Thanks to everyone who participated in our anniversary event today!
In the event we revealed an upcoming campaign with the following trailer:
Now, after the video you might have some questions, as some people had during our anniversary event. I've collected some answers below in a Q&A format:
Q: What is Covert Revolt?
A: Covert Revolt (CR) is a new original, full-length singleplayer campaign for Dawn of the Tiberium Age that we're planning to release some time next year.
Q: What is that first part about? Does the campaign have cutscenes?
A: Covert Revolt has pre-mission and some post-mission cutscenes like the one you see in the beginning of the video. I wanted to have something similar to the TD & RA FMVs in the campaign, but because we don't have the development resources for actual FMVs, I instead push the story forward with images and text displayed by new logic built into our client. You could imagine the cutscenes to be a bit like a visual novel; the "slides" progress forward as you click with the mouse.
Q: Where does the campaign slot in the C&C lore?
A: Covert Revolt is going to be a side-story, comparable to our older The Toxic Diversion campaign. It takes place in an unspecified neglected country in Eastern Europe during the First Tiberium War (TD), in a geographical area that the official games never touched. This allows us to have a setting where we can plausibly have both Allied and Soviet as well as GDI and Nod equipment without retconning the official C&C lore, where old RA equipment has no place in the main conflict between GDI and Nod. The conflict in CR starts as an internal war within the country with outdated equipment, and eventually the bigger factions intervene with their own motivations.
So far DTA's missions have mostly stuck to a "TD setting" with GDI vs Nod, or a "RA setting" with Allies vs Soviets; in other words, while we've had 4 factions in multiplayer, our singleplayer and co-op missions have mostly stuck to using only two of the four factions, which I feel has left our missions a lot of unused potential on the table.
Q: How long is the campaign?
A: The full campaign will have over 20 original missions. However, like some of our earlier campaigns, this campaign also has multiple different endings and also multiple different paths that you can take. I've always loved player choice in, for example, RPG games, and thought that RTS games could use some of that. Thus, a single playthrough of the campaign varies from about 10 missions to 15 missions, depending on the path that you take.
Q: What about the difficulty level?
A: We realize that DTA missions are known for high difficulty, which has left the community with mixed feelings towards our missions. Many have criticized them for being too hard, while others have enjoyed the challenge.
To solve this issue, I have paid special attention and effort to difficulty scaling in this campaign. Every single enemy attack and difficulty-impacting mission event in the campaign has separate versions for Easy, Medium and Hard. This has made scripting the campaign missions significantly more work as many things have to be scripted 3 times rather than once (luckily our new editor makes doing this relatively quick), but as a result we have natural-feeling difficulty scaling for all missions, by far better than the original Westwood C&C games did.
Our aim is that Easy difficulty should be beatable by anyone who has played the original TD or RA campaigns. Medium difficulty is roughly 2x more intense than Easy, while Hard is, again, 2x more intense than Medium, providing the "familiar" hardcore DTA experience for those that really enjoy challenging themselves.
Q: But the footage in the trailer looks super hard?
A: All of the footage that you see in the trailer was captured on Hard difficulty. As stated above, on Medium you'll be facing only half of the difficulty, while on Easy you'll only be facing even fewer enemies.
Q: The trailer says "Coming 2023". Can you provide any more accurate release date, like Q2 2023 or something like that?
A: Unfortunately we can't provide a more accurate release date prediction yet. Currently the campaign is about 30% done, including programming work that went into creating the cutscene system for the client and our new map editor.
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Overall, Covert Revolt is my first full-length campaign and a really ambitious project, where, in addition to just adding more content into DTA with cutscenes that provide the classic "C&C feeling", I also want to push my over 10 years of C&C mission design experience to new levels and gameplay-wise provide you with one of the best and most interesting C&C campaign experiences ever.
I also have to provide credit and thanks to the rest of our staff and testers, who have been testing the missions created so far and provided a good deal of feedback that helps me achieve this goal.
You'll get to evaluate our success when we eventually release the campaign next year. For now, we hope you have fun with our new GDI and Allied advanced infantry and improved balance.
I love the semi-realistic weapon systems of old C&C games.
Wish more settings would adopt this approach.
Just... WOW.
That looks extremely promising. And ambitious.
I really like where this is going.
Will be worth the wait.
The best thing here is that with THAT many missions I can easily see how the player can get to play EVERY faction here, staying on steady course as commander of regular army boomers with Allied arsenal, going up ranks to GDI spec-ops, defecting to communist cause, and maybe, maybe even getting a chance to work for Nod.
The only thing puzzling me here is pink Nod.
Rampastring?
Did Kane send you?
Hopefully, this campaign will include optional missions the player can do that make the main missions easier like the Nod Tibsun mission where you complete it, and it will reduce Hassan's reinforcements in the main mission.
My current plans do not include optional missions, but they do include optional objectives that can affect the mission itself or following missions.
It seems very well made. I like the idea. Good strike ;D
oh.. amazing news !
So with more variable difficulty, I gotta ask, how is difficult is hard going to be in comparison with the Creeping Destruction campaign? And since you mentioned how the campaign will go from RA to TD tech, is it decided yet if you'll play one faction that just switches, for example you are Allies one Mission and then full on GDI the next without any tech-tree crossover, or will you progress, for example Soviet changing into Nod over the course of several missions but retaining some Soviet tech that doesn't have a direct equivalent?
1) Covert Revolt's hardest difficulty will mostly be a step below Creeping Destruction's hardest difficulty. This especially applies for the first half of the campaign. If you've played our "Chainbreaker" single mission on Brutal, the latter part of Covert Revolt on Hard will more or less match it, with the difficulty increasing in small steps throughout the campaign.
However, since Covert Revolt has multiple endings, some paths and final missions will be more difficult than others, as a logical consequence of your choices. The hardest of them will really be challenging on Hard and will most likely slightly exceed Chainbreaker on Brutal, while the easiest one will be a bit more casual.
I could say that, comparing Covert Revolt's hardest missions to Creeping Destruction (CD) in difficulty design, the biggest difference will be the "game speed target". With CD I was fine with it being so difficult that I personally had to lower down the game speed to be able to beat the last 3 missions of that campaign. Nowadays I don't think that's very enjoyable design though, so even the most extreme CR missions will be beatable by myself at 60 FPS (Faster) game speed. But they will maximize the difficulty otherwise.
CR will also have much more diversity in its missions than CD, which might make the overall campaign a bit more difficult in some ways - just raw micromanagement or macromanagement might not cut it in some situations, but you'll need to think more of your tactical approaches and unit compositions.
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2) Regarding technology, there won't be a direct transformation from RA technology to TD technology, instead the technologies co-exist. The factions that use RA technology perform modernization efforts during the campaign to be able to keep up the fight against GDI/Nod equipment. Expect that you'll get to use equipment from multiple factions during the campaign, although I don't yet want to reveal how the faction or technology switching or mixing will work for the player.
Thanks for answering. Sounds like this will be a more enjoyable campaign to play through then, since CD was a pain to play through at times(super fun though), and greater mission diversity, even if it throws some different kinds of difficulty, is always a good thing. And I can understand not wanting to spoil how the tech changes will work, but I'm just glad that you said multi-faction tech. Always enjoy when I can play around with stuff that isn't normally available. I hope this campaign is well received and inspires others to do more cross-era campaigns in the future.
Definitely interesting! While I don't quite feel that TD/RA setting split is quite as strong in the current missions as the third answer suggests - Creeping Destruction is both long and centred on a Soviet/Nod conflict, after all - this is just a minor quibble, and I'm certainly looking forward to something as ambitious as Covert Revolt.
I'm thrilled to hear you - and the other commenters here - are finding CR interesting!
You have a good point about Creeping Destruction involving TD and RA factions, but due to its very high difficulty, we consider that campaign to be a bit more like "bonus content for experienced players" than a "regular campaign". A lot of people have given feedback that they simply can't beat it, which limits the amount of TD/RA mixed setting content for them. It was also made at a time when we were a lot smaller as a mod and the expectations people had for our missions were different, and, frankly, while it's a decent campaign for people that seek challenges, it does not have the same quality as many of our later missions do.
Also, even with its 8 missions, CD is also only one-fourth of all our current SP content. Most of our ~20 Co-Op missions also follow TD or RA settings.
It is of course a good thing if you've felt that we've not had a strong setting split though :)