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PC Games (Games) Real Time Strategy (Games) Entertainment Games

Command & Conquer 4 Announced For 2010 72

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]."
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Command & Conquer 4 Announced For 2010

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  • Can't wait to play (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Friday July 10, 2009 @09:26PM (#28656859)
    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.
    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Hubbell ( 850646 )
      #1 Total Annihilation [wikipedia.org] is still the best RTS ever released.

      #2 C&C started sucking around Tiberian Sun/RA2, leaning more towards RA2 being the LOL point in the series where it just started sucking. RA3 and Tiberium Wars were utter fucking shit along with Generals.
      • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday July 10, 2009 @09:40PM (#28656949) Journal
        Assuming you aren't already familiar with it, TA:Spring [springrts.com] is well worth your attention. It is a wholly shameless clone of TA(though there are a whole bunch of other mods, some minor, some totally different gameworlds/unit sets); but with quite respectably modern graphics and controls. Good stuff, decently active multiplayer.
        • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Hubbell ( 850646 )
          TA:Spring isn't a clone, it's an engine built specifically for TA being adapted to full 3d. I was the story/mission writer for one of the TA2 projects that was undertaken over the years, and I kept up on TAU and shit until like 06 or 07
        • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          actually spring RTS IS the TA engine - TA was open sourced years ago when the company failed, and developers took it up and made the lobby and multiplayer aspect of it. BA (balanced aniliation) is the main game on there now - i regularly play 8v8 games on spring. 6v6 games run every 20 minutes or so. spring's graphics are more than decent as well - it's a full 3d environment with a modifiable landscape and 100's of units.
    • 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.

      Interesting. I dislike it for the simplicity and lack of innovation.

      The damn AI's make me want to cry in these games. Here's all this new graphical bling and we're seeing the same pathfinding problems first encountered a decade ago. Graphics don't matter if the stupid's no better.

      I think the reason why Dune 2 didn't suffer as much was because they didn't try as much. When you can select a gaggle of troops, give a move command and watch them fail, you get frustrated. In Dune 2, you couldn't select like that,

    • by phorm ( 591458 )

      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 mor

    • that's funny because they stopped being my favorite at C&C Tiberium Wars when they somehow managed to make the enemy able to cheat the laws of the game and made the AI of your own troops stupider. And I'm not even going to buy Red Alert 3 even with RA2 being one of my fav games of all time and Generals being my favorite RTS game by far. It comes with some ridiculous borderline malware DRM scheme and I think anti-cheat system too. And the gameplay got even worse and is unbalanced with crappy AI and po
    • 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.

      Ever played Company of Heroes?

      Let me know when strategy in C&C involves suppression, flanking, cover, retreating, reinforcing, directional weapons, victory points (because annihilation just won't happen due to the nature of the game), cutting off strategical points and 6-8 units per side on the field. The best part is that it's not complicated at all - everything is just perfectly natural and behaves like you expect it to.

      By the way, I recently watched a Starcraft 2 gameplay video somewhere and it left

  • And yet (Score:3, Funny)

    by JimboFBX ( 1097277 ) on Friday July 10, 2009 @09:45PM (#28656981)
    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.
  • Cashing in (Score:1, Troll)

    by Lershac ( 240419 )

    On the breathless anticipation of starcraft 2. Gosh knows SC2 wont be released by then, so they can extract some bucks from those folks wanting to whet their appetite for some RTS.

    • by maharb ( 1534501 )

      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.

  • by Omegamogo ( 1388313 ) on Friday July 10, 2009 @10:09PM (#28657091)
    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 [wikipedia.org]
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10, 2009 @10:13PM (#28657117)

    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 [gamespy.com] 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.

    • You're going to whine about SecuROM?
      Buy it then get a nocd patch and shut up already. And don't even pretend to not be aware of this possibility ...
      • by Homburg ( 213427 )

        Or just download a torrent, which will doubtless have a nocd patch included, making it even easier.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Draek ( 916851 )

      I can't remember where I got it from, but IIRC EA was now moving away from DRM after seeing how incredibly useless it was with Spore. At the very least, they didn't use it [slashdot.org] for The Sims 3 which is their most popular franchise, so odds are good that C&C4 won't be crippled either.

      Yeah, sucks that they didn't see the light 'til now and all that, but I prefer not to hold a grudge against a company if they start doing the right thing. Plus, that gives me good RTSs to play ;)

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        FTFA:

        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.

        It sounds like they are trying to twist the definition of DRM to make themselves look better. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], DRM is "access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices." The restriction of needing to be connected to the internet

  • 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.

    • by jonwil ( 467024 )

      EA is nowhere NEAR as bad as some companies *cough*Blizzard*cough*Atari*cough*
      I own Red Alert 3. I never had any problems with the online authenticator (it just asked for my serial number and that was it). I also never had any problems with the DRM of that game. I put the DVD in the drive and it installed first time (without even caring what hardware I do and dont have). When I booted the game, it authenticated online ONCE and then hasn't needed to authenticate again. I can also press a button in-game to de

      • Well, great. I guess since you didn't have any problems, nobody else did.

        If we're extrapolating, my copy didn't even have to be authenticated once, but I've got GameCopyWorld to thank for that, not EA.

    • I feel like the C&C series of games hasn't been developing as well as they should, certain things have even disappeared from the game, like walls. Now maybe I'm biased but I liked being able to build walls and barbed wire fences to slow down an enemy assault but for some reason they're not in C&C3...

      Then OTOH, I'm one of those RTS players who like a slightly slower but more complex gameplay situation with games that drag out for hours on huge maps.

      /Mikael

    • Wait for it to release on Steam.

  • DRM (Score:2, Interesting)

    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

  • There will be no DRM (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "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.

    • 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.
    • Does that mean that there will be no DRM, or that there will be DRM but it will be branded as something different? The latter option seems more popular with game companies at the moment...
      • 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

  • by viridari ( 1138635 ) on Friday July 10, 2009 @11:53PM (#28657571)
    Warzone 2100 [wz2100.net]. I just saved you a bunch of $$. You'll love this game.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Arimus ( 198136 )

      I'll second that one... excellent game and I love the tech tree in it... AI can occasionally be a bit dumb (keeps trying to use VTOL on my nice airdefences and ground against my ground defences ;) )

  • 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!
    • If you don't want to reboot, TA works well in Crossover Games (I'm using the free version that they gave away last year). I've not tried it with the stock build of WINE, but it will probably work, although building WINE on OS X is certainly not for the faint-hearted.
  • 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.
    • Why should they be rolling around in their graves? The only Tiberian-universe game that was an insult to the original was C&C2, and I'm fairly sure that this was back when Westwood were still in control of the franchise.

      C&C3 was, I thought, a pretty decent spritual successor to the original.

  • 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 u

    • Yer but a young whippersnapper, BZ was the real deal, back when any pilot worth his salt could make them recyclers spit ammo, piss Wolverines and shit Black Dog Tanks all might long...yeeeee haaw! I can almost see old Killseeker comin' over the hill being chased by the immortal Shotglass! Long live the xGo! (Xtreme Gamers Organization) est. 1998 on the Acti servers. The elite Lakytus aka ~xGo~Sublime!! An Aussie ANNIMAL...~xGo~BigWIllieStyle!! Lord of the Wolverines! and yours truly ~xGo~Mustang -> TH

  • After playing an RTS with full map zooming, I can't play new RTSs without it.

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