Click here to see the YMMV page for the overall series.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: Nod is depicted in a more ambiguous light in this game:
- On one hand Nod has become the de facto government of much of the yellow zones (and by extension a majority of the human population) and is mentioned to often be the only provider of humanitarian aid or any semblance of civilization in those regions. Furthermore, some of their complaints about GDI do seem to have merits - the blue zones having lower populations than the yellow zones suggests that it's difficult to emigrate out of a yellow zone, the lack of noticeable GDI outreach to the yellow zones, and if a fool like Boyle can rise in GDI's ranks then the claims of corruption start to look more well-grounded.
- On the other hand most of the problems of the yellow zones - the wars, social instability and ecological damage - can be directly or indirectly blamed on Nod and it's history of waging wars of aggression, infighting, and deliberately spreading Tiberium, to say nothing of actively sabotaging GDI's attempts to reclaim those same yellow zones. All of Nod's care for the people of the yellow zones can be seen as a fairly transparent cover for whipping the population of those zones into an anti-GDI fury and most of the Brotherhood's higher-ups openly consider them expendable. Kane even outright admits that he planned for the majority of the Brotherhood of Nod to be wiped out in the Third Tiberium War - a war he started, and was the initial aggressor, with a smile on his face. And the whole time this is going on Nod is still continuing it's highly-unethical research policies resulting in, among other things; the red-zone-in-a-can Liquid Tiberium Bomb, under-equipped masses being dosed with Tiberium as a combat drug, (Notably, this is only applied to Militants and Fanatics, while anyone less expendable avoids partaking in it) suicide bombers and a massive secret cybernetics program that erodes the free will of it's subjects.
- Breather Level:
- Though not without their dangers, first three GDI missions in Germany feel much easier than the war of attrition of the missions in Eastern Europe.
- In stark contrast to the GDI counterpart, the Nod missions in Eastern Europe are relatively forgiving (which is justified as Nod is fighting in their fortified home turf). Nod has access to an entire base in Sarajevo (after delivering the bomb truck past the GDI base). And despite the mission's primary objective being to destroy the GDI base afterward, reinforcements come in to destroy it completely after some time, though they quickly turn hostile and your new directive is to smash the newly erected two Nod bases. They're still not nearly as armed to the teeth as Nod's base in the GDI mission nor what used to be the GDI base, and it's possible to steal the Tiberium from these two locations beforehand, plus you have access to all Nod units at this point. It's in the following act in Australia where the Nod campaign's Difficulty Spike occurs.
- Catharsis Factor: Nod Vertigo bombers giving you hell? Enjoy the pilot's furious "No! NOOOOO!!" when you manage to take one down. It sounds like a fit of petty rage which makes it all the more satisfactory.
- Fridge Brilliance: On a meta level the Scrin Mothership's bizarre design makes much more sense when you realize that a massive floating solid hunk would obstruct the player's view.
- Funny Moments: The Hand of Nod drops it's globe when the building is sold or destroyed. This counts as an attack.
- Game-Breaker: The Scrin Planetary Assault Carrier - a fleet of 10note is enough to turn any enemy installation into dominoes unless it's specifically prepared for air raids (read: train hordes of anti-air units). It is a good reason why the Kane's Wrath expansion introduced new special anti-air units to both GDI and Nod.
- Good Bad Bugs:
- If you're playing Global Conquest and opt to resolve battles automatically, the game chooses the map, which the battle will take place on by the amount of the bases/strike forces involved... with a single exception. Sometimes it loads the Top Gun (2 player map) even if there are more than two bases/strike forces. One of the strike forces spawns beyond the map border and cannot take part in the battle. If you happen to lose your base, it doesn't matter if the extra strike force is yours or enemy. You're forced to surrender otherwise the battle won't end because the AI doesn't have the word "surrender" in its vocabulary. The only way to counter this is to save the game before each battle, which is incredibly tedious.
- It's actually more infuriating if the extra force is enemy and you level their base with your army of fire-hardened veterans/heroics only to be forced to give them up as you can't do s**t against the out-of-bounds enemy strike force.
- Also sometimes on the global map, some strike force may ocassionally struggle to reach its destination, especially in choke points due to poor pathfinding and just keeps wandering about its position. This brings the game to a halt because the battle situation are only designated after all strike forces have stopped moving. This can be easily fixed by saving and reloading the game. Well, most of the time...
- If a battle situation involves all three factions and you battle it manually and lose, one of the other enemies just commits suicide. Literally. This can lead to hilarious outcomes when one enemy nearly obliterates the other save for a sole survivor, then proceeds to steamroll you and once it's done with you, their entire army blows up to smithereens making the single surviving enemy unit victorious. It's exactly as funny as infuriating.
- The "Auto-resolve" option for battle situations doesn't account for airport-bound aircraft to actually require airport. In other words, a single Fire Hawk/Vertigo can obliterate entire enemy force if there are no Anti-Air units in it (to counter the aircraft) even though in real-time the aircraft would be put out of commission rapidly, by the enemy storming the airfield.
- If you're playing Global Conquest and opt to resolve battles automatically, the game chooses the map, which the battle will take place on by the amount of the bases/strike forces involved... with a single exception. Sometimes it loads the Top Gun (2 player map) even if there are more than two bases/strike forces. One of the strike forces spawns beyond the map border and cannot take part in the battle. If you happen to lose your base, it doesn't matter if the extra strike force is yours or enemy. You're forced to surrender otherwise the battle won't end because the AI doesn't have the word "surrender" in its vocabulary. The only way to counter this is to save the game before each battle, which is incredibly tedious.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Remember the ending of the Nod campaign in Tiberian Sun where the Brotherhood manages to destroy the Philadelphia space station? It's now destroyed for real at the beginning of the game. As if losing the Kodiak and Umagon in Firestorm wasn't enough trauma for poor old McNeil.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Tricia Helfer would go on to play another character in a real-time strategy game after Tiberium Wars, being the rival game Starcraft II as none other than the Queen of Blades herself.
- Moral Event Horizon:
- Kane's much-contested arrangement for the destruction of Eastern Europe as part of his plan. Even followers in game question it.
- Director Boyle's decision to fire the Ion Cannon over General Granger's objection is this as well. He isn't questioning the legitimacy of Granger's concerns; he just doesn't care.
- Most Wonderful Sound:
- Mammoth firing its railgunsnote and all of its sovereign sounding quotes.
- MARV's voice itself is this, and it's made even better through all of it's lines being spoken with a dutiful and hope-inspiring tone of voice.
- Retroactive Recognition:
- If you don't recognize Grace Park, who plays Sandra Telfair, from Battlestar Galactica (2003), you probably recognize her as Kono from Hawaii Five-0.
- Did you know that Carl Lumbly was the leader of the Black Hand before becoming a super-soldier in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier?
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- The modern free-range building placement does not translate well to Command & Conquer's traditional base-building restrictions when it comes to base proximity. Some buildings, e.g. Power plants, don't provide expanded building space at all, while some e.g. Barracks provide too little, which means you often find yourself attempting to place a building on what seems to be a close enough spot, only for it to not work. In some cases, it's downright necessary to plant an outpost (which is primarily meant to be deployed away from your base as a means of expansion) directly adjacent to your base just to get more building space. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 would go back to the grid-based system, which would solve a lot of construction headaches (and it helped that the building ranges were larger and that there were more diverse expansion methods).
- Come the Kane's Wrath expansion, the adjacency problem got even worse as now even production structures like factories and barracks don't provide any building space. The cheapest structure which provides decent building space is the refinery, which's cost got ramped up to 3000 credits!
- Distributing techs between the new subfactions wasn't maintained very well, as due to the hypothetically same unit having different upgrades in each subfaction, there's essentially two to three types of the same unit in the game. This causes a mess especially in the Global Conquest mode when you happen to have both a base and some subfaction's strike force involved in a battle situation to resolvenote . Suddenly you have e.g. Mammoths both with and without railguns/reactive armor on the battlefield and double clicking them does not select them all, since technically they're not the same unit. It doesn't even matter whether you actuall purchased the upgrade or not. Have fun coordinating your forces.
- Special Effects Failure: Kane's mask in the first portion of Kane's Wrath is noticeably lopsided. This is most noticable if you look at the top of the mask and the part next to his left cheek; the angle of the slant on top would have been corrected if the left side of the mask actually touched his cheek instead of just hanging there. Becomes Fridge Brilliance when it is revealed that Kane is perfectly normal under the mask, the mask being a mere decoration.
- Spiritual Successor: Tiberium Wars makes for a nice Independence Day video game. The Scrin help this case by having nods to the invaders featured in the film, including their own versions of City Destroyers (Motherships).
- Tear Jerker: In the cutscene that plays when starting Act IV of the Nod Campaign, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the Nod-affiliated field journalist in the news video. Watching his people faced with impossible odds, believing that all is lost, and spending his dying moments reciting a Nod prayer before GDI fires the ion cannon...
- That One Level:
- GDI's mission to destroy to port of Alexandria (Hard mode especially) is one mission where nerfing in multi-player has a poor result on the single-player missions. Your adviser who briefs you encourages you to build Mammoth tanks and roll over the NOD port authority base, but the over-nerfed Mammoth is a poor choice for direct assault because of the infinite resources fueling the enemy's constant assault, and the severe lack of money for you to harvest. Also, the tanks are too under-powered and slow to handle the job, and the rail-gun upgrade to increase their firepower is a ridiculous $5,000 (that's the price of a superweapon).
- You're better off using Orca aircraft or Zone Troopers to gank the Instant-Win Condition while playing Hold the Line with Mammoth Tanks as damage sponges near your war factories, rather than playing like your adviser suggests in the mission briefing.
- Nod's final mission, named Kane's Tower, requires the player to defend three Scrin Phase Generators from GDI, which sounds simple enough, until you realize that you're severely handicapped by the following factors:
- GDI is shelling the structures you're supposed to protect from the second the mission starts with unique artillery that out-ranges normal artillery by a factor of 5- captureable, sure, but only if you manage to get to it while simultaneously dealing with all the other difficulties at the same time with your very limited early game resources.
- You start out with one medium sized base at tier 2, GDI starts with two tier 3 bases, one of which is larger then yours, and the other much larger.
- The Scrin are hostile to you, making protecting them difficult, but they're also nowhere near powerful enough to stop GDI.
- GDI will happily build not one, but two Ion Cannons before you can even begin construction of your own Nuke.
- GDI starts with a fully functional small airbase, which will bomb the Scrin to the ground if not disposed of
- Your two starting Tiberium fields are both in harms way, one from the Scrin, the other being the main avenue on GDI's attacks on your own base.
- And to top this off, GDI's units instantly reach elite status, and would gain heroic status in as few as a single kill.
- Given all the above factors, winning the mission often depends on luck more so then anything, as the GDI attacks on the Scrin vary in size, from manageable, to an armored column consisting of a dozen Mammoth Tanks supported by twice as many lighter vehicles and about as many infantry squads, as well as every single reinforcement support power in the GDI arsenal. Losing (which will happen very often) will earn you a chewing out by Kane himself, despite the fact that his request to protect the Scrin structures from such an onslaught is completely unreasonable.
- Operation Stilleto (which comes shortly before) is also frustrating for very similar reasons; you are tasked to take over 2 construction yards each from the warring Scrin and GDI. Taking one is easy enough, but that often results in the weakened side losing their second construction yard soon after depending on how the AI's fight. And you won't have the firepower needed to stop that before you captured the first one. Thankfully, the passive AI allows you to simply set saboteurs at every objective, then have them capture everything you need simultaneously as GDI and Scrin forces don't actually become hostile to you until you attack them first.....not even as you set up right inside their base (planning mode helps cheese this mission immensely...at the cost of barely having any time and resources to complete the bonus objectives, if at all).
- The GDI mission in Bern, Switzerland is notable for having a very aggressive Scrin enemy. The opponent is programmed to target your harvesters relentlessly and attacks you right away, so Early Game Hell is in effect here.
- The final GDI mission can be pretty though as well, if you don't use the Liquid Tiberium Bomb (which will essentially wipe out Nod or most of the Scrin). You have to quickly build up forces to eliminate (or capture) the Scrin Superweapon right away, then to deal with their mothership or divert it to Nod, all the while both sides will attack you early and often, including building more Superweapons and advance bases.
- "A Grand Gesture" from Kane's Wrath also qualifies. You WILL be attacked within two minutes by swarms of GDI Vehicles and infantry. And they don't let up. Ever. It's also the first mission where you play as the Black Hand subfaction. Finally, good luck getting to those downed Purifiers. They make the mission a lot easier, but having one survive long enough to make the trip back to base for repairs is harder than it sounds.
- With the 1.09 patch, all of the single-player campaign can qualify as ThatOneGame, since the missions are not rebalanced to match the mutiplayer nerfs to economy and changes to AI. With harvesters bringing half the amount of cash they used to bring, Mammoth tanks losing their Game-Breaker status and cranes no longer able to build turrets (which makes Nod's DC mission secondary objectives impossible to complete unless the player builds an MCV), it could have been bearable, but with AI changes since 1.01 it becomes a massive Difficulty Spike. The worst offender is GDI's Sarajevo mission, which wasn't exactly a cakewalk in the original game, but post-nerfs it's outright broken, barely winnable even on Easy (which feels more like Brutal after the patches) and all but requiring the player to use Sequence Breaking to avoid getting overwhelmed. To be fair, heavily scripted missions are mostly unaffected.
- GDI's mission to destroy to port of Alexandria (Hard mode especially) is one mission where nerfing in multi-player has a poor result on the single-player missions. Your adviser who briefs you encourages you to build Mammoth tanks and roll over the NOD port authority base, but the over-nerfed Mammoth is a poor choice for direct assault because of the infinite resources fueling the enemy's constant assault, and the severe lack of money for you to harvest. Also, the tanks are too under-powered and slow to handle the job, and the rail-gun upgrade to increase their firepower is a ridiculous $5,000 (that's the price of a superweapon).
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A lot of people were upset that most of the futuristic units like the walkers were replaced by more standard Boring, but Practical units like tanks.
- Moreover, some players were really salty that Tiberium lost its pod. More specifically, the mutation of Tiberium from growing in plant-like pods into the self-replicating proton lattice which also meant the removal of a majority of Tiberium-based lifeforms seen throughout Tiberian Sun and Firestorm. Even the visceroids went from the signature amorphous mass to solid, three-legged creatures.
- Within the same game, with game updates and patches, some say the game was changed for the worse, and not just in the multiplayer. The Tiberium profits cut in half have especially slowed the game to a crawl, and in the single player campaign, no adjustments have been made for this universal change.
- The Kane's Wrath expansion did even worse things. Not only now even less structures provide ground control to build in their adjacency. They also upped the cost of the refinery to 3000 credits. Tiberium refinery is a crucial structure to get your economy running and you'll be needing a lot of them. It also ruins all potential chances of recovery if your last refinery is destroyed. While in previous games it was possible to scrape a few nickels required to rebuild it, in here it's just too much of a cost and since lost refineries also waste your cash reserve, once you lose your last refinery you might as well call it quits.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Kane's Wrath only has a campaign for Nod. This is especially baffling when Kane admits that during the final Time Skip, GDI wiped Nod off the map, which sounds like plenty of opportunity to give GDI a campaign. Particularly considering the expansion introduced two subfactions to GDI that were ripe for campaign scenarios.
- Though it should be noted that Kane's Wrath was titled "EP1". Presumably, more expansion packs focused on the other factions were planned, but never came into fruition.
- Vindicated by History: To put it in simple terms, the game's reception went from "it's not Tiberian Sun" to "it's not Tiberian Twilight".
