Command and Conquer 3 Announced

pasamio writes "After years of April Fools Jokes and other pranks, EA has officially announced Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Set for PC release in 2007, they're keeping the details very close to hand but it is being developed using the next generation SAGE engine (used in C&C:Generals and Battle for Middle Earth)."

Re:New direction needed..

[Komarechka]

You have a valid point, that its all personal opinion. I enjoyed the side-bar, it allowed for easy access to build units from anywhere, and made the feature of construction/training rally points a lot more useful. I've been a fan of the sci-fi stuff, so again, all personal prerference.

Re:Possible Hope

[identity0]

A-men. One of the main appeals of the original C&C was that it was set in a very real-feeling setting; not reality, obviously, but plausible in a good sci-fi way. You could actually believe such a world would come about, if something like Tiberium fell to Earth. There were military types fighting narco-cult-terrorist types with modern weapons on a post-cold war battlefield, and it had a very cyberpunk/speculative fiction feel to it.

It felt like it was taking place "40 minutes into the future". I especially loved the intro sequence and side selection, where you get flashes of TV channels until you get the GDI or NOD channel - very postmodern and cool, IMHO.

Then, you had RedAlert - good game, better graphics and gameplay, but WTF? Einstein goes back in time and assasinates Hitler, and that's how the C&C world came to be? The plot of the game totally ruined things for me. I didn't even bother with Tiberian Sun, which looked like total Star Wars/Trek sci-fi, without the 'here and now' feel of C&C. If I wanted that crap, there are countless sci-fi themed RTSes out there, including StarCraft, BattleTech, Dark Reign, etc.

Now, it's good that they're going back to the near future, and hopefully making it feel 'gritty' and '10 minutes into the future' again. Oh, and I hope they keep the rock music. The music in C&C rocked, the first PC games I wanted the soundtrack to.

Re:New direction needed..

[Deathlizard]

I agree. The SAGE engine frankly sucks for C&C Gameplay. If I want to play Warcraft, I'll get Warcraft. I don't want to play a C&C game that basically clones warcraft.

Blizzard RTS have a totally different feel than Westwood CTS's for those not in the know. For example, Lets say that Blizzard and Westwood added a Duck to their games. In the Westwood game, it would be a Duck and it would Quack. In the Blizzard game, it would be white breasted green tailed mallard which has a quack and a peck command, and if you built the biomek duck processing factory, you could add interchangeable beaks that would either give the pecking power more oomph, or give the duck a "Sonic Quack" that would stun the enemy for 3 seconds. C&C generals felt like Blizzard made it simply because every unit had this extra touch that wasted more of your time instead of just simply being a unit and kill or be killed.

EA simply doesn't know what they bought from Westwood. They bought it for the name and the IP when they should have bought it for that as well as the Game Devs, which were some of the best in the industry at the time.

As the owner and fan of Every C&C game ever made, (including Sole Survivor, Which Westwood buried in a landfill somewhere) I can tell you that if C&C 3 plays like generals, then don't bother. I'd rather remember what it was like rather than knowing that EA is raping the series.