While there is no naval combat in CNC4, air-to-air and air-to-ground engagements make up a significant part of the gameplay experience. Our “Support” Class emphasizes flying units over all others – in fact, the “Support Crawler” on for both GDI and Nod factions is a massive flying unit - allowing for faster navigation of the battlefield, greater tactical flexibility and the ability to provide battlefield support on multiple fronts.

Tiberian Twilight is the final chapter in the Tiberium saga, and following the maxim that “it is always darkest before dawn” things get pretty unpleasant for all involved as we hurtle towards the conclusion. From the get go, we wanted to move the series away from “campy” elements – which work so much better in the Red Alert universe – in favor of a “dark and gritty” narrative thrust, especially in our FMV sequences, with an emphasis on a believable world and more complex character motivation, allowing our Players to get emotionally invested in the outcome of the story.

Factional diversity is one of the key focuses of CNC4 – we actually have more units in this game than in any of our previous RTS titles.

While Tiberian Twilight has two core factions – GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod – each has been split into three classes; Offense, Defense and Support. Each class, while tactically diverse, is designed around a particular play-style, and as such are comparable to sub-factions. However, rather than simply changing out a few units and modifying the rules, as we did with the subfactions in Kane’s Wrath, each Class in CNC4 is, engineers aside, entirely unique, with its own range of units, structures and powers designed around the strengths and weaknesses of that class.

While the Scrin – and their putative invasion - do play a role in CNC4, they will not appear in playable form.

The Liquid Tiberium explosion at Temple Prime, used by Kane to summon the Scrin to Earth, had an unfortunate side effect; it massively accelerated Tiberium growth, overpowering the sonic technology GDI had previously used to contain the alien element. By 2062, when our prologue takes place, it has been 15 years since the end of Tiberium Wars and the Earth is in pretty bad shape.

Basically, the Player has a consistent “Commander Profile” across Campaign, Multiplayer and Skirmish. As they play the game – in any mode - they earn experience that in turn allows them to “level up” their profile, unlocking new units, structures, powers and abilities. These are then available across all game modes. In other words, if you’re having a tough time in a campaign mission, go, play some skirmish or multiplayer, earn yourself some new toys and then come back and kick that missions ass.

It is worth noting that the unlocks have been balanced so that they don’t simply provide more powerful units, but rather a wider variety of tactical approaches for a more experienced player.

Perhaps the biggest graphical improvement is our new “deferred lighting engine”, which allows pretty much every element on the battlefield - from explosions to power ups to Tiberium itself - to light up the environment in real time. This really brings the battles to life as never before.

Kane is our only returning character, but there are references to previous CNC characters woven throughout the campaign.

From a fictional perspective, we’re tackling that in our unit profiles on the CNC website. The basic backstory is that administrations change, and with that change comes a new set of priorities and incentives, leading to the return of bipedal / walker units.

From a game design perspective, it’s a bit simpler. In CNC3, we were trying to get back to the feeling of Tiberian Dawn, with an emphasis on treaded and wheeled vehicles over more science-fiction oriented designs such as walkers.

With CNC4, we had a desire to explore more of the science-fiction side of the universe, allowing us to embrace Tiberian Sun-era units such as the Mammoth Mk. II (returning as the GDI Mastodon) and to examine where other forms of battlefield technology (such as hovercraft) would be in 2077.

Sorry, can’t really comment there.