Slashdot Mirror
Command & Conquer 4 Announced For 2010
EA has officially announced that Command & Conquer 4 will be coming to the PC sometime next year. They say it will bring the Tiberium series to an "epic conclusion," while introducing "new class-based gameplay, mobile bases and persistent player progression throughout all game modes." In an interview with Gamespot, designer Samuel Bass elaborated:
"Our 'offense class' is your classic RTS faction, tank-oriented and focused on frontline combat. With the 'defense class,' however, the emphasis is on infantry, bunkers, and turrets, which lets you build complex defensive grids and really hold down a section of the battlefield. Lastly, we come to the 'support class,' which is based around utilizing a selection of aircraft and custom vehicles to traverse the environment. Once engaged in combat, support players can fight directly or assist their teammates with a variety of powers and [healing abilities]."
C&C has always been my favourite RTS series. It has a nice balance of not being overly complicated, so that you can focus on the actually strategy part, without being overly involved with micromanaging things like upgrading buildings and researching new technologies. I am looking forward to playing this one.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And yet after years and years, Online gameplay will still slow to a crawl because someone's graphics are too high, because apparently implementing frameskip in their stupid engine is *THAT* hard.
Just run a local PVPGN server (once they support it, that is).
http://pvpgn.berlios.de/
What? How have you managed to correlate the release of a CnC game with SC2 in this manner? The CnC series has been steadily releasing games and expansions for the last several years but of course it has to be related to SC2.
Joe Kucan's brilliant yet over-the-top acting practically makes the Tiberian series for me. His personality in real life is pretty fun too, judging by the interviews I've seen.
"It would be a sad error in judgment, General Solomon, to mistake me for a corpse."
I'm just wondering, will they deliver? For more info on this sort of idea check this
This is yet another title that I refuse to buy because it is affiliated with EA. The last EA title I bought (and will ever buy) was the Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath expansion. It turns out that its SecuROM was responsible for many of the problems experienced by users. Had they not chosen the path of intentionally cripple their products and prevent the right of first sale, I would have decided to purchase Red Alert 3 and this game. (I recognize that higher quality versions are available through 'alternate channels', but choose not to procure them in such a way.)
But you know what? It gets easier and easier to skip their inferior products. The Command and Conquer series is one that I had enjoyed since Tiberian Sun, but EA has managed to convince me steer clear of it. There are plenty of alternatives from companies that show respect to their customers, and those are the ones who will get my business. Yeah, yeah... -1 Redundant, but given the sheer lack of regard for users of their products it bears repeating.
Never mind. Lame attempt at humor.
C&C was awesome, and one of the first RTS games I played, even before I got into Starcraft. It went enormously downhill when EA bought Westwood studios and "did their thing".
Shouldn't be at all surprising, since that's EA's general way of doing things.
Even if it's good you'll have to somehow convince the online authenticator that you had nothing to do with 9/11, have never hummed a tune out loud in earshot of another person or ever described in words any of EA's "intellectual property", up to and including walking into the store and asking for the game by name without first buying a licence to say the phrase "Command and Conquer 4" in a public place.
Even after that, you'll put the CD into the drive and it will boot the installer and say "you have a CD drive! CD drives are used to rip mp3s and steal music!" and then shut down, consuming one of your three install allowances.
I'll pass.
Sorry, after the latest fiasco with that stupid securerom refusing to run cnc 3 on my system because I have a virtual drive (and I owned the title) and the twitchy crap it does with the 1.06 update by crashing everytime I try to load it because I don't have a language pack (which there is no option for me to implement) has gotten me to the point where I won't be sending money to EA anymore for games.
I don't mind buying games, I do get really pissed off when I buy the game, register it, and then get locked out because they blacklist a product.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
"Designer, storywriter, and campaign lead Samuel Bass explains these new features and confirms that the game will have no digital rights management software"
Please RTFA before ranting about DRM.
Warzone 2100. I just saved you a bunch of $$. You'll love this game.
The plot and rather simplistic controls make it fun to play, unfortunately I've found that the bugs definitely did not, especially when it came to Tiberium Wars. While it improved over time, initial games of the purchased product was like playing a Beta copy, and I didn't buy at release time, but many months later, meaning there was plenty of time for fixes. There were a few instances in single-player missions where I had to restart because the game wouldn't recognize completed objectives, and some even more frustrating instances of multiplayer crashing, dropping out, or many other issues.
EA makes good games, but the overall quality of the released product seems to be lacking. You're better off to wait until about a year after the initial release until the bugs are out.
Thanks for this story! It reminded me that that I have an original TA disc and just installed it on my Mac laptop via Bootcamp. Seems to run fine. Bye-bye productivity!
This is the last C&C game in the tiberian universe. So now the original designers won't be rolling around in their graves anymore. Let it rest in peace EA, move on and kill another game.
Okay, parent did indeed read TFA, which is a crime on Slashdot.
Nevertheless, he seems to be the only one to have caught that critical part of the interview when there are already 10 posts complaining about DRM.
BZ2 combined RTS with a first person view. You could basically jump in any vehicle and then direct things just like you would in C&C, except from a first person view and as a member of any battle groups.
It changed the whole dynamic, since you could not just scroll around the map at will, you actually had to go to an area you wanted to manage. Terrain was much more important too, because it could obscure you line of sight and some steep hills were impossible for some units to climb.
I've been wanting an update to BZ2 for years. Just a shame it's EA that's doing it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
After playing an RTS with full map zooming, I can't play new RTSs without it.
Samuel Bass: "Essentially, whenever you play Command & Conquer 4, be it in single-player, co-op, skirmish, or online, you earn experience that collects in your persistent player profile. Within the profile, you use your experience pool to level up your classes, earning new units, structures, powers, and upgrades. Since your profile is persistent across the game, you can then take your new toys and put them to use in any of our game modes.
[..]
"As a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we'll be shipping without any form of DRM."
In short, I have no idea just what that means. My current reading is that it is one of "you have to be online to play any multiplayer games" or "you have to be online to run the game at all".
Company of Heroes has restrictions similar to the ones planned for Starcraft II. You have to login through Relic's online authentication to play the game at all, even with friends on a LAN (this will keep your friends from using a pirated copy, much to our chagrin at the time). However the LAN gaming works perfectly assuming everybody logs in to Relic with a legitimate copy of the game. So I don't really feel like that sort of login method "killed" the RTS genre (and if you liked CoH I don't see how you could think so either), it just makes it harder to get a free lunch.
Or did you mean to say that Company of Heroes was responsible for Starcraft II's DRM? That might be true.