Part 2: Interview with Lead Gameplay Designer Greg Black

We continue our discussion with C&C Legend and ex-dev Greg Black!
This time we are talking about monetisation, popcap, community development and 2v2!

Entsorger: Some mobile games had a PC co-release (Arcane Showdown comes to mind), and most streamers (myself included) use Bluestacks to emulate Android and play on PC. (I highly prefer playing on PC, despite the fact that it is a disadvantage).
Was this ever considered for Rivals? So much backlash came from the fact that it was on mobile when C&C had been solely PC-based so far.
To what extent was the game "built for PC" and then ported to mobile?
And, as you say yourself: the game really is that good, if only people would have given it a chance.

Do you think it could be worthwhile to do a PC release? Have it cost only 5-15€ and drop the levels. Seems to me like PC gamers would give it a shot for 5 or 10 bucks. And the development costs surely must be minimal versus starting a new game?
The game has SO much potential, it feels like such a waste to let it slowly die because of its business model and platform.
I assume EA will not consider something like that unless someone with a lot of passion, effort and money convinces them to do so.
I have a dream of winning the lottery and buying the rights to Rivals, porting it to PC, and finally having it achieve the glory it deserves.

MrBlack: Rivals was always intended as a mobile first (and probably only) experience. We built it on PC of course, because that's how game development works, but every decision we made was about what was best for a mobile game with a touch interface. We briefly discussed doing a PC port but it was never seriously considered as far as I can recall. I think if Rivals had been wildly successful, it would have been an easier pitch to make to port it to PC.
Your idea is interesting but you'd be surprised at the level of effort required to port Rivals at this point.
Certainly, it wouldn't cost as much as spinning up a whole new game from scratch, but It's not clear to me that selling Rivals for 5-10 bucks on PC would actually be profitable. Even if you could turn a profit, I suspect the scale of that profit would be insignificant to the point where it wouldn't make sense to do it. One of the realities of game development, especially a big studios, is that is really expensive. Way more expensive than you'd think. And big publishers are not really incentivized to take small bets, which is why you see so many of them focusing on big blockbuster titles (much like with film studios). From any publisher's perspective, there's an opportunity cost that has to be considered when assigning resources to things. Does it make more sense to put Smart Expensive Computer Programmer on PROJECT A that might make, at best, a few million dollars, or that same person on PROJECT B that might be the next billion-dollar franchise? The reality of market capitalisms is that decision makers are strongly incentivized to put that programmer on the billion-dollar bet and not the tiny passion project. Until we can all escape to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by Capitalism (SPAAAACE!), I don't see that changing. If you do win the lottery though, please hire me and we can make some sick RTS games.

Entsorger: I suppose you're right. But I think that as a passion project I could find a lot of friends who would be willing to help out. Even just us Legion dudes already invest hours upon hours to keep this game alive simply because we love it so much.

On that note, we would also love to be more involved with Rivals and take any burdens off their hands. Ideally, there would be a world where we might have community balance patches. We would be willing to do everything from playtesting to patching if they would only let us.
Do you think there might be any conceivable avenue to approaching that with good intentions?
Community cooperation is not something new, and could go a long way to help Rivals, as the player-base is pretty unhappy with only 1 balance patch every 6+ months.

MrBlack: Community cooperation is great and certainly something I've been involved with in the past. As far as Rivals is concerned I can't really speak to any future plans for Rivals, nor am I privy to any. I also can't really speak to what level of support the game is currently receiving or will in the future. I've been largely out of the loop on the game for a few years now.

Entsorger: Understood. I didn't expect you to know that, but I had to ask. You were my only hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi!
We love this game so much we'd do and are doing everything we can for it.

MrBlack: Yeah, sorry I don’t have better news there.

Entsorger: What do you think led to the demise of rivals?
Many tend to think it was just a marketing problem and perhaps some backlash from the fans (but would they be mobile gamers anyway?)
And based on the lessons you learned with Rivals, what would you do if you would now start to build a new RTS that wants to combine competitive multiplayer with broad appeal and commercial success?

MrBlack: I don't think there was any singular factor that lead to the demise of Rivals. It was just a confluence of things but here are a few that pop to mind.

The mobile game market is really competitive. There's this idea that its really easy to make something cheap and cynical, cash in, and make a ton of money, but that's really not true at all. Maybe it was at one point, but now the market is so saturated with high quality mobile games, games that have been really optimized for success, that its hard to break through. Very occasionally you see someone capture lightning in a bottle, like with Archero, and they get a ton of organic installs, retain well, and monetize well and become a monster hit seemingly overnight, but that's really the exception not the rule. If you look only at "real time strategy games" on mobile, there's only really one big player: Clash Royale. That game came out, was a total phenomenon, and inspired a ton of imitators. But it turns out that you can't just sort of clone Clash Royale and be successful, none of those really on-the-nose clones ended up being hits. The entire RTS market on mobile is basically Clash Royale and a bunch of dead or tiny games.
As far as I'm aware, at one point at least, Rivals was the second biggest game in that category, but it was still miles behind Clash and not a viable business. There's this weird reality of mobile games where some genres, like 4X or Collector RPGS, can support multiple really successful games, but some genres (like RTS) have one successful game and a bunch of also-rans.

Another issue was just user acquisition. Now I'm not a product manager, or expert in mobile games marketing and finance, so I'm going to do my best here, but don't take this as gospel. Fundamental math of free to play games is this, what is your cost per install (CPI) - meaning how much money are you spending on things like advertising, marketing, and promotion divided by how many players are you bringing in? And what is your revenue per user (RPU) - meaning how much money are you making, divided by your total number of users. If your CPI is higher than your RPU, you have a game that basically costs money rather than making it, and that's without even considering the cost to develop the game, maintain the servers, pay the team supporting it, etc etc. One of the issues with Rivals was that it was expensive to acquire users. There are lots of factors that go into this that we control, marketing, the intrinsic attractiveness of your game, the IP (i.e. C&C), etc, and a bunch of factors you don't control like what time of year it is, how much ads cost, what your competitors are doing, what the platforms are doing. For example a little while back Apple gave users the ability to opt out of apps tracking their data, and that caused the CPI for a lot of apps to go way up, because without that tracking data the marketing people could not target ads as precisely as they could before. Meaning to acquire the same number of users, they had to buy more ads, which costs more money. Rivals was not a big organic hit, meaning we had to pay to drive installs (which is normal) but that drove up our CPI.

In terms of the C&C community's reaction to the game, obviously that put us on a back foot. However, the reality is that the C&C community just isn't that big compared to the scale of users on mobile. I mean, at one point Clash Royale had like 100 MILLION active users. So even if every single player who ever played a C&C game woke up and was like "HELL YES, RIVALS IS THE SICKEST GAME EVER AND I LOVE IT WITH ALL MY HEART FOREVER", that maybe still would have been insufficient to make the game financially viable (although it certainly wouldn't have hurt). So its definitely not the communities fault that the game didn't succeed but I do wish more of them had given it a fair shake.

Now the other thing that didn't help us, and I know some of you will roll your eyes at this, is just that we didn't monetize the game very heavily. If you look at some of those other genres like 4X, that monetize really well and can support multiple games, they are basically wallet wars. Everything costs money, everything is on a timer, there's a million places and ways and reasons to spend. They are pretty much straight up Pay 2 Win games. With Rivals, the skill component kind of outweighs the money component. You can literally drop $1000 into it and still suck. Yeah you'll get a ton of levels and you can stomp some noobs for a while, but you will just run into more skilled players that will crush you. Because Rivals is so skill oriented, it really didn't incentivize people to pay. What's the point of paying to win if you don't win after you do? This weak monetization meant that our revenue per user wasn't high enough to offset our other costs. In order for our monetization model to work, we would have needed just a ton more users and a lower CPI, just like Clash Royale. The extra fun part of this is that for all the work the team did to try and keep the game fair and really focused on making it a true skill based RTS experience, people still naturally dismiss it as being a cynical pay to win game. Making games is hard.

All that being said, I think the biggest thing that led to the demise of Rivals is just what kind of game it was. Rivals is a true 1v1 RTS PVP game. Yeah it's scaled down and shortened and mobile-ized and all that, but at its heart it's still a competitive RTS and the reality is that just not that many people are into that type of experience. Its too hardcore, its too stressful, it demands too much of your attention, and its too intense for a lot of players to enjoy. What we found was, if you're the type of player that does enjoy that "knife fight in a closet" experience, and I assume you are if you're reading this, you would enjoy Rivals A LOT. For some people Rivals is just a perfect little RTS crack-pipe that delivers and those high intensity strategic thrills directly to their dome, but if you're not one of those people, it's a pretty challenging game to stick with. Unfortunately for all of us, there just weren't really enough RTS crack addicts out there to support the game at the scale we needed for it to be successful, and Rivals wasn't a game that you could really play casually. I've long ago made peace with the fact that RTS is a niche genre and probably always will be. Multiplayer 1v1 ladder RTS is even a smaller niche within that RTS niche, and I think it will be really difficult for anyone to build a broadly appealing version of that, which still maintains the character of an RTS game as we know it.

I'll be a very happy camper if I end up being wrong about that last point though.

Kenny: Very informative and interesting!

While we had some active development going in 2019, progression got a lot faster, seemingly to increase RPU, trying to get the average player to spend some money, by making it possible to get a lot of value for your bucks. Cloning labs, events with normal and premium rewards, or the daily login calendar that is rewarding the player with 1500 diamonds for just logging in, or perhaps the most egregious example, Rivals Races with a colossal crate as a first-place reward, which trigger once a week on both factions.
Progression got a lot easier during this first year of the game's existence so even F2P players have close to max level collections now.
I think a lot of people in the community will agree with you on monetization.
We all saw replays where people win even while at a -2 or bigger level disadvantage. Seems like the entire system of progression led to a lot of frustration, as players who did spend money didn't really get some huge advantage that guaranteed them the way to the top ranks.
Pro players with low levels were frustrated because being under-leveled can be very annoying even if victory is possible, and then finally its clear the product's revenue was also not exactly soaring.
I feel like we as a community know the answer is basically "no", but I must ask: is there any possible version of events where Rivals is monetised in a different way? A battle pass maybe, where you need to pay to unlock some units, or really go crazy with vanity items.
COD Mobile and Wild Rift are seemingly examples of this, porting a PC game almost 1 to 1 to mobile and using these methods. Does Rivals being a C&C RTS basically doom this approach?
And then the big question: You mention how 1v1 RTS is specifically niche... were there ever plans for a team-based version of Rivals? 2v2? How would it have looked like? How close were we to getting it?

MrBlack: There was talk of a 2v2 mode for Rivals. It was a dream for many of us on the team, but it never really got past the initial idea stage.

As far as I remember, we never got to the point of prototyping it. I think if Rivals had been a big hit and was still being actively developed, we would have taken a crack at it.
There are a couple of issues I see with vanity as a primary monetization vector.
RTS games, in my experience, actually monetize pretty weakly for vanity. We saw this in Starcraft 2 where people were begging for unit skins but then we actually made them people didn't buy them. Vanity works much better in games where there is a proxy for the player, i.e. an avatar (no, not that Avatar), and people can project themselves onto that proxy. People just don't generally get as emotionally attached to their little RTS units so as to want to play dress-up with them.

Vanity and battle-passes also require a lot of content churn to support, and I'd argue its a little harder to think up a ton of different skins for an RTS unit that are super cool but also keep the unit recognizable in combat. C&C somewhat limits our ability to do lots of whacky stuff with vanity that you could easily do in a game like Fortnite where anything goes. For my taste some of the stuff we did do in Rivals was already inappropriate for C&C (unicorns come to mind).
The biggest issue though is just that you need a big player base to support that kind of low cost low impact monetization. Fortnite can make a billion dollars selling skins because they have a huge user base, so they only need to make a few bucks per user to make a ton of money. All sorts of different ideas can work when your user base is huge.

Kenny: So, you came on board once the basics were already laid out? Does that include the mechanic of the missile silos and control pads? We would be interested in how this idea came about, or how it was developed, as at first it seems a little bit odd. 2 missiles to kill a base, capture points in a C&C game, the base being static… but I think the game managed to make it fit really well and it’s really easy to learn once you start playing it.
What's also interesting is the added tension the last couple seconds of the missile gives the game, where its charge can decrease. It’s really nice to see people preparing for a long drawn-out fight over that short timer, executing fast unit switches on your pads but constantly keep contesting the middle pad.

MrBlack: When I joined the team the basic framework was already developed. The hexes, the bases, the missiles, and the pads. There was only one map and a handful of units at that time. The TLDR is the team went through a bunch of iterations on how to make an RTS controllable with a touch interface, and ended up landing on the hex-grid idea. They then developed the capture point idea which started out as a real abstract ticket-based system, i.e. hold the pad and make the victory number go up. That approach worked mechanically but was just too abstract and not exciting enough so they finally ended up developing the missile idea which also added all that cool last second missile stealing tension.

Like I said I found the entire framework to be really quite brilliant although there were clearly places to improve on the margins (like with the deck building change I mentioned early). I was pleasantly surprised at how much of that frantic 1v1 RTS experience you could squeeze out of a couple of hexes on a phone.

Kenny: Rivals is also an amazing game to spectate. You have the entire battlefield in view, you don't have to switch between 2 points on the map to keep up, it's only 4 or 5 units on the field from each side, and there are no real special abilities that people need to watch on a menu. It’s all there on the battlefield, and the missile silo rapidly changing between pointing at one of the two bases is a very obvious sign of who is winning at any given time. How much of this was a deliberate choice when deciding how a game of Rivals is played? Is it safe to say C&C TV and the improved replay spectator mode were added to emphasize this?
Were there ever any plans for official tournaments beyond the Launch event?

MrBlack: Yes the Rivals spectator experience was a major focus for the team early on. The tem would host internal "Scorpion Bowl" tournaments (Scorpion was the internal project name) (Editor: hence the scorpion-prod URL in game error messages!) in the big theatre at EA HQ, because we also really felt like it was an amazing game to spectate. There were grand plans for a fully supported eSports program with ongoing tournaments, we even hired some really great folks to plan and run everything. C&C TV and the spectator stuff was definitely meant to emphasize this. We really had big plans for Rivals and the launch event tournament was supposed to be just a taste of what was to come, but unfortunately, things didn't work out that way.

Kenny: I want to ask about the popcap system.

You probably saw some version of this while you were working on the game, but "popcapping" has become more mainstream. This is a strategy where people deliberately don't kill their opponent's units, but leave several rifle squads at 1 member, thus preventing the opponent from making new units. The popcapping player then kills all these lone squad members near the missile firing, so that you can't replace in time to contest it.  Not a lot of players use this strategy to its full potential, but its enough of an issue that most tournaments ban it.

I feel like this is only a symptom of a larger issue. The popcap system might be my biggest issue with the core gameplay of Rivals. The current version of this mechanic is although easy to understand, which I imagine was the main reason it was designed this way for mobile audiences (just look at the UI segment for it) there are situations where it hinders the game from becoming more interesting in my opinion.

I feel like there are too many situations where due to being popcapped you are suddenly in a worse position and can't respond. A classic example would be winning a rifle war in the early game. You have more map control than your opponent with 2-3 riflemen squads on the pads while your opponent has maybe 1 riflemen. So as long as they have enough Tiberium, they can start spamming some cheap flying unit like drone swarm, and you as the player who actually won the rifle war are punished for it due to not having popcap to respond right away to these flying units. If your opponent times their tech switch well, they can win the missile with ease. The balance of tech units and double harvester is also involved in this.
Is there anything you would change about the popcap system if you could go back in time? Were there ever plans for a more complex and three dimensional system over a max amount of total units? Or do you think its intuitiveness outweighs the negatives of the current system?

MrBlack: The popcap system was one of the most controversial bits of design even during development. There were some people on the team, usually the more skilled players, that would often have critical feedback about the system and we certainly made iterations to it to try and address peoples' concerns.
That being said, the popcap system served a couple of critical purposes: it limited the number of units in play at a given time, and it helped keep the games close. These two aspects were pretty much non-negotiable for us. At various points of development, we actually tried a much more liberal tuning regime for the popcap system and the game pretty much immediately devolved into unit spam and really became unmanageable for players. We also struggled with how much rubber-banding to have in the game, we wanted a soft system that would keep the games close but we didn't want to straight up blue-shell punish better players.
And as you mentioned, accessibility was also an issue. We didn't want a system that required a ton of explanation or another resource (like a supply resource) in order to work. Even with our streamlined system, and the nifty UI widget, it was difficult for people to understand what was going on with the popcap system. For a long time it wasn't really visualized at all and people just kind of had to intuit what was going on.

Are there things I would have changed? Probably! We tried different things during development, but none of them were really better in our view than what we ended up with. I think with a lot of the systems and choices you see in any game there are always theoretically better options that either we didn't think of or were impractical to implement. Usually though when making these kinds of system design choices you're trying to pick the least-worst option and achieve multiple seemingly contradictory goals. Maybe this is an area where we didn't get it right? Hard to know for sure.

Kenny: Yeah, I think I understand the major pros and cons of the different approaches. If a game similar to Rivals was ever developed, this should be the main area to improve on.

My next question would be about no-harv gameplay and rushes. Throughout the game's lifetime, most units capable of performing a successful rush were nerfed and playing without a harvester isn't really popular. Do you think No-harv should have a bigger part in Rivals? We know rushing with Jumpjets, Bikes and other units was nerfed due to newer players, and especially under-leveled players finding it frustrating, but do you think there could be a way to make it more appealing for both sides involved? There is a general consensus that attacking harvesters isn't rewarding enough.

MrBlack: No, harvester games were certainly intended to be part of the game. If I recall correctly were aiming for them to be something that would show up around 25% of the time. So not predominant but also not super rare. I think no matter what you do getting your harvesters rushed is going to kind of suck to some extent. We tried to make it as least traumatizing as possible by having the replacement harvester be free and making it more about rewarding the aggressor than punishing the victim. It's a fine line to walk for sure.

Kenny: Here are some quickfire questions from the community:

Rivals was the first serious attempt at a true mobile RTS. What mistakes were made and what would you change if you had to make another mobile RTS?

MrBlack: I think there's room to improve everywhere, but right off the bat I would start with a more accessible setting / IP. Maybe Red Alert 2 (huge in China) or a more generic and mobile-y fantasy setting.

Kenny: What unit design gave you or your team the most headache? Anything got close to Rocket Buggy?

MrBlack: Off the top of my head, I remember the Flame Tank being really tricky to balance in a way that allowed it to be a realistic base rush option without it being totally overwhelming. The Stealth Tank and the stealth in general was always a highly debated mechanic on the team.

Kenny: What extra units would you have added to the current roster if you had the chance to make more? Any units from the old games you wanted to get into Rivals? (The battering ram isn't released yet, but we know it’s coming)

MrBlack: Good question! Mammoth Mk 2 would have been a fun challenge to add to the game.

Kenny: Marcion has been datamined as a planned commander for Nod, but he doesn't seem finished so won't ever see the light of day. We know his ability is called "Tiberium infusion". Can you tell us what it does in game? Maybe talk about other commanders and abilities that could have been added to the game?

MrBlack: Marcion and McNeil were largely developed by the guys in the balance team that took over after I was largely off Rivals. I don't remember exactly what his power was, sorry.

Kenny: What's your favorite unit? Both in Rivals and in C&C in general.

MrBlack: My favorite unit in Rivals was probably the Giga-Cannon. I was really happy with how that turned out from both a gameplay and visual design standpoint. We used to call it the "Shoot and scoot" on the team. Excluding units I designed myself (looking at you CryoCopter), my favorite C&C unit is the Mastermind Tank from Yuri's Revenge. Other favorites: Rocket Buggy, Stealth Tank, Attack Bikes, Kirov, OG Mammoth Tank, Desolator... I could go on for a while.

Kenny: Happy to report that the Scoot’n Shoot is still a popular nickname!
Are you optimistic about the future of RTS genre, desktop or mobile? C&C Remasters and Age of Empires seem to be doing great, but there are not that many new RTS games around.

MrBlack: I'm going to hedge a bit here. I am encouraged by the number of RTS games being developed right now. I thought AOE4 was great. I can't wait for COH3. BBI and FrostGiant are doing cool stuff. So I think there's a lot to be excited about. However, I do not think that RTS will ever be more than a niche genre. After nearly 20 years of working almost exclusively on RTS games I am more convinced than ever that RTS games are just too challenging for most people to want to play instead of other more immediately rewarding and low stress games. RTS games push up against players cognitive limits like almost no other genre, especially in multiplayer, and that's just going to limit their appeal for a large chunk of gamers.

Kenny: There are no other games on the mobile market like Rivals.  Do you feel like you managed to capture as much of CnC into Rivals as able, or are there additional aspects that you wanted to add into the game?  For instance, some players have passively mentioned expanded base building, mining, larger maps, etc.

MrBlack: I think with Rivals we were striving to really distil the experience down as much as we could. It was more an exercise of what to cut rather than what to add. What made sense for mobile rather that made sense for PC RTS. From that perspective: no, I don't think there's much I would have added to the gameplay. The one thing I really wanted to get into the game but couldn’t make the case for was more classic C&C music. I'm pretty happy with where the music ended up, but I would have loved to just throw Mechanical Man or Act on Instinct in there.

Kenny: Right now, in Rivals, the meta game is warped by a couple of very strong units. This is only natural of course because when meta develops for a long time, like it has in Rivals, the most optimal units will crop up to the surface. Looking at the last few balance patches, the direction has been to simply nerf the strongest units in the game. However, this has left a lot of them feeling mediocre and I think this takes away from the game. The question is, when you are looking at balancing a game, what criteria do you use to nerf or buff a unit from a competitive point of view?

MrBlack: When balancing a strategy game I think its preferable to buff counter units rather than nerf overpowered units. Like I mentioned early I want everything to feel overpowered. I want every unit to feel like a viable option. Nerfing something is sometimes a more direct way to fix a problem, and sometimes you have to do it, but really I think its better to solve a problem via buffs whenever possible. I would say though, for every RTS game you'll ever play, have some sympathy for the balance team. The job is pretty much impossible: the systems are too complex and players are too clever. It's a really thankless task that always leaves someone unhappy.

Kenny: Another balance decision within Rivals was with Lasers/Missiles and Attack Bikes/Pitbull. These units are central to both factions in terms of balance - if you make any of them worse, it changes the way games play out significantly. For example, Missiles and Lasers are used as a catch-up mechanic because they are cheap and the role they play works in many situations, so they can pull you from behind. What this has resulted in is almost every deck running one of these units. To me, this reduces deck diversity because when you try to run a deck without these units, you are a lot weaker overall. Was it intentional for these units to be so central to the balance of the game? And how might you change that?

MrBlack: It was intentional that those units would be core to every deck. It's important to keep in mind that this game was designed with the expectation of multi-year ongoing development. Our expectation was that we'd be adding units for years and that would allow us another vector, other than pure numbers balance, to work through these kinds of problems as they came up. I could easily see a situation where we would design new units that were reasonable alternatives to things like Attack Bikes and Laser bros with different tradeoffs and deck synergies, to address the issues with deck diversity.

Kenny: Scavengers ended up being that!

You talked about how you revamped deck building, so I'm curious about how you found the exact balance about how many units are in a deck. Were there ever versions of the game where you could
have more units? Or less? Do you think 6 is the perfect number?
I think 6 units in a deck give an interesting limitation, since you can't build a deck that has an answer to everything. Tournament gameplay I think became very exciting due to this limitation, as its possible to build a counter deck to your opponent, giving us a cool mind game aspect to deck and map selection.
I am a big advocate and a fan for this side of the game. An example:
Player 1 is known for playing tanks, so Player 2 tries using the Giga-Cannon, but Player 1 will expect this. counters and plays Inferno instead.
It makes for great spectacle when a maybe mechanically weaker player wins against a stronger one due to these mind games and being more versatile in what units they can use effectively.

How much of this was intentional?

MrBlack: I think the decision to go with a six-card deck was made before I joined the team. However, we certainly were aware of and discussed the implications of that decision. Six felt like a goldilocks number for us, not to big, not to small, good deck building options while also forcing you to make hard decisions and leaving you open to some build order poker. I think in addition to the gameplay constraints there were also some UI and usability concerns that would have made it unpalatable for us to go bigger on the deck size. I don't actually know how much iteration we did on that number before landing on six though.

Kenny: It’s been talked about by other ex-devs, but let’s put this theory to bed: Is there an evil EA matchmaking algorithm designed to make you lose? Can you talk about the matchmaking system a bit?

MrBlack: I don't know the specifics of how the match maker works but I think it's taking things like metal count, Elo, and region (for ping reasons) into account. We were trying to give you good matches. There is no secret evil EA algorithm that's giving you bad deck matchups or anything weird like that as far as I know.

Entsorger: Shatterer's sound effects seem to be based on the Simpsons? Is that a personal Easter egg? Who came up with that? On that same note, why does Mohawk sound like a pirate boat?

Are there any other easter eggs in the game?

MrBlack: Wow, good ear! (Editor: credit goes to Omeleet) I believe I specifically referenced this Simpsons clip when talking to our awesome audio designer about the Shatterer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd_yvCNkPp4

I was usually the initial source of ideas for the unit personalities. The Mohawk was a pretty typical example of this. I, or someone else, had an idea for a unit, I would write up a "one-page" design doc for that unit. This gave a high level overview of what that unit was and what it did. Along with specific notes about gameplay, art, VFX, animation, and audio. I would then work with the various departments on the implementation of these ideas. In some cases what I wanted wasn't workable or someone else had a better idea and we'd end up with something else, but in a lot of cases the other departments were able to deliver a cooler version of my initial pitch.

So for instance, with the Mohawk, the high level overview was: "The Mohawk Gunship is a heavily armed, long endurance, ground attack tandem rotor helicopter gunship. The Gunship flies in a standard configuration but fires broadsides against enemy targets. It’s as if an AC-130 and a Chinook had a baby and it was raised by a Kodiak. "

And the audio notes were: Helicopter pilot that was a ship of the line captain in a previous life.

“Bring ‘er along side!”

“Hard’to port!”

“Fire! Full Broadside!”

“I should have joined the Navy”

“Abandon Ship!”

“Stow it!”

“Cross the T!”

“Raking Fire!”

The thematic idea here (he's a ship captain) came from the gameplay mechanic, where the Mohawk has to broadside its targets.

I don't think we put a ton of Easter eggs in the game. The one big one I added was the Scrin ship in the campaign map.

Kenny: I think it was added after you left, but there is a beach themed map called "castaway", I always wished it would have a volleyball next to some rock called Wilson!

Entsorger: Now that you mention it: there were rumors of a third faction (Scrin) that may or may not have been in development. Can you speak to that?

MrBlack: The Scrin were never in development, or ever planned to be.
So much of the game was designed and implemented with two factions in mind it would have been a nightmare to add a third.

Kenny: Do you think there will be more mobile games like Rivals in the future? Maybe similar RTS games? Rivals was supposedly going to start a trend to make mobile games more complex and full-fledged experiences, does its failure discourage others from trying?

MrBlack: I think it’s always possible you'll see more Rivals like games. Companies use a bunch of different metrics when they make decisions about what projects to greenlight. Sometimes people just have a really compelling pitch and they're able to get people excited about it. More often, pitches are successful when they can demonstrate that comparable games in the market have done well. So yeah I think Rivals, and every other mobile strategy game that failed to match the promise of Clash Royale, makes it more difficult for future RTS games to get made. But never say never.

This now concludes our mega(tron) interview with Lead Gameplay designer Greg Black!
Needless to say, it was a huge honour to talk to him and we hope you found his insights into the game’s development as interesting as we did!

 

In-Depth Interview with Lead Gameplay Designer Greg Black - Part 1

 

Part 1: Faction design, balance, and tech units.

We are very happy to present this interview with Greg Black, C&C legend and ex-developer on Rivals!
Due to the special nature of this interview, we are splitting it into 2 parts and will use a more conversational format. This was originally a Discord conversation that took place over many days, with some messages that weren’t relevant to the interview edited out.
Part 2 will be published next week, but we are still in contact with Greg, so If there is any topic or question the community wants us to follow up on, let us know!

Entsorger: Hi Greg! Thanks again for doing this!
Please meet my organizational partner Kenny (part of the Legion team), who is just as excited as I am! To keep things simple and natural we'd like to do an easy back & forth chat where we can talk over the course of a few days or so and then I will create a transcript for the blog.
Anyway, time for introductions! As I mentioned before my name is Carsten aka Entsorger (German for Disposer). I'm from Massachusetts but relocated to Germany a long time ago.
I've played C&C since the early Westwood days and now play Rivals almost exclusively and have recently started streaming on Twitch.
Together with Kenny I am a part of Legion, a community-run organization that hosts events and tournaments (both live & offline) with a custom-bot that one of our founders created.
We are mods on the official discord and try to keep the community alive as best we can, including running the blog where this interview will be published.

Kenny: Hello Mr Black! My name is Peter, but I’m known as Kenny in the community and I’m from Hungary. I've been organizing tournaments and other events for Rivals since 2019, and it’s probably fair for me to say I'm the leader of this "Legion" organization team that does Rivals tournaments and events. I'm also a moderator on the community server. I've been playing C&C games since I was 4 years old, starting with Red Alert 2. It’s a huge honour to talk to you, so thank you for doing this! My dad still plays Red Alert 3 everyday!

MrBlack: Hi Carsten & Kenny nice to meet you both. Super cool to hear you guys are still keeping the Rivals dream alive.

Since you guys introduced yourselves let me do the same. My name is Greg Black. I've been playing C&C games since I was 15. I started with the original C&C back in 1995 and have pretty much played or worked on every C&C game since then, with the possible exception of C&C4 (although technically I did play it when it was in development).
The first C&C game I actually worked on was the Red Alert 2 expansion Yuri's revenge. I then worked on Generals, Zero Hour, C&C3, Red Alert 3, and Rivals in various roles, but mostly in game design.
I've also worked on a couple of other games: the Battle for Middle Earth 1 & 2, an old Facebook game called Empires & Allies that I built with a bunch of C&C vets, and I also worked on Starcraft 2 (a little indie RTS game not a lot of people have heard of). I'm looking forward to chatting with you both.

Kenny: Can you tell us what your title was on Rivals? We know you from C&C but some of our readers might not, and I couldn't find a specific title anywhere in the credits.

MrBlack: I think my title was the Lead Gameplay Designer, or Lead Combat Designer, something like that.
I was basically responsible for "game" part of the game. Between match start and match end. So that covered things like unit design, unit balance, economy balance, the deck building system (i.e., how structures worked).
I was also the C&C expert on the team. So I made sure the little C&C details were correct. For instance, getting the Obelisk to function and sound just right.

Kenny: Thank you, this will help guide our questioning. Let’s get started!
Are there any unit roles that are intentionally missing from the factions? Nod's weakness to light air units like the 2 drone units is often talked about in the community, most competitive decks need to play either Stank or Phantom. Is any of this intentional? What do you think about the recent Banshee change that tried to make the unit more like Talon?

MrBlack: No, missing unit roles was not intentional. The faction design on Rivals was pretty ad hoc. On Red Alert 3, I was able to pre-plan the factions, starting from unit roles, and make sure all those roles were covered. This wasn't the case on Rivals. Before I joined the team many units had already been designed and built, without necessarily having a clear plan for the factions themselves or the unit roles within the factions. It was more of a bottom up approach. Part of my role when they brought me on was figuring out how to take what already existed and made it work in a cohesive way, as well as plan out future units to help fill some of the holes in the factions you're talking about. So, in this instance, Nod's weakness to light air probably wasn't addressed because were we busy addressing even more fundamental issues within the factions. This wasn't ideal, but given that it was a live service game and the plan was to keep adding unit content on a regular basis, we expected to be able to address all these types of issues when the game was live.
I also made some changes to how deck building and structures worked in the game, which gave us a lot more flexibility in adding units. That flexibility hadn't quite been there in the previous system, which I think stymied the faction design somewhat.
As far as the Banshee changes specifically, I couldn't really comment on them. I'm not up to date enough on the state or Rivals to have any real opinions on balance or more recent changes.

Kenny: Can you talk more about those changes to deck building and structures?

Additionally, while we are on the subject of factions: Obviously, being C&C they are Nod and GDI, and they have to fill certain roles, GDI being slower, tankier powerhouse, while Nod the faster but less hard hitting, subversive faction. Was it hard to design units that fit this criteria but also fill the required unit role? Were there any units that were changed during development to fill the themes of these factions

MrBlack: Sure, when I arrived the way the game worked is you would build your deck by picking structures, rather than units. There were a bunch of different structures, not just the standard four we have now on each faction. Each structure would come with two specific units. So as an example, Nod had a "burrowing" themed structure that produced the Rockworm and the Scarab. So if you wanted either the of those units in your deck, you had to pick that structure, and you get both those units, whether you wanted them both or not. The upside of this design was that it was really easy to build a deck, just pick your 3 structures and you're done. This design also had a few downsides. Deck variety was super limited, I think my calculation was that we'd only have 83 unique decks in the game at launch. It also meant that for every two units we designed, we would have to design a thematic pairing for them, as well as an actual unique structure for them to be built from. This made designing units way harder than when you can just design them one at a time, and it made it way more expensive from a production standpoint because you basically had to design 1.5 things for every 1 unit (i.e. 1 unit and half a structure). Switching to the "just pick the six units you want and the buildings come along automatically" design really helped free us up creatively on the unit design side, and it increased our unique decks at launch from 83 to over 8000.

I have the "GDI is big, slow, and powerful. Nod is fast and subversive" thing internalized very deeply at this point just from years of exposure to C&C, and I had done a bunch of this type of RTS unit design on other C&C games, so it wasn't a particularly new problem. We also had the advantage of a bunch of previous Tiberium universe C&C games to draw from and the majority of the units in Rivals were adapted from previous C&C games. The more challenging problem was how to adapt those units. How do we make the Mammoth Tank on our tiny phone feel like the Mammoth Tank? How do we let Nod be fast and sneaky on a map that's not that big? Finding ways to capture the distilled essence of C&C and make it work well for a mobile game was the real challenge.
I don't recall if we had to change any units during development to fit the theme of the factions, that would usually be something we'd try and catch early in the design. More often changes came from me being nit-picky about how iconic C&C units functioned or were presented. There were little things like the Orca used to have Tiberium-green colored gas jets coming out of their turbines, and I asked art to change it because GDI wouldn't power their orcas using Tiberium. Or the original design of the Obelisk had it firing a sustained beam against a target, like you see in some other mobile strategy games, rather than a high damage single shot laser with a long awesome sounding charge up.

Kenny: There is a very popular and effective GDI playstyle that uses fast units that can't be blocked: jumpjets, orca, drone swarm, talon. As opposed to this, top players usually play more expensive units, slower and more often ground units, like scorpion tank, giga cannin, tick tank, or even in the air tower, Inferno is the most common choice, which is a lot less expendable than the GDI air units I mentioned.
This kind of meta game kind of breaks the core C&C faction calculus. Would you try to balance this out just to fit the theme?
There are also some unit pairs that dont fit this requirement, most notably grenadiers are less tanky and use EMP, while mutants on Nod are more straightforward tanky heavyhitters. Do you think this breaks the c&c formula, or they are just the exception that proves the rule?
Additionally, on the obelisk, did you know it is affected by the boost provided by fanatics, and it makes the wind up shorter? in addition to that, the sound and animation are also out of sync when fanatic boosted. The sound bug I'm assuming you would fix, but was this not know to the dev team, or just left in because boosting obelisks is actually pretty fun?

MrBlack: I don't think it would make a ton of sense to balance the meta to fit faction theming. Faction theming is a guideline, its flavor, its not a rule. Players are going to break the game in new and interesting ways every day, and I think that's awesome. I'd rather have a fun, healthy, dynamic, meta than strictly adhere to faction theme.
And yeah, I think you can point to every RTS games and see units that are not perfect fits for the faction theme, or even go directly against it. The goal is to have every unit in a faction be a totally unique but perfect distillation of the faction, but we don't always hit that goal in unit design. I think what's important is that the overall faction makes sense thematically and that the most iconic representations of that faction fit the theme as well as they could. Like for instance, I don't think the Avatar is really a great example of Nod thematic consistency in terms of how it's balanced (it's big and fairly slow), but it's so badass I would never want to get rid of it. On the other side I was always balancing the Mammoth Tank to be slower and tankier beyond what was sensible.
I think the Fanatics' interaction with the Obelisk is an interesting question. The sound and animation being out of sync is sad and that's something I would try and address, but the combo itself is really cool and ultimately gameplay is what's most important.

Kenny: Good that you brought up Tech units, as they remain and very polarising spot, basically being huge walls of stats that are very hard to kill and lock out more aggressive cheap decks for the 3rd missile, but are also useless in your deck for the first missile, and it’s possible the first 2 missiles fire fast and you don't get to use them at all...
Asking for a rework of the building is on a lot of people's wishlist, mostly wishing that tech units were cheaper but less powerful, so Titan would be a stronger version of a Predator tank, similar to how Predator is a stronger version of a Pitbull, thus creating 3 tiers of units. Do you think this is a solution, or is there a better way to balance it?
I also have a question about the theme of C&C relating to tech units, as a lot of iconic C&C units were moved into the tech lab. Was it intentional for people to have to wait and build up to these, or was there ever a version where a wolverine could exist in the same building as a Predator tank? What was the thinking behind creating the tech lab as a completely separate production building, rather than some kind of building upgrade?

MrBlack: Tech unit balance was definitely a point of debate on the balance team. For my part I prefer to try and push the boundaries of what is possible in unit tuning and design. I want the widest distance possible between the power of the weakest unit in the game and the strongest. I want the character of the unit to be as pronounced as possible. And I want the game to be exciting and have big swings in momentum. I want players to be able to pull off unlikely wins or sneaky plays. To me makes the game more exciting and dynamic as a designer and a spectator, however I think a lot of players, particularly as they become more competitive and proficient at the game (or really any RTS game) trend towards wanting to flatten the balance of the game as much as possible. I think competitive players really enjoy building incremental advantages over  their opponent, they really don't like getting "cheesed", and ultimately want every interaction to be as fair and predictable as possible.   I don't think either direction is necessarily right or wrong, it’s more a question of what kind of game are you trying to make, and what your values are. One of the things about C&C games that always attracted me to them over Blizzard RTS games were those wild balance swings. An entire game of C&C can turn around on a sneaky APC loaded up with Engineers. Superweapons can wipe out entire bases. C&C, to my mind, has really leaned into that "balance high" mentality from Red Alert 2 and that's why the tech units are balanced the way they are.
I don't really have an opinion on if the proposed Tech rebalance would be good or bad for the game. However, I know from experience that changes of that nature rarely have predictable outcomes. RTS games are extremely dynamic and complex systems so be careful what you wish for.

As far as the Tech Lab being a building rather than an upgrade, it was simply the most streamlined design we came up with. We were trying to reduce complexity in the design, and building upgrades were considered but ultimately we thought them an unnecessary complexity. And no, there was no intent to make people wait for Tech Labs to get the most iconic units, it just turns out that a lot of the more iconic units were higher tech and ended up there. We did actually have the Wolverine and the Predator Tank in the Warfactory at one point I think.

Kenny: Very interesting.

I think tech units are an important question, because a lot of players don't really appreciate or grasp the true complexity of Rivals. If you look beyond Tiberium league you find that an overwhelming majority has 2, 3 or sometimes even 4 tech units in their deck, learning to beat tech is one of the first things that players looking to climb the ladder need to learn. Do you think this is just due to the very accessible nature of Rivals being a mobile game? How do you design or balance units that encourages people to try to learn and not just stick this easy to play but overall not too effective strategy, or is this simply due to Rivals not having enough competitive players to populate more than one league?

MrBlack: It is pretty natural for players to try and take the path of least resistance to victory.
RTS games have such a heavy burden on pure execution, keeping your micro going, remembering to build units, being 10 places at once, etc, that running the same deck over and over again helps players from getting totally overwhelmed. When I was trying to "get good" at SC2 I would run the same 3 hatch roach build over and over again. It would win more games than it would lose, but some times I would just get hard countered by someone running Voidrays (or whatever). I didn't really have any interest in trying other builds because I was just trying to focus on my macro and execution of this one specific strategy, knowing that the long run good execution was the key to ladder success.
Ideally, we designed Rivals in such a way where even for lower level players there's not one or two dominate strategies that players completely rely on, so if literally everyone is running the same tech deck that sounds real bad. If everyone in lower levels is playing different tech decks but tech is dominant, that's probably indicative that tech is easier to execute for lower level players. Not ideal but probably ok as long as players graduate out of it eventually.
I do think you would probably see more variety in the meta even at lower levels if there was a more robust player base. More players would probably have solved a lot of issues for Rivals!

Entsorger: Wow. We are off to a great start! This is already a fascinating, well-written dialogue. Your responses are very thought out & eloquent.
Especially the bit about the wide power gap between top and bottom units. That has always been a very controversial topic in the community. Personally, I am on the fence about it, as I am a very competitive player that likes predictable, flat balance. However I enjoy the sneaky, surprising style almost just as much.
As Kenny said, leagues below Tiberium have lots of tech. I think this has a lot to do with Tech being among the first units you unlock, and the game teaching you to use it early on. Was this a conscious decision? Perhaps to convince the player a bit with a "wow" factor (big powerful fancy units vs boring old buggy, e.g) Would it perhaps have been better to introduce tech much later so new players learn "proper*" rivals first, and have tech unlocked at levels 40+ or more? How much thought went in to placing units on the level-unlock list 1-60?

Edit: "proper" in the sense that they are disadvantaged by not knowing the other, higher-tier playstyle once they hit Tiberium league and have much less outs when playing against competent techless aggro players.

MrBlack: I don't remember all the details (sorry it's been a few years now) but fairly late in the project we made the decision to give each player one of 3 random tech units at the end of their "onboarding" period. If I'm recalling correctly, we did this in order to make sure there was some initial diversity between decks, we wanted players to have a big shiny toy unlocked, and we wanted all four buildings in play as early as possible.

Mobile Free To Play games have basically zero switching cost, meaning the player hasn't really invested anything in terms of time or money when they start playing the game, so they will drop the game very quickly and for any reason. You can literally see this in things like retention metrics where (for example) for every extra minute a tutorial lasts, you'll lose an additional 5% of your players (note: these are not real numbers but are illustrative of reality). So what that means is we want to get the full scope of the game into the players hands absolutely as fast as we can, and convince them that the game is worth sticking around for. So, yeah, we probably would have paced out the game differently if it wasn't free to play and we could expect players to stick around a bit longer and there were almost certainly better decisions out there than the ones we made. A lot of design is just picking the least worst option based on the information and resources you have at the time.

Kenny: Hmm I know you wouldn't want to go into specifics due to not being in the loop of the state of the game, but based on this philosophy of "balancing high", do you think the opposite of the suggestion I mentioned would be better? As in, instead of making tech units weaker and closer to their war factory & barracks counterparts, and make them even more powerful and expensive. So once you have a Titan that is your key unit, it's a very powerful and if you keep it alive it will dominate the battlefield, but if you lose it, it is a guaranteed loss?
Part of this tech unit conundrum is the economy of Rivals, which was also slowed down significantly in the last balance patch. Double harvester doesn't give you infinite Tiberium anymore, but in a 4 minute game it still feels like killing a Titan isn't too decisive as maybe it should be?
An RTS that has similar design would be Company of Heroes, where if you stall long enough to get a Tiger tank it will start to slowly win you the game, but if you lose it, it dooms you, forcing you to be very strategic with it.

MrBlack: Yeah I'm sorry Kenny I'm going to keep being unhelpful when it comes to the current state of the game. I honestly don't think I've even played Rivals since the econ changes went in. It's been a few years, sadly. As far as the "make tech even more power" suggestion, I don't know. Could totally work! Hard to theory craft such a change without a ton of testing and iteration on the specifics. I think one of your main limiting factors here is just the timing of the overall game. An absolute mandate from my Creative Director was that I couldn't let the games get any longer than they already were, mobile gamers are sensitive to session length. Given how short the overall games are and how short the timing windows are it is challenging to find that exact sweet spot you're describing.
I think in longer, slower, games like COH and AOE you have a lot more room to make the MegaUnit/Wonder/Superweapon ultra-long investment strategy thing work.

Kenny: Yeah, some versions of these tech decks are more popular than others, but there is definitely no clear deck everyone plays.
It's frustrating from our end, because Rivals is so much more complex than almost anything else on the mobile market, so it is kind of sad when even most of the people playing it don't realize its full potential.
This is something I think Rivals didn't communicate very well. Rivals for all intents and purposes is a fully fledged out PC RTS game ported to the mobile platform, and it doesn't feel like most of the people who dismissed it realized this. Over the years the community definitely fell in love with it's art style, even the first controversial commander emotes are fan favourites now. But it seems like some RTS players didn't play the game simply because it looked like a standard mobile game.
I know you weren't responsible for marketing, but do you have any thoughts on this? It just feels odd that a C&C game was released without having even a trailer scored by Frank Klepacki.

MrBlack: We found it very hard to convince people that we were trying to make a real RTS just distilled down for phones and not a "cheap cash grab". A lot of PC gamers have a really negative perception of mobile games (which I totally get), and we always knew we would be fighting against that perception. Personally I think the marketing was a mixed bag, but we did attempt to make the case. I gave lots of interviews to the press extolling Rival's virtues, we had a big showing at EA Play, we did that live tournament on Twitch for the launch of the game, and they even flew me out to Korea to give a detailed talk about Rivals at the G-Star Conference. Our belief always was that if we could just get enough people to give the game a chance, they would see what we saw and the game would be successful, unfortunately it didn't work out that way.

Now yeah, as far as some of the ad content itself, there were some misses. The Kane model they used in the initial trailer was definitely a big miss and something I raised the alarm on as soon as I saw it, but at that point it was already too late to change. After that they actually brought me into many of the marketing meetings as someone who could help them avoid making decisions that might alienate C&C fans.
I definitely would have loved to have used more classic music or have Frank score the trailer, but that wasn't a priority for the team. I was able to help guide the direction of the in game music a bit more in the direction of OG C&C even if we didn't quite get there entirely. The score had a whole Avengers / Hans Zimmer thing for a while that would have been fine for a Generals game but didn't strike me as super correct for the Tiberium universe.

 

End of Part 1!

Part 2 should come out relatively soon, and will dig deep into Rivals' fate, monetization, the popcap system and lots of other topics!
We are in still in contact with Greg, so let us know if there are any extra questions you want to ask him!