaching these visuals, and why we felt the 2D style was the best fit for the project.  

As you may remember from one of the first posts, our plan is to remaster (not remake) the classic games.  Creatively, this means our guiding light has always been to remain authentic to the original feel, and we’re constantly on the lookout for ways to achieve that goal.  When we recovered the source code to C&C Tiberian Dawn and C&C Red Alert, this gave us a viable avenue to accurately match the core gameplay, feel, and signature look of the legacy titles.  We felt the 2D style was the best way to bring all these elements together, and ultimately achieve the authenticity we were looking for.

It’s been wonderful to see the passionate, artistic care taken by Lemon Sky and the team with this creative approach.  Lemon Sky has re-concepted, re-modeled, and re-animated every gameplay asset from scratch - examples of which you’ve seen with the Construction Yard and Tesla Tank.  Once it reaches the final stage as seen in those previews, we render and export the assets in 2D so they lineup frame for frame with the original visuals.  In some cases like the Grenadier, this can mean over 600 frames for a single unit.  This creative process has allowed us to modernize the game assets as you originally imagined them, and stay true to the gameplay you’ve known and loved for 25 years. 

In addition to the authenticity, we’re excited to reveal an extra benefit of this 2D approach is that Petroglyph has been able to utilize their deep familiarity with the source code to enable the real-time switching of Legacy / Remastered graphics in Campaign missions.  This means at any time when playing a Campaign mission, you can tap a single key to smoothly toggle between the original assets at 320 x 200, to the Remastered assets up to 3840 x 2160.  Playing with this toggle over the past several months has been a true joy, and we believe will be one of your favorite features in the Remaster.  Along with the real-time toggling, you’ll have the ability to zoom the camera to take in all the high definition detail, with an effective zoom distance between the DOS and C&C Gold camera heights.

You can see an example of these features in action in the associated video above (just in case you made it this far and haven’t watched it already).  To get an even better feel for the visual difference, we encourage you to visit our new website site at:

www.ea.com/games/command-and-conquer/command-and-conquer-remastered

Here you can use an interactive component to see the Legacy / Remastered visuals playing side by side.  Keep in mind some of the assets you’re seeing in these videos are still in progress (I’m looking at you, Tiberium Silo), as we’re continuing to fix bugs and polish items based on feedback from our colleagues, the Community Council, and all of you.

We’re eager to hear your thoughts on everything you’re seeing in this post, so please share your comments in the thread below.  Thanks for your support and participation, and looking forward to sharing more game assets in the months ahead.

Cheers,

Jim Vessella

Jimtern