Red Alert 3: Preview & EA Los Angeles Chat

We check out the anticipated title in the Command and Conquer franchise and speak with EA's Amir Ajami.

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Each mission is thus a sort of attrition puzzle, with the idea being to communicate well and develop hybrid strategies. This also serves to draw out the respective capabilities of each side's roster. "We definitely want to stress the importance of certain units and certain powers," Ajami went on. "and we do that by dropping in these kind of - puzzle elements is a good way of describing them I guess."

Armchair tacticians are a reclusive, even fastidious breed, of course, and not every player will want another general tramping around his nice clean battlefield mucking up his manoeuvres. Fortunately, the aforesaid AI personality is smart enough to fill the gap, but docile enough to follow your lead.

"With the AI you have four different options," Ajami explained. "You can tell the AI to attack something right now. You can tell them their strategy to attack something - build out forces that are suitable against that structure, that enemy. You can tell them to cancel an order. Or you can just hit a button which says 'help me' and they'll go to wherever your units are taking fire, go to your base, go to your facilities."

As each campaign bores on the experience will apparently move closer to conventional RTS solo modes, as players unlock more units and hence field more rounded forces. "In later missions when both players have topped up the tech tree they become more like traditional base-on-base," Ajami went on. "And those are more fun because - imagine a full tech tree on one side and your buddy has another full tech tree, and you're just like 'barraging' units at the enemy."

When asked about the increasingly hypothetical PS3 version, Ajami played down the idea that EA Los Angeles had struggled with Sony's asymmetrically constructed monster. "It wasn't so much an issue of problems as it was an issue of resources. We've de-emphasised PS3 so we can get the PC and Xbox 360 version out. Since that announcement we haven't really been talking about PS3 - we want to do something on PS3, but whether it'll be this year and whether it'll be Red Alert 3 or not remains to be seen. We certainly don't intend to ignore the PS3."

Real-time strategy might be a PC genre at root, but the new focus on collaboration suggests that Red Alert 3 will have a bright future on consoles, arguably the seat of cooperative gaming. It will, however, have to put up one hell of a fight to see off the extremely promising Tom Clancy's Endwar, also out this winter. As for debunking greasy introverted stereotypes, we're not sure either has much to offer. Ubisoft's effort might be a little less sexist, but it does, as Alex found out, actively encourage you to scream at the television. Perhaps now would be a good time to resurrect that golfing habit...

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 is out for PC on October 31 and for Xbox 360 on November 14.

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