Command & Conquer V (or Generals 2) in production

Not in the very near future anyway.

I personally think EA are done with single-player Command and Conquer games though. Their last effort was critically panned and the playerbase hated it as well. That multiplayer thing was their last throw of the dice it seems. Besides, they make enough money from the Battlefield franchise, Dragon Age and Mass Effect - they don't really need to make any more C and C games.

I thought they had given Bioware an effective carte blanche on what to do with C&C? Or was that just false sugarcoating?

edited 30th Oct '13 1:34:11 AM by MarqFJA

As someone who was is the closed Alpha I kinda have mixed feelings about it.

On one hand the game sure had flaws like the generals being to similar or there being no way to make cash once the depots ran out.

But it wasn't broken beyond repair in my eyes and so it saddens me that the game ended up still born...

edited 30th Oct '13 2:39:06 AM by Kiefen

"Bioware"?

That NDA still up? I want detaaaaaails.

Ah, sorry. Forgot that it's spelled "BioWare".

Wait, is it "spelled" or "spelt"?

edited 30th Oct '13 11:02:03 AM by MarqFJA

XD I couldn't care less how you spelled it. The idea that "Bioware Victory" was in any way Bioware is ridiculous. EA just slapped the name on it because Bioware was popular.

Ironically they where doing that around the time Dragon Age 2 was released and everyone started hating them.

They went back to being Victory games (Or maybe just went to being Victory games? I dunno.) mid-production before disintegrating under the regime though.

edited 30th Oct '13 11:12:20 AM by ShirowShirow

Well the game in the state I played it was pretty much like a remake of CNC:Generals with some minor changes to each faction:

GLA:

• -the angry mob was changed to an upgrade of a new unit called "Rebell Squad" which was the GL As tier 0 infantry
• -the GLA had real tanks which was justified by them being "blackmarketed"
• -no blackmarkets for getting cash later on

China:

• -got flamethrower towers and infantry, the latter were rather strong the former couldn't even handle a single tier 1 tank
• - the overlord and the dragon tank had to be built in a seperate advanced war factory
• -No hackers or blacklotus

EU:

• Haven't played as them.

The main problem really were the generals. There were 16 generals but most of them only had one or two different units if at all and they mostly differed in what support powers they could use.

In general I felt like there was an overemphasis on the support powers (you had to unlock them either with ingame-money or real money which gave the whole system a pay-2-win taste).
and as mentioned above some generals just diffred in that they could use a different support power ( the GLA had a Scrap-General despoite the scrap mechanic not being implemented in the alpha, so an emergency repair power was his only difference from the main faction)

edited 30th Oct '13 11:31:03 AM by Kiefen

Huh. Seriously? No huge influx of flashy new units?

I've heard tons of terrible things about the gameplay but I figured at least having a shiny new array of unique soldiers could have been neat.

-Goes back to Red Alert 3-

Holy crap, this really came out of the blue. When I first heard this I seriously thought it was just some trolling BS, but to think that EA would actually plug the plug on the game on so late a stage in development??? Just how in the heck does that even make any business sense?!?

The fandom's reaction isn't very supportive or helpful either. Let's just say that... well, you do NOT wanna be visiting any of the official or fansites right now, lots of hate-dumb and vitriolic comments all over the place. A wee bit baffling too; you'd think they'd be trying to give their sympathies, but some of them are managing the impressive feat of showing glee at it's cancellation whilst complaining that EA never gives them a C&C game at the same time... :/

EDIT: A little bit more info... apparently this was more of a business decision than anything else, not poor test-group results or anything. A little snippet from one of the fansites CNCNZ:

edited 30th Oct '13 1:23:24 PM by SgtRicko

Interesting. What kind of "corporate politics and shenanigans" are we talking about here?

edited 30th Oct '13 2:35:29 PM by MarqFJA

And so EA continues to be the worst company in the world.

Gotta keep it up to make it 3 years running, after all!

The reaction against C and C 4 was so vitriolic I didn't bother buying it. I have the Tenth Anniversary collection, plus the Kane's Wrath edition of C and C 3 and the Red Alert 3 collection so you know I am into my Command and Conquer thing, therefore I have the sneaking suspicion I missed out on something I might like.

Yeah, it actually was starting to look pretty decent: basebuilding, support powers, no buil caps, it was all there (except the walls and pavement... but then again only the die-hard old Tib-Sun fans are still pissed at the lack of that). Hell they had even confirmed the creation of a campaign for later in mid-2014, so they were slowly starting to add in the stuff the fanbase requested.

Come to think of it, why did they remove walls and pavement? I never understood the removal of what was a standard feature (the walls, that is) of the franchise up to RA2.

edited 31st Oct '13 7:33:28 AM by MarqFJA

Pavement was largely useless. In the time it took you to build a meticulous base with pavement and everything you would have lost three times over against the hard AI or other players.

Walls on the other hand, I'm not sure why that was removed. That wasn't useless and it was really quick to deploy from Tiberian Sun into Red Alert 2.

Hmmm... Well, considering that Generals introduced Worker Units to the C&C system, maybe Generals 2 could've allowed setting a worker unit to auto-pave a player-defined area, so that it starts to build one pavement section after another until every valid square in said area is paved? Company of Heroes does something similar with placing sandbag barriers, barbed wire, and land mines. And maybe even have each building come with a small area of pavement around it as well.

edited 31st Oct '13 7:43:52 AM by MarqFJA

I recall one of the original reasons the walls didn't make it into Generals was that the devs were having a hard time trying to figure out how to implement them into the game. In particular they couldn't figure out if whether the walls should be difficult to destroy but slow and expensive to build, or cheap and quick to set up but easily destroyed or bypassed. Plus, the heavy useage of aircraft in the game didn't help prove it's value either. Granted, they could've worked on some of the maps and would've been a godsend against the GLA stealth gen, but the USAF gen and the China tank gen would've laughed at the very idea.

As for the pavement... well, it really only worked for Tiberian Sun's slow, turtle-focused style of gameplay. For one, the pavement helped to stop craters from forming, sped up your tracked and wheeled units speed, and stopped those goddamned subterranean tanks from Nod drilling into your base. The later games didn't have any of that and were much faster paced, so the only benefit you'd get from the pavement by that point would just be the acceleration boost. Which, given how fast the later games were paced, would be pointless.

edited 1st Nov '13 10:01:49 AM by SgtRicko

This article, though close to four years old, fills me with some measure of vindication.

Also, Machinima did a video series about the history of both Westwood and the C&C franchise, and their impact on the RTS genre.

edited 1st Nov '13 2:27:45 PM by MarqFJA