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PC Games (Games) Real Time Strategy (Games)

New Command & Conquer Game In Development 77

Posted by Zonk from the reporting-in dept.
jujubees writes "Worthplaying is reporting that EA's Mark Skaggs has sent out a newsletter to long time Command & Conquer fans quietly announcing that the team behind C&C: Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge and C&C Generals is working on an all-new Command & Conquer product." From the article: "You will also see a major enhancement to the Sage graphics engine we originally created for Command & Conquer Generals. Expect us to leverage and continue to evolve this powerful engine as we start work on our new Command & Conquer game."
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New Command & Conquer Game In Development More

New Command & Conquer Game In Development

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  • The original... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sbryant ( 93075 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @11:52AM (#11019717)

    I still like the original C&C and Red Alert. I'd be interested in seeing versions of those that actually run on XP without you having to hack them (or better still, Linux).

    I did have RA working under Wine for a while, but it doesn't seem to want to at the moment. :-(

    -- Steve

  • Please make the games as good as they used to be, with the ability to make your own MODs by editing the INI file. I don't know why, but after RA2 the game just went to crap with Renegade and Generals. I just want to pretend they never existed, and we're all still waiting for Tiberium Dusk
    • The use of the word "leverage" as a verb in a press release is something I consider a bit revealing. It sort of confirms that yet another game maker has evolved to become a Big Company.

      Next they will be talking about partnering with strategic enterprises to form key synergies and maximize the potential of their core infrastructure.

      Meanwhile, somewhere a couple geeks in a garage are burning a little venture capital (along with a loan from a rich uncle) to come up with something way cooler than these peopl
    • "Please make the games as good as they used to be,"

      Only with like... you know... an actual AI? Besides the usual problems of "What the heck are my guys doing trying to walk through that wall instead of around it?" Red Alert's AI players didn't know the meaning of the word "amphibious."

      Want to reduce the AIs to token players? Create a map where everybody starts on their own island. For laughs, put some bridges between them to blow up, and point and laugh as you see their men and tanks run up to the bre
    • Amen.
      EA destroyed Command and Conquer. Red Alert 2 was still is the greatest of all strategy games. For every move, there was a countermove. For every unit, there was a weakness, for every strategy, there was a counterstrategy. The game was fast, fun, frantic and solid.
      Contrast to Generals. Slow, glitchy, uncustomisable. And stragtey? Just build tanks, tanks, tanks. No brain required. And the racism! I think this game has to be the most racist gae ever made. It's the only game I've ever seen with a ELSPA "D
  • ...but must EA really drive yet another game into the dirt?

    Next we'll be seeing Command and Conquer: Fall 2005, with the all new spring 2006 lineup of soldiers!

    *fondly and sadly remembers when he used to enjoy Command and Conquer*
    • Why don't they just call it like it is:

      Command and Conquer: Yeah, Its Still Dune II.

      I mean really, alarm bells should go off when you release a re-make of your first title in the series (Dune 2000) and it plays almost exactly like your latest release (Tiberium Sun).

      I enjoyed Dune II. I thought Command and Conquer was okay. When Red Alert came out, I pretty much had accepted what Westwood was doing: new engine, same game. Its like EA Sports titles, but an RTS.

      N generations later, and they still suck c
  • I enjoyed C&C Generals. I know it's not the best RTS game out there (WarCraft 3 still my favorite). But, it was an interesting story and the graphics were pretty good. It was plagued with numerous EA bugs such as blowing up your installed game when you tried to play online. All and all it's a good 20 dollar game. If I payed full retail price of 50 I would have been disappointed.
    • Story? What story? The story was:

      You are a general for X group. An unidentified voice tells you your enemies are in X, doing X, and you must kill them all to accomplish X. This continues throughout ALL THREE campaigns until the game is over.

      There are NO characters, other than your special commando guys who never talk to you except to acknowledge your commands. Even the weak string of objectives that make up the "story" are boring and pretty much recycled from earlier C&C games.
      Blow up X with my c
    • Or just read a fan fiction based on the game? There was NO storyline (other than a few paragraphs of background information) and the graphics caused the game to crawl to a halt on anything that was high-end when it was first launched, with Halo and Doom 3 being the only games to claim that. I remember reading how C&C:Generals was SUPPOSED to have a huge complex story that eventually got cut out.

      Supposedly the storyline involved China becoming a military power after the fall of the Soviet Union complete

  • I'm surprised it's taken them what, 18 months or thereabouts to start pushing a new C&C out the door. They could start by remaking the original games in the Sage engine, which would make the EA board of directors jump around with excitement. After that maybe start releasing uniform updates to show who the big teams are and how things have changed since the last year's release, plus even "player names" updates as all your old soldiers keep getting killed!
  • I am a big fan of the C&C series (Tib.Sun excep.) but I am concerned with the waxing interest in the Genere. C&C RA 2 Was great, and this looks promising, but I fear that without a AAA title (StarCraft 2?) The genre will die in RTS/RPG ruins. (WC3 was alright, just not a real RTS.)

    • Re:RTS RIP (Score:2, Informative)

      by jherekc ( 460597 )
      I would just like to point you in the direction of WH40K:Dawn of War, released a month or so ago.
      • I found Dawn of War to be somewhat disappointing. The game itself played fine and looked great. However, the single-player campaign consisted of only 12 or so missions, all from the point of view of the humans (or whatever they are called). When you can play a Blizzard RTS and get 10 or so missions for each playable race, only getting to play a campaign for 1 race in Dawn of War feels like you've been ripped off. (especially since you aren't paying significantly less for the game.)
        • This is absolutely true. To be honest I havn't even completed the single player missions in DoW, but have played plenty of multiplyer, and imho this is where the game shines.

          Also, I did play some of the single player campaigns in C&C:Generals and I can honestly say that the AI absolutely sucked :(
    • I think you meant waning when you said waxing. I suggest you look outside "modern" RTS games right now. Rome: Total War looks like an excellent game, and there are always a number of smaller publishers looking to fill the current vacuum in RTS now that Warcraft 3 is getting old.

      I was also dissapointed in Dawn of War. The campaign left me indifferent, and my college intranet's high fluctuation in usage, and thus ping rate, leaves me unable to play online most of the time. Also, the game was unbalanced o
  • FMV in C&C was always so much fun.
  • ...personally, anything beyong C&C Gold (and I mean the SVGA version of the original C&C) is crappy.

    Is it only me, or did ONLY the original C&C series and Total Annihilation have a non-pre-determined "to hit" factor built-in when it comes to RTSs ?
    I mean, except those two, have you ever had a game where you could actually EVADE a shot with skilled control ? Any game where (with excrciating and painstaking carefulness) you could destroy a piece of heavy armor with a single bazooka (or equivalent
    • What I want to know is why Total Annihilation wasn't more popular. It kicked ass all over all of the other RTSs on the market.
      • Same here. TA is still on my computer, and still played periodically by my friends and I. How come nobody since has done true 3D terrain, ballistics modeling, a freakin' physics engine for the units, etc?

        If you want to have even more fun, download the UberHack for it. It makes multiplayer far, far more interesting than it already was.

        UberHack info [rakrent.com]

        • look into Absolute Annihilation - pleasantly mixes Uberhack-style balancing, rescaled Krogoth (and Arm counterpart, Orcone) and adds new units only where there's a new niche to fill, instead of the usual "everything but the kitchen sink" unit packs, while still adding a healthy list of new units.
      • if you're like me, by the time you found out about TA, there were already like 100 mods for it along with all the extra units, and along with the expansion packs. Now, couple that whole mess with the hardcore TA players who couldn't but help crush my ass like an ant before I'd even really learned to play the game, and it was a let-down experience. I suppose if you'd been on the TA train from day one, it would have been a hell of a ride. But now? How does one even get into that game anymore? Is there a
    • Myth: The Fallen Lords.. You could move your troops out of the way of the onslaught of exploding spells, wights, dwarven handgrenades. IF you want to talk about excruciating and painstaking carefulness, play it on the legendary difficulty setting...
    • Most people consider this type of "ninja micro" more of an annoyance than a feature. Ultimately, without some new UI ideas for the past few years, game developers run into a wall while putting complexity in the game.

      There comes a point when players have so many options, which the AI also has to use to seem realistic, that they just can't keep up in clicks per second. Hotkeys help, but in a game like Rome: Total War, you really have to allow the player to pause the game in order to use the options you'v
  • I loved the Red Alert games, and the new C&C is going to be set in the Red Alert universe!

    I still play Generals:Zero Hour online with friends and we are still having fun, but could've been even more fun if EA released a patch that addressed the connection problems and scud bugs..

  • Not the same team (Score:3)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @12:32PM (#11020332)
    the team behind C&C: Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge and C&C Generals

    It's not the same team. C&C Generals was the first C&C game to be designed by a team that had nothing to do with what used to be Westwood. This is one of the reasons that Generals strayed so far from the traditional C&C gameplay style... it's not really a C&C game.

    Hopefully, however, they do mean that they will revisit the traditional C&C style gameplay for the new game. Otherwise, while they might produce a great game, it still won't be a C&C game.
  • to actually fix the navigation.

    Seriously - I looked forward to various new C&C games, then was constantly dissapointed to discover they hadn't actually fixed simple things like pathfinding.

    • This has bothered me for a long time. What's the difficult problem of pathfinding AI? Almost all games have with pathfinding have problems. There was only one RTS I can remember that handled this in a graceful fashion. The Starship Troopers RTS (yeah I know) would show you the path your units would take before you committed to moving them there. On the ground, what looked like cables would appear between your units and their destination.

      At least show us the path and let us work around the problem, if

      • At least show us the path and let us work around the problem, if it's not practical to develop a flawless pathfinding AI.

        FWIW, there is a way to do this in C&C Generals (and Zero Hour). I believe that if you alt-click, it will show the path, and set waypoints for your units .

      • What's the difficult problem of pathfinding AI?

        It's NP complete, Pathing is a "difficult" problem. Doing true pathing is exstremly hard. So complex maps will always result in bad pathing. War 3 gets by this by making fairly straightforward maps where pathign isn't a huge issues and they use lots of "cheats". But when you have complex maps or a convuluted base structure your going to have lots of pathing problems. If you find a way to do it in a reasonably scaling time, then you will have broken np compl
  • I remember Dune 2. I also remember sending an email to WestWood: Please make a new game with regenerating spice and multiplayer then you have a hit. I never even recieved a thank you.
  • Red Alert 2 was the last good game in the series. Generals wasn't anything special, so I don't see this game being much better. It almost seems that whenever a game series goes from a 2D engine to a 3D engine, it's just not as good.
  • I have a C&C collection that I bought last year but never opened:

    C&C

    C&C: Red Alert

    C&C: Tiberian Sun

    C&C:Red Alert 2

    Once finals are over, which of these should I play over the break? And why, if I may ask?

  • I have spent a lot of time playing the C&C series but considering all we have heard about the Evils of EA I will not buy this game and encourage the rest of you to boycott EA as well. Until EA treats their employees properly I will not buy their games.

  • Rest of his comment (Score:5, Funny)

    by darkmayo ( 251580 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @01:41PM (#11021272)
    "We've got our developer and programmers working 80hour weeks to bring you the best C&C yet."

    • So they've slacked off, then. Maybe they'll get back up to 120-hour weeks (~ 18 hours/day for 6 days, then you get a short sunday of 12 hours if you're good) when crunch time comes, um... next week. When's this thing going to be released, in 6 months?

  • You will also see a major enhancement to the Sage graphics engine we originally created for Command & Conquer Generals.

    I think this is wrong. Emperor: Battle for Dune [mobygames.com] (also by Westwood) used it first in May of 2001. Either that, or something that looks and behaves exactly the same; same 3d base, same building construction, same camera controls. Why would they create a new engine that works just like the one they already have?
    Also, the original Dune game was the first to use the engine for C&C Tiberi

  • It is no coincidence that EA had no hand in what I thought was the best game of the C&C franchise; Red Alert I. The soundtrack alone was fantastic. Remeber that heavy riffed tune that the game opens up with? The single player missions were great. Multiplayer on westwood online was great. I preferred that more tangible subject of east-west conflict to gdi-nod sci fi stuff. If ea wants to do us all a favor they should take the first red alert game, use the new sage engine and allow you to build multipl

  • Fix the fucking bugs, please (Score:4, Informative)

    by ThatComputerGuy ( 123712 ) <[amrit] [at] [transamrit.net]> on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @06:33PM (#11025862) Homepage
    I've been a C&C fan ever since I played the demo of the first one (TIberian Dawn?). With C&C Generals/Zero Hour, however, the campaigns didn't hold my interest long. Instead, some friends and I tried out the multiplayer.

    BEST. MULTIPLAYER. EVER.

    The implementation of "generals" for each side that have, for example, better air force and no tanks, or very strong infantry but few vehicles, makes for a much more fun experience than just 3 sides, with the same types of units/functions on each. Whether we played against the computer on teams, or against each other, we were sure to have hours of fun.

    But then the bugs started showing up. For some strange reason, we would always get the "network mismatch" (or whatever) error popping up when we were half way through the game, and would be forced to quit. EA never even attempted to fix it. The most they did was to release a patch that, among other things, changed the text of the error message, without fixing the problem itself. The problem wasn't any of us.. we checked our bandwidth usage, we tried other games, etc... everything pointed to shitty coding by good ol' EA and their 80 hour work weeks.

    We tried over and over to get the game to work (it was that fun), but it would always error out and piss us off. Fucking shame.

    Make sure this doesn't happen again, EA!
  • I really could not stand the mouse controls for Red Alert. And they were non-customizeable. You select your units with a left click and then have to also left click on the unit you want them to attack. Oops, a little bit off with that left click and missed the guy? You just deselected your units. Now you have to go back and find the ones you want, select them again, and then go back to try left clicking that enemy unit again. And don't forget that there's no attack-move(TM) command, so you either have
  • I'll have to make more sheepab maps :)
  • EA PR. Minion: "Boss they aren't buying the "leaked" internal memo on /.!" EA Boss: Curses! Foiled again! Quick, put out an annoucement saying we're developing A C&C sequel!

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