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!