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!