C&C and Star Craft are only two RTS games I really enjoy, except that fanfic C&C4.
I would like to say: Fuck EA
I will never stop being mad about C&C 4
I saw no reason to play anything other than RA2, Generals, and Tiberian Sun so that's why I'm not really heartbroken over the series going to shit. I had a lot of fun with those games and never wished for sequels
Fuck EA long live Westwood.
I got c&c4 for like 20 dollars awhile after it came out, and were it not for the shitty leveling system, I'd have considered it a pretty decent fun little game. It's one of those things where the real shame is that it replaced something else, kind of like banjo kazooie nuts and bolts.
Probably the big lesson to take from this would have to be: don't try to compete with blizzard.
[QUOTE=thelurker1234;52137301]I got c&c4 for like 20 dollars awhile after it came out, and were it not for the shitty leveling system, I'd have considered it a pretty decent fun little game. It's one of those things where the real shame is that it replaced something else, kind of like banjo kazooie nuts and bolts.
Probably the big lesson to take from this would have to be: don't try to compete with blizzard.[/QUOTE]
That's what EA does. A studio makes a game that sells well and is well received so naturally they greenlight a sequel. Only instead of making a sequel to the game people loved, they think the best course of action is to betray the fans and turn it into something else. Just look at Dragon Age 2, Dead Space 3, the C&C games, the sims, etc.
Oh our fans love command and conquer? Bullshit, they love starcraft, lets give them starcraft.
They're completely fucking retarded. What they do goes against the fundamental [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_niche]rules of nature[/url].
It's like getting on a bus with empty seats but instead of going to go sit in an empty spot by yourself, you go sit on someone else just because they're there and look comfortable
RA 3 and C&C3 were pretty fun and they were made by DICE LA not Westwood.
But DICE LA also made C&C4 so...
[QUOTE=Jimpy;52136889]I would like to say: Fuck EA[/QUOTE]
They made a deal with the devil and the devil just [I]fucked[/I] them all in the ass.
I wish they would just completely retcon c&c4 and make a new one.
if i've never played a C&C game, which of the ones available on steam should i play first?
[QUOTE=Swiket;52137683]if i've never played a C&C game, which of the ones available on steam should i play first?[/QUOTE]
I'd go with C&C 3.
Someone who claimed that they were a game designer/producer for Generals 2/F2P Command and Conquer posted this on reddit recently:
[QUOTE]The biggest problem was tension between free to play, and monetization. There's really no good way to find a happy medium. Either you incentivize people with meaningful persistent upgrades like levels, or new unit loadouts, or you have fair, competitive play. There's just not a good happy medium. Naturally, money talks and bullshit walks, so the game was leaning towards monetization and away from competitive play (except it's the competitive play that really keeps things interesting over the long term, so caught between a rock and a hard place I guess)
The second biggest problem was also a result of the need to monetize: content sprawl. We were adding two new Generals every month or so, so that there would be lots of unlockable content. 2 weeks per General is not even remotely close to enough time to fully develop each General. Like... not even close. You need distinct units, generals powers, upgrades etc. 2 weeks is probably 1/10th the time necessary to even get the assets built, let alone tuned, polished, and balanced. So what was the solution to this break-neck cadance? Strip down the Generals so they only had a subset of units, and go for MOBA style 3v3 gameplay where you had to pick complementary Generals to form a cohesive, well-rounded team. We were effectively trying to clone the likes of LoL and HoN in a fundamentally different genre. Personally, I hate being dependent on 2 other randos, or spending time trying to coordinate with 2 other players I trust. I just want to hop into a 1v1 ladder and start playing. But this game was not built for that, at all.
Next was the siloed development. Art was doing its thing. Engineering was doing its thing. Design was doing its thing. There was no vision holder creating a cohesive product. Art was laser focused on realistic visuals, which actually HURT game readability substantially. You could hide a terrorist in the shadow of a palm tree, and he would just blow up half your tanks. When you're playing a game competitively, you're spending literally fractions of a second on a given screen, and need to be able to assess conditions instantly. This can't happen when the map is full of visual clutter (burning piles of trash, crumbled walls, shrubs everywhere...). Zero Hour's simple graphics actually enhanced the gameplay. Generals 2's hurt it. I actually created a test presentation for the dev team called "Count the terrorist" where I'd show them a screen, give them 5 seconds (an eternity) to count how many terrorists were hiding on the screen. I did this for both Gens 2 and ZH. Nobody got the number right on Gens 2, but ZH was more accurate. Why? Better overall readability.
Moreover, we wanted to do things like make Technicals transports. Art was against this because they didn't have time to model the dudes sitting in the back of the technical, and the load/unload animations. This focus on realism placed a big drag on gameplay quality. Sure, it was the most gorgeous RTS ever made, but most people are there to play the RTS, not look at it!
The third biggest issue was contention about the RTS flavor the game should have. The lead gameplay designer at the time was a huge StarCraft fan, and the gameplay he had designed reflected that. Units didn't have mass, and all behaved homogeneously. No variety in turn rates, no acceleration, very similar specs. All of that nuanced micro that made CCG/ZH so special? 100% non-existent in Gens 2. The community who got to preview the game that previous December were not happy with the lack of CNC flavor, so there was an attempt to create a special community build for GamesCom that would feel more CNC-like. Unfortunately, that design shift was never officially cemented, and right up until cancellation, there were competing design philosophies.
One such example was how to handle rushing. The existing design was SC2-like: large-ish maps with plateaus and narrow entrance ramps that you could block off and defend easily. However, there were several design elements which contradicted this goal. Unit build times were too long, and movement speeds too fast. It would take a tank ~30 seconds to cross a map, but a tank would take 35 seconds to build. This means you could barely have 2 tanks built by the time your opponent's tank arrived. Even on small maps in ZH, you could often have 3 or 4 tanks ready by the time one arrived. Why? ZH (and CNC games, in general) had short build times and slow-ish movement speeds. This creates a natural defender's advantage that actually helps people repel "rushes".
Speaking of engineering. God damn. The game was an authoritative client-server model, where the server would model the game, and broadcast game state to the clients, which merely rendered it. Great for stopping cheating, but due to performance issues, the game's logical frame rate was 4FPS (literally 250ms per tick). And that didn't really account for latency. So you'd order a unit to go in one direction, and then very noticeably later, it would finally obey that order. This slow gameplay frame rate also made things like accurate crushing, and other effects (like high rate-of-fire weapons like gatts and quads) almost impossible. Also, apparently Frostbite 2 (the engine it was built on) is really not well suited for RTS gameplay according to the engineers I talked to. Things (like range detection) that would have been cheap and simple in an RTS-dedicated engine, were not so straight-forward or cheap in Frostbite.
And things like crushing wasn't just a technical hurdle - it was a political hurdle as well. Crushing is kind of a signature part of CNC gameplay, but there were lots of people on the dev team who thought that crushing would just make infantry useless, so they didn't want it. Except there are myriad ways to design infantry to retain a core role, while also allowing crushing, so it shouldn't have been an issue so long as adequate time was given for tuning the balance of crushing and infantry. We got the very first pass of crushing in as a trial in the last build (the people in the closed beta never got a chance to play with it, if I recall), and it was quite bad thanks to the disconnect between the server state and client state. On the client it would look like you've collided with the infantry, but the server state was slightly out of sync with the client state, so didn't actually register the crush. Or sometimes you'd think you've safely dodged the vehicle with your infantry, but they would just die as the tank passes by them (since it runs over where they were, which is what the server thinks the game state is).
Other issues like the Generals powers were just lame. They were point and click instant effects. Totally uninteresting, lacked nuance, and lacked depth. My voice of concern over the existing powers and suggestions to effectively scrub them and start from scratch, was not strong enough. Further, the manner in which you earned those powers was incredibly bad. In Generals/ZH, you earned your generals points by destroying enemy units and structures. In Generals 2, they were unlocked as a function of time or tech level (or something else, I forget which now!). No earning them, just suddenly became available to you even if you camped in your base and did nothing all game.
At the time we were cancelled, the game was about 2 months away from open beta. As a massive fan of the franchise, and RTS snob/connoisseur, to me it should have been 2 more years away from open beta. There was so much work that had to be done just to make it feel like a CNC game, let alone balance it and polish it. Honestly, even if that game had been released, fans would have hated it and would have been really disappointed in it. I personally would not have played it in the state it was in, for what it's worth.[/QUOTE]
[URL]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/if_you_could_bring_back_any_game_from_your/dgd1geg/[/URL]
Dunno how much truth there is to it, but it sounds about right
It looked like this before cancellation:
[video=youtube;80_x6bmzluc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80_x6bmzluc[/video]
I loved the C&C games. I owned every single one and loved them all... but I refused to buy 4.
It's a shame. I'm still mad.
[QUOTE=Swiket;52137683]if i've never played a C&C game, which of the ones available on steam should i play first?[/QUOTE]
Also, I just looked it up. Origin's C&C collection is $20 ($5 more than Steam's C&C 3) and you get the following with it:
• Command & Conquer
• Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Counterstrike
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert: The Aftermath
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Firestorm
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge
• Command & Conquer: Renegade
• Command & Conquer: Generals
• Command & Conquer: Generals: Zero Hour
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: Kane's Wrath
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Uprising
• Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
So that's 16 whole C&C products for a bit over the price of one on Steam.
[URL]https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/command-and-conquer/command-and-conquer-the-ultimate-collection/ultimate-collection[/URL]
If I understood this video correctly, around 2010 they tried to mainstream and simplify the games, failed, then were all over the place with several different projects, browser games and shit, and it all fell apart. It's interesting how at the beginning of the video the guy from Westwood expected to sell 60 000 copies, but it took them by surprise when they sold 3 million. These days if the game doesn't sell 3 million it's a flop. Publishers need to realize they have some some "niche" franchises, with 1-2 million potential sales. Make 3-4 of those, focus on the core concepts that made the originals fun, and get your 5-10 million sales.
I liked Tiberian Sun for it's post-apocalyptic mutant vs cyborg setting, and Renegade for being a hammy action hero FPS.
[QUOTE=AntonioR;52137947]If I understood this video correctly, around 2010 they tried to mainstream and simplify the games, failed, then were all over the place with several different projects, browser games and shit, and it all fell apart. It's interesting how at the beginning of the video the guy from Westwood expected to sell 60 000 copies, but it took them by surprise when they sold 3 million. These days if the game doesn't sell 3 million it's a flop. Publishers need to realize they have some some "niche" franchises, with 1-2 million potential sales. Make 3-4 of those, focus on the core concepts that made the originals fun, and get your 5-10 million sales.[/QUOTE]
They had a similar issue with Mercenaries. Mercs 3 was on the cards but Pandemic got shut down, then another studio was handling the IP tasked with turning it into a multiplayer-only F2P game with some MMO/persistence elements involved which went dark for a few months then got shut down.
[media]https://youtu.be/-YAuGSlvEpA[/media]
Problems were already evident before all this really.
Mercs 2 got restarted from scratch about quarter of the way into production since EA didn't think it was shaping up correctly. Then they proceeded to rush development hence Mercs 2's weird design decisions and bugs.
RA2 is one of my favourite games of all time, it's entertainment value still holds up today and not to mention it's got one of the best soundtracks of any game ever.
The franchise started to go stale with RA3 personally, which wasn't exactly a bad game, it just came at a time when I'd already been spoiled by more realistic/tactical strategy games like CoH and Faces of War.
And I'll echo the sentiments of C&C4. I can understand wanting to rewrite the C&C formula to keep the franchise fresh... but not like that. Anything but that.
Its sad that EA let C&C4 pass but canned much more interesting looking titles. Project Comacho sounded fucking great.
Went and replayed Tiberian Dawn and RA2 the other week for shits and giggles.
Man, the characters were all so fun and the music was absolutely superb. I really miss this stuff.
I just want to point out that Command & Conquer series lives on through [URL="http://openra.net/"]OpenRA[/URL], which also supports Tiberian Dawn and Dune 2000. Team is also working on Tiberian Sun at the moment.
[QUOTE=suXin;52138959]I just want to point out that Command & Conquer series lives on through [URL="http://openra.net/"]OpenRA[/URL], which also supports Tiberian Dawn and Dune 2000. Team is also working on Tiberian Sun at the moment.[/QUOTE]
They are also adding support for Red Alert 2 along side the support for Tiberium Sun but it still some time away I believe.
[QUOTE=mcattack1092;52139420]They are also adding support for Red Alert 2 along side the support for Tiberium Sun but it still some time away I believe.[/QUOTE]
IIRC OpenRA has very limited support for RA2/YR already, but it's an unofficial mod that may not be up to date with the project.
[QUOTE=Aredbomb;52139447]IIRC OpenRA has very limited support for RA2/YR already, but it's an unofficial mod that may not be up to date with the project.[/QUOTE]
Ah ok. I thought it was part of the main development for Open RA.
[QUOTE=mcattack1092;52139458]Ah ok. I thought it was part of the main development for Open RA.[/QUOTE]
Think I saw mention recently that working on Red Alert 2 should be a natural part of course after finishing Tiberian Sun
I think the real turning point was C&C3 ; most games before relied on rushing and more macro than micro. No upgradeables, no powerups, just a crap load of units. Speed and keeping an eye on the map was key.
Generals was (bar C&C4) the biggest departure from that strategy, feeling more like AoE / StarCraft with upgradeables, multitudes of different factions with different units (unlike RA2 with only one, two max new units per faction) and general powers. Generals was a good game on it's own (and shockwave makes it amazing ) however it's not really a C&C game. C&C3 decided to take on and keep a massive amount of General's features, the only real C&C part being kept was the building system and lore. Instead of returning back to no micro and rushing (which I really feel is C&C's gameplay), they shafted it even more in RA3 with those fucking tech levels per structure and units each with at least 1 alternate feature. I couldn't bear RA3 which is a total shame considering I loved the previous games, remember playing the beta and just being really disappointed with it. I guess that's why games like Planetary Annihilation and Total Annihilation managed to fill the gap; although being more complicated on the surface ( managing multiple factories, keeping an eye on resources, multiple planets ), it was simply a "make units, destroy the others" game at its core, just like C&C
Shame that SAGE is also locked to 30fps, another minor gripe.
[QUOTE=Jimpy;52136889]I would like to say: Fuck EA[/QUOTE]
tbh its amazing but it seems like pretty much everything they touch goes to shit in some way
My favorite part of the old C&C games was exploiting the AI, seriously you throw a stone at their harvesters and they bumrush all their infantry straight into the tiberium.
Me and my father both played shit out of the original C&C on the first computer we ever bought. Same with Red Alert, I remember when he came back from work, hopped out of his car with Red Alert in his hand. I still have the disks and packaging.
[QUOTE=RainbowStalin;52139707]My favorite part of the old C&C games was exploiting the AI, seriously you throw a stone at their harvesters and they bumrush all their infantry straight into the tiberium.[/QUOTE]
Yeah I figured this out as a kid. Touching the enemy's harvesters would make the AI shit every unit they had on killing the attacker.
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