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Command and Conquer 3 Announced
pasamio writes "After years of April Fools Jokes and other pranks, EA has officially announced Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Set for PC release in 2007, they're keeping the details very close to hand but it is being developed using the next generation SAGE engine (used in C&C:Generals and Battle for Middle Earth)."
I've heard Duke Nukem Forever is supposed to...
OW!
Hey!
Stop hitting me!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
C&C Generals didn't have as much of a following as the original C&C games. I found it had more of a Warcraft 3 feel then a classic C&C game, which was a turn-off for some players such as me. It was also the first RTS game published since EA's assimilation of Westwood, and was under a different director.
Westwood is now just a shell of the company it once was, since a lot of the staff have moved on to other projects. I hope whoever is left at the development house knows how to design with the same concepts that started the franchise.
Going back to its roots is something I think this series needs to do. Red Alert 2 was the name's last huge success, and the bad sales of Renegade and the mediocre response to Generals should show that a new direction is needed.
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I just bought the 10 anthology of C and C and for the past two weeks have been running thru the general set and the expansion - I love the challenges section where you pit yourself against all of the generals - I especially love the finger of death weapon - the particle cannon.
Can't wait to see the new game - I usually wait months before purchasing a new release, but I'll prolly pick this one up the day it's released.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
There have been like 10 command and conquere games, how can this one be 3?
If it's dead, you killed it.
As a member of the C&C community, I can actually say that this could have potential to be good. In many ways, they're returning to the roots of the game with GDI and Nod, live-action cutscenes (although it's unknown if Joe Kucan will return as Kane) and an immersive single player campaign. EA have actually taken some time and care to get a bit of science behind tiberium, which I feel is a good sign.
I still feel betrayed by EA for letting the community down at so many points - Generals, their interference in Tiberian Sun (look at prerelease info about the game to see what I mean), the dumbing down of Red Alert 2 (the original RA was serious, RA2 was all cartoony and not serious at all) and then the fiasco surrounding The First Decade pack they released. If they can release a solid C&C game that lives up to the expectations of myself and other C&C fans, I could probably forgive them.
Also, not mentioned there but there is to be a third side available once GDI and Nod campaigns are complete, but it's unknown as to who you'll be playing as. If you're in the US, there's a PC Gamer coming out that will have a lot of info about the game, and a Dutch magazine, PC Gameplay, also has a preview of the game.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
The original Command & Conquer has always impressed me. Sure it wasn't the first RTS, but in my opinion it was the first one to get it right. Both Nod and GDI were fairly well balanced, and the game had a lot of depth and replayability (most levels had multiple battle fields). The graphics were good for the time (even the FMV), and looked great when C&C Gold came out for Windows '95. There were a lot of tools out there to create your own levels, and playing friends over a LAN was a great experience. I don't know if this new C&C game can push the envelope, but I sure hope it tries.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
...as much as you might like to play this game - it's coming from EA. It irritates me it's even getting publicity...
I loved C&C Tiberium Sun, it was the game that really got me hooked on RTS. To this day, I still fire it up to play a multiplayer skirmish now and then. The tech tree was great, and I loved the story line. The graphics weren't bad, but when Generals came out and after I'd played it, I wished they'd taken the Generals engine and slapped a sequel to Tiberium Sun on there.
Even without that, Generals was one of the best RTS games I'd ever played.
This, if EA doesn't screw it up, has the possibility of besting any of the other C&C games by a mile. I really hope they don't.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
You know, I really REALLY love generals and have played it multiplayer online with friends
until just recently when the bugs and network difficulties got to be too much for us.
I think whoever designed the networking code was either inexperienced or lazy or both.
Why can't they just use a SIMPLE network protocol??? For example, if you have a
firewall, you have to open up the TCP ports: 80, 6667, 28910, 29900, 29920
and UDP ports: 4321, 27900. That's just part of it. There's loads more "fun" if NAT
is involved.
What happened to games like quake -- just open one port and you're done?
I can't tell you the lost time given to configuring. I remember many nights
having to cut the play short with friends because the configuring took
loads of time at the start. I mean, you get your friends fired up about
this game, they go to play it with you and... fizzle. (by the way, we're talking
developers and network admins here... so we should have a headstart)
And the multiplayer... I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have a wonderful game
in progress (myself and 2 friends vs. 5 computers), and have the game stop early because
of either "Mismatch detected", "A serious error has occurred" (happens simultaneously
on 3 computers!) or some network glitch. We've all replaced hardware, and that's not
it. We have never gotten a generals game going successfully with 4 players for more than
5 minutes.
If a player has a network problem, it gives him an irrevocable 60 second countdown
before kicking him out. No option to pause, just an option to kick him out early.
Even if the problem is momentary, your 2 hour game is toast if he can't recover in that
time.
So please EA, rethink how this stuff works and save us the pain!
I am excited for this. I like the genre of the C&C series. Generals was fun, but not as fun as Red Alert 2. I do hope it goes back to the classic style.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Could you be using a basic hub, as opposed to a network switch? Tray and see if you're getting any packet collision.
Set for PC release in 2007, they're keeping the details very close to hand
Is that the right turn of phrase? I'd expect something like "close to chest" like one does with a poker hand. "Close to hand" is more like Emporer Palpatine keeping Luke's lightsaber, saying, "You want this?" It's generally used to refer to weaponry placed for rapid deployment for personal defense.
Or like some documents in a closed folder labeled "Top Secret" within reach of the EA executive in plain sight where you could make a grab for it, but you won't, and which presence only serves to underscore that, "We have the information you want right here, but I can't let you read it."
I.e. "close to hand" tends to be used literally while "close to chest" is used figuratively. The context calls for a figurative phrase.
RA2 and it's expansion was the last decent game to come from westwood.
One of the few games that was fairly balanced, the online top 100 rankings was
even between allied and soviet(well, iraq).
I believe it works like this:
RA1: Solviet Campaign --> CnC-->Tiberiun Sun-->CnC3
RA1: Allied Campaign --> RA2/Yuri's Revenge
The two campaigns in RA1 esentially follow two paralell universes. I believe wikipedia has a good article on the CnC universe connections here
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There are various links to drool on: #1, #2, #3, and #4 for magazine scans, information, and discussions.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been waiting since I was a little kid for a sequel to Red Alert 2. The C&C universe was always boring to me. The Red Alert universe was always exciting and the games themselves were always better. Stick with the Red Alert series. You guys already put out a C&C sequel since the last Red Alert sequel.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
I loved Generals. It was an awesome game. For a while.
But I have vowed never to give EA another dime for that franchise if it's the last thing I ever do. Why? Because their commitment to their customers is crap compared to their RTS rival Blizzard. Here's what happened for you non C&G:G players:
First they released the game. It was cool. People noticed it was blantantly unbalanced. It was still imbalanced. They released 3 or 4 patches and then Zero Hour came out. Zero hour further screwed up the balance of the game. In the end, they patched it a few more times and then left it in a crippled, obviously screwed up state. I remember being so frustrated with the game being one sided that I was posting in their support forums. EVERYBODY was angry about the game. It came down to a point where people were telling prospective customers to not purchase the game because EA doesn't care about you once you cough up cash. It was only after insane amounts of anti-EA posts when EA staff finally started interacting - on a very limited basis - with the community. I remember their first post being an apology of sorts. But it was clear the higher ups were telling them to can support and move on to working on the LoTR game that was coming up.
The consensus was that the game coulda been great, but EA's lack of commitment to release balance patches (is it that much work???) killed hard core players' will to keep playing. I remember vowing to never play again until they patched the current version. I haven't picked up that CD since.
Why would I complain about the game's balance? Because the expansion set made the game have TWELVE sides and yet at the end of the day there was one or two CLEAR superior sides to play (inf and usaf). It became boring and frustrating to play when two out of three random opponents you played was one of the two cheese sides.
I don't care how shiny and flashy their next game is. I'm not giving them a damn dime. If they are going to release a multiplayer RTS and then not bother to make sure it's balanced, I'm not interested.
The parent post sounds like it was written by one of those people hired by companies to use fake online personas to promote products and generate "hype" in public Web discussion areas. I mean, its okay to be a fan of something, but the parent just sounds so amazingly artificial to me...
Blizzard is good for micromanaging. Age of Empire was good for huge wars and economic games. TA was for downright fighting and it seemed to me that C&C was going for the TA feel but never achieved it.
C&C 2 was one of the worst piles of trash to visit the PC. Dune 2 was more fun than C&C 2.
God spoke to me.
I still play generals ever week. Im sure Ill buy it the day it comes out.
Ant
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EA games are developed for console(X360, etc.), because
console games dont need support and balancing.
They dont care if it is a RTS game or anything else.
Supreme Commander
Check it out here: link.
And let's hope it happens - still the best, most complex RTS game ever, all it needed to be perfect was some improvements to the AI.
Read Pynchon.
Looking at the screenshots so far, the biggest problem with Generals as far as I am concerned is still very evident - you can't zoom out far enough to see what the hell you are doing.
If you go back to C&C and particularly Red Alert 2, you can crank the screen resolution and see a very large area on the screen - maybe a few hundred metres or so, certainly most of your base at one time.
In Generals, you can see one or two buildings and a few units. I always found this made it extraordinarily frustrating trying to control events with any precision - you would constantly lose units and generally get lost in the chaos of a battle because you simply couldn't see enough.
If EA has any interest in making a halfway decent game, they will take a leaf out of the book of Black and White and Civ IV and allow players to zoom waaaaaaay out to a comfortable level.
Of course I am also in the tiny minority who would love to see a return to 2D graphics for the series...
Read Pynchon.
I urge you not to let Red Alert put you off from Tiberian Sun. As other posters have mentioned, the C&C/TS universe may as well be completely separate from RA.
:-)
Plot-wise, TS is a completely logical extension of C&C. Yes, it's more "out there" when compared to the real world, but not when compared with the world in the original C&C. That's pretty much a necessity in any divergent timeline plot. After all, C&C took place in what- 1995? TS takes place in 2030 (the manual is absolutely clear on this), so yes- things will be different. However, TS retains the grittiness and cyberpunk feel of the original, as Tiberium continues to spread across the planet (effectively terraforming it into an alien biosphere) and Tiberium-based technology continues to improve. Taking C&C as its starting point it all makes sense.
As far as game play goes, IMHO Tiberian Sun is the best RTS game ever made. It came out 7 years ago and I still play it regularly. I can't say that about any other game. In fact, I keep the TS and Firestorm discs in my laptop backpack all the time. (My only complaint about it is that it uses IPX for LAN play. Boo!)
The interface is clean and intuitive, the AI is reasonably intelligent, the graphics are good, and the game is just damn fun. There are a couple of minor game balance issues, but Firestorm pretty effectively addresses them. One nice point is that after installing FS you can select which version you want to play when you launch the game, so if you're not in the mood for cyborg reavers or walking artillery you're not stuck with them.
Seriously, if you're a fan of C&C then you're doing yourself a grave disservice by not playing TS. It's that good.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
There is something enigmatic about the character Kane that just makes the whole C&C series what it is, and what Generals was not.
Not only did Joseph D. Kucan do great acting for the games but he also directed them.
My Hero!