C&C Labs News Wire

— Saturday, November 20, 2010 —

First things first: C&C 3: The Forgotten is in the running for Mod of the Year 2010, and we're honored to have been featured in the official promo trailer for the competition. We'd love your vote here. We're also honored to have received the "Geile Mod" (Cool Mod) award from German magazine PC Action, and to have been featured in a two page spread in German magazine PC Games. If you speak German, pick up the most recent issues to see the piece!

With the release of C&C All Stars and now the release of C&C 3: The Forgotten, at C&C Labs we get asked often about what it's like to make a mod. In an effort to pull back the curtain a little bit on the (very fun) process and to show you what goes in to crafting something like The Forgotten, we've created a series of articles we're calling "The Making of The Forgotten." The first in that series, "Story, Campaign, and Battlefields" was released today. Here's a snippet: 

Command and Conquer is fiction. Its fiction is what draws the fans in, makes Kane the enigma that he is, and spurs the campaigns onward. We wanted to create a mod in the Command and Conquer universe, that didn’t remove the player from what was familiar but enhanced it. We wanted to invite the player into a story with personalities and conflicts that gradually built into a rewarding crescendo, just like the C&C should be. One problem: we needed a fiction.
 
The Forgotten were a natural choice. Their motivations are complex but, before our mod, their story was largely untold. Initially, we thought that The Forgotten would be a faction that, to use Head Artist’s Tsumetai’s term, “was thrown together”—here a beam from an obelisk, there an older GDI tank chassis, here part of a Nod jet, and on and on. My contrasting idea was to make The Forgotten a group bound by a near-religious identity, with Tiberium at its core. Happily, we moved away from that. An intermediate stage of the design was “Nod’s Nod,” which lasted a bit longer and which in some forms made it in to the final version: in this conception, The Forgotten are motivated by their economic plight, and the disillusionment they have with Nod. The more I worked on the story, though, the more I realized that the questions of why people fight often relate to money and resources, but rarely end there.
 
Read on to learn more about the story, plus how Head Scripter Drummin scripted the missions and Mission Designer Predatore created the maps.

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