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To be clear, Generals isn't an offshoot of either the Tiberian Dawn or Red Alert storylines. It's a completely new game, with a completely new plot, in a completely new universe. The game is set 20 years in our future, and it involves an escalating situation between China, the United States, and an increasingly hostile terrorist organization called the Global Liberation Army, who has its roots in Central Asia.
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The biggest change that Generals brings to the Command & Conquer universe is obviously the fact that it's 3D. But the real differences between this game and its predecessors are more than just skin deep. Gone will be the notion of unit deployment. In Yuri's Revenge, for example, the machine gunner's deploy ability encased him in a ring of sandbags and allowed him to inflict more damage, though at the cost of being immobile. Even though this deploy command was useful for certain situations, it wasn't particularly functional in most cases. "We've seen this sort of thing done better in other games, so we wanted to make that change in Generals," explains Producer Harvard Bonin. "Getting rid of deploy commands gives us freedom and lets us add some variety in what our units can do. We didn't want all our units to be stuck with only one secondary function, and we needed to make it more obvious to the players that these units had secondary functions to begin with." Bonin asserts that only seasoned Red Alert 2 players knew of their units' deploy commands, but even they rarely used it during battle. The addition of upgrades will also dramatically change the way that a single unit might behave throughout the course of any given mission.
The three sides in Command & Conquer: Generals will play markedly differently from one another. EA Pacific is building on commonly accepted stereotypes in creating the units and maintaining the balance of each side. The US military, for example, values the lives of each of its soldiers, so the game will coerce you to place more value on each of your units by making them generally more expensive to build than the other two sides. The Chinese, on the other hand, will have more infantry than the US, but an individual Chinese solder won't be as tough as his US counterpart. As for the GLA, they have the ability to scavenge parts off of destroyed US and Chinese vehicles, and use them as their own. Let's take a closer look at some of these units--we'll start with the US.
If the US units we listed on the previous page seemed eerily familiar, it's with good cause. Skaggs says that the units in Generals will be based off of existing military hardware "plus one." The "one" indicates that the designers are taking that extra step to liven up the units so that they don't seem ordinary. The game is set 20 years in the future, after all, and besides, it is a game, so if some liberty is taken with a tank based on the M1A2 Abrams, for example, we won't hold it against EA Pacific. However, it's interesting to note that, compared to the US side, the Chinese units have a distinct sci-fi look to them. Let's take a look:
The GLA will play distinctly different than either the Americans or the Chinese. Whereas the US side places value on every single one of its soldiers, and the Chinese rely on overwhelming numbers, the Global Liberation Army uses human life as a weapon. They're not disregardful of human life, but they'll make stop at nothing to overpower their enemies--even if it means death. Skaggs compares the GLA to the world of Mad Max, where violence is commonplace, survival of the fittest is the rule of the land, and salvaging anything and everything is the norm.
We mentioned earlier that the original idea of Command & Conquer: Generals was for you to choose a general and acquire his or her unique powers. Well, that idea was dropped, but EA Pacific still found that basic notion appealing. To that end, the ability to choose specific "commands" will be included in Command & Conquer: Generals.
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