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Red Alert 3 Expansion Announced
TheProphet92 writes "Electronic Arts has announced a single-player only add-on to their popular real-time strategy game, Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3. The expansion features new units and more campaign levels to play. Although not a part of the expansion, 25 new multiplayer maps will be released as part of a patch. 12 of them are 1v1 maps and the remaining 13 are 2v2. Amer Ajami, an EA exec, said, 'Uprising is a game that in many ways reflects the feedback we have gotten from the Command & Conquer community. We're giving gamers more of what they want — more of the fast, fluid and fun gameplay, more of the story we began to tell in Red Alert 3 and more cutscenes featuring top-notch Hollywood talent. At the same time, we're excited we're going to be able to bring new things to the mix, including new units and the Commander's Challenge, which is a great way for players to hone their skills and get deeper into the combat.'"
"Here's a bunch of new units, but you can't use them in multiplayer. Especially not with all of these shiny new maps!
Why don't you go play by yourself, it's not as if multiplayer hasn't supported this franchise for a decade or anything."
RA3 sucked anyway, nobody cares.
EA/Westwood, you're going to need to get your head out of your butt and recognize that there are more companies on the RTS scene than just you and Blizzard. This isn't 1995 anymore. The C&C series just doesn't stand up to what others are doing these days.
Innovate, entertain, or get out of the way.
I wonder how many times I can activate this expansion before I have to pick up the phone, call EA, wait on hold for 60 minutes, try to explain why I need to activate again, and hope they buy my story.
I could never figure out how to order units around though, seemed to use keys like insert and such.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Dear EA
Please restore the ability to zoom out far enough to see more than 1-2 of your oversize novelty units and buildings at once on the one monitor. I will then consider purchasing your RTS games again.
You may like to take a look at Supreme Commander or Red Alert 2 running at a decent resolution to see what I am talking about. You will note that not only can I see my own super cool units, I can also see enemy units at the same time and visually gauge what the hell is going on. This has the bonus of actually allowing me to enjoy playing the game.
Regards
- a one-time Red Alert junkie
Read Pynchon.
Actually it isn't just third party titles. Look up all the angry discussions all over the net over HL:GOTY edition. I paid $50 for that box only to be told I must be a thief because some cracker group put out a keygen. I offered to fax the receipt, even take a picture of the nice pretty box with today's paper behind it. I was treated VERY rudely, got hung up on a couple of times, and pretty much the only thing I got told was i must be passing my key all over the Internet, even though I pointed out that made absolutely NO sense. So basically I paid $50 for the privilege of being called a thief. I will never give Valve a red cent again ever. If they had the orange box for $5 at Walmart I wouldn't take it. It just isn't worth it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I agree with you. But I've found that you can change the default zoom level in the RA3 WorldBuilder (was released recently).
An unfortunate limitation: Don't go out too far though, or you won't be able to hear the unit sounds. :(
This pisses me off.
First, they cut 4v4 play (which the red alert series used to have and which ra3 was announced to support). Then, they release the game with lobsided support of 1v1 and 2v2 over 3v3 maps.
Now, they're going to release an expansion pack with NO 3v3 maps whatsoever?!
Hell, I like ra3. A few friends and I enjoy playing 3v3 online (in lieu of 4v4). 25 new maps and none of them 3v3?
Fuck you, EA. I probably would have bought this expansion if you added 4v4 support back in or atleast threw 2 or 3 3v3 maps in there.
Your 02c worth is definitely 02c worth... Letting a hacker and poor customer service who don't know a function from a variable keep you from playing some of the best quality games ever is a sad thing to see. There are a ton of companies out there (EA for one), who create games and then forget about them. Or they create patches that don't do anything but solve a few problems but create so much more. I'd highly recommend giving Valve another shot at it. They provide quality updates for their products (TF2 and L4D receive huge in game updates a few times a year). I'd give you my 2 cents worth but I spent it on HL for $1 on steam...
I loved the old C&C games (including Generals) and RA games except Tiberian Sun, but RA3 just didn't hit me. I played the multiplayer beta and single player demo, but wasn't impressed with RA3. What about the rest of you?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Well, L4D hasn't actually received any huge updates yet. There are even a number of annoyances still unpatched, both in the interface and in-game. One patch even removed some functionality (ability for the server to set the difficulty in Versus mode), then the next one removed even more (ability for the players to call a vote to change difficulty in Versus mode) for no apparent reason. The former could have been a temporary fix until they were able to change the game to let players choose versus difficulty in the lobby (like they do with campaign mode) but the latter is simple removal of functionality.
I never used it (didn't even know you could still make the vote in vs. 'till it showed up in their changelog as having been removed) but it still bugs me that they are trimming choices out. So far there are a lot of things still wrong with it, including extremely minor and presumably very easy to fix problems with the menus and server-joining system, but they remain unfixed.
It's Valve, so I expect them to get to most of this eventually, and I do expect the "huge game updates" you talk about, but for the record there have been zero of them so far.
So you think that because they put out some good games that my answer to being insulted and hung up on is to give them MORE money? And that makes sense to you? I deal with customers every damned day. Some of them are nice, and some of them are asshats. Do you know how many times I've insulted or been rude to them? Zero. Zero zilch zip nada squat.
If I was at my own shop I would point them to another shop if I didn't think I could resolve their problem, or if I was working for someone else I would hand them over to the boss. There is NEVER an excuse to insult and belittle a paying customer. EVER. If they had any kind of quality control on their customer service the rep would have been fired and I would have gotten an apology. Instead as we saw by the letter I was responding to they have let third parties treat their customers just as bad. Unacceptable. If I decide there is a Valve game I want that bad I'll wait and pick it up used on eBay just so I don't actually hand a dime of my money to Valve. Frankly I'm surprised with all the complaints on the net of bad treatment WRT HL:GOTY that they didn't end up with a class action for ripping off their customers.
And finally for all those that talk about how wonderful Steam is, please reread my earlier post and the post I was responding to and remember, DRM is NOT about piracy. It is about control. Because we have seen time and time and time again for the past 20+ years that all their little DRM doodads do exactly zip to stop pirates, who have now gotten breaking DRM down so well that they often release BEFORE the game company does, and with a much better product. DRM will ALWAYS end up with screwed customers. Always. And by supporting it along with that "If it doesn't work then you're a pirate" attitude then eventually it will blow up in your face just like it did for me and the earlier poster. It will NEVER hurt the pirates, since they never experience it anyway. The only ones DRM hurts are the ones actually trying to hand them money. Which IMHO is just insanity.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ever debugged huge games? I didn't think so. Try debugging S.C.O.U.R.G.E. or Spring.
I'm not talking about bugs, at least not in the interface. It's things like having no good way to access the server browser (you have to do it from console) and being dumped back to the menu if both you and another person attempt to join a game with 7/8 players at the same time via the "join a game" search function, rather than it simply re-trying the search with the same parameters. Not bugs--just lack of polish.
The things that might take a bit longer to fix are exploits occurring as a result of flaws in level design. They've gotten some of these already, but more have been exposed since then.
The only true bug I can think of is a freezing issue with multi-core processors. Short freezes a few seconds long. Fixed by setting processor affinity to one core. My understanding is that it's an engine problem that's existed in Source for a while.
My point was simply that there have not yet been the huge updates that had been talked about, and that even quite a bit of minor stuff hasn't been fixed yet, which implies (to me) that the large updates aren't coming for a while. It's not really fair to credit Valve with updates that haven't happened yet. Their behavior with other games indicates that they will support this game very well, but L4D can't yet be used to back up their support record. So, that part of the statement "TF2 and L4D receive huge in game updates a few times a year" is false.
Point taken. And I agree. TF2 and L4D haven't had the huge patches that HL has.