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04/27/00
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Recently, we visited the Westwood offices in Las Vegas to take a look at the company's crop of upcoming games for E3. While there, we were shown a number of games, some of which are still being kept a secret and others that have already been announced, like the upcoming third-person shooter Command & Conquer: Renegade. We weren't expecting to be surprised by any of these games, as GameSpot is usually privy to early information on a number of titles before their announcement to the outside world. So you can imagine our shock when we were led into a nondescript room to take a look at Red Alert 2, the sequel to Westwood's 1996 smash hit.
Westwood officials revealed to us what is sure to be considered one of the industry's best-kept secrets: Development on Red Alert 2
has been going on for nearly a year at the company's Irvine, California, offices
- the same studio where Nox was developed. This is exciting news for Command & Conquer and Red Alert fans, and it's amazing to think that Westwood has been able to keep this game's development a secret for so long. We were one of the first non-Westwood employees to lay eyes upon Red Alert 2, and we've been given the green light by the top brass at the company to unveil the world exclusive on Westwood's latest strategy game.
To do so, Westwood turned to the Tiberian Sun engine to create Red Alert 2. The designers knew that the technology for Command & Conquer 2 was already dated and wasn't necessarily aimed toward the fast gameplay they were attempting to capture in Red Alert 2. According to Westwood, the solution was to detune the Tiberian Sun engine in order to make it "lighter" and better able to handle the fast gameplay mechanics the designers wanted. As a result, the Red Alert 2 engine - a stripped-down version of Tiberian Sun's - mixes sprite and voxel units, no longer has layered or deformable terrain, and enables much larger maps. While this might sound like a step backward, in reality, creating a simpler engine without any bells and whistles makes it much easier for the Westwood developers to focus on perfecting the gameplay for Red Alert 2. And as you can tell from these screenshots, the graphics haven't been sacrificed - in fact, they've been significantly improved over Tiberian Sun's.
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