Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Command and Conquer 3 Announced 91

Posted by Zonk from the reporting-in dept.
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)."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Command and Conquer 3 Announced More

Command and Conquer 3 Announced

Comments Filter:

  • Also in the news (Score:4, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday April 21, 2006 @11:52AM (#15174054)
    I've heard Duke Nukem Forever is supposed to...

    OW!

    Hey!

    Stop hitting me!

  • New direction needed.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Komarechka ( 967622 ) * on Friday April 21, 2006 @11:54AM (#15174086) Homepage
    C&C Generals didn't have as much of a following as the original C&C games. I found it had more of a Warcraft 3 feel then a classic C&C game, which was a turn-off for some players such as me. It was also the first RTS game published since EA's assimilation of Westwood, and was under a different director.

    Westwood is now just a shell of the company it once was, since a lot of the staff have moved on to other projects. I hope whoever is left at the development house knows how to design with the same concepts that started the franchise.

    Going back to its roots is something I think this series needs to do. Red Alert 2 was the name's last huge success, and the bad sales of Renegade and the mediocre response to Generals should show that a new direction is needed.
    • If you LAN at all, Renegade is actually in high demand. It's got some fun multiplayer.
    • I personally loved Generals. I've played every C&C RTS to completion, and definitely enjoyed them, but Generals was a major improvement for me. Earlier C&C games had a side bar where you could build from. In other words, rather than clicking on the appropriate building and choosing your unit, you could queue up any unit right from the bar. I know some people enjoyed that, but I always found it cumbersome -- it took up a huge portion of screen real estate.

      I also liked the present-day / near-future un
      • 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.
        • What I disliked about the sidebar is its monolithic nature. No matter how many factories or bases you have, you only have one sidebar. When we were playing 2 vs. 1 on a LAN (the one guy was a better player than the rest of us), the single player made the true observation that no matter what he does, he can't produce units as fast as we do simply because he has only one sidebar. In Generals your capabilities scale almost to infinity, if you have 50% map control alone you can churn out units just as fast as 4

          • In Earth 21*0 (the only one I'm sure about is 2160 but 2150 probably does as well) there is a sidebar in which you can cycle through your production facilities so you can give new build orders even while you are watching a battle

            In essence, you are correct. In Earth 2150 (which I have played very much) the sidebar actually appears only when a building or vehicle with construction capabilities is selected. The exception is while playing the Lunar Corporation, building construction is always available, si

            • Ah, so it's different in 2150. In 2160 you have a row of items below the bar for each type of construction unit/building, clicking them repeatedly cycles through the buildings/complexes (it always issues build orders to the closest drone for the UCS, the LC still builds in orbit and the ED has colony centers that spawn the buildings). If you select a building it'll show you that building's list but you can cycle through them without selecting anything so your group of units will not be deselected.
          • Actually, in the original C&C(called Tiberian Dawn nowadays for disambiguation purposes), if you were playing as Nod and you had multiple airfields, you could order multiple vehicles at once. No other C&C game has that feature though, and DeeZire hasn't tried to add it, so it was probably removed from the codebase after Tiberian Dawn.
      • You are pretty much alone in the world.
        Most fans of the series prefer the classic universe, and the ESPECIALLY like the side bar, no unit upgrades, and the ability to have huge battles.
        As has been said, Generals, with its unit upgrades, complex tech trees, etc, felt like a Warcraft rip-off.

        CnC games are about simplicity. Generals was not.

        • Personally I much prefered the Red Alert series. I have to admit though, I never got much chance to play the original c&c. RA2 was the best for me. Generals was fun, but it was defaintly more complex.

    • Re:New direction needed.. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      >>Westwood is now just a shell of the company it once was, since a lot of the staff have moved on to other projects. I hope whoever is left at the development house knows how to design with the same concepts that started the franchise.

      Many of the Westwood employees got together and created Petroglyph. Their current title is Star Wars: Empire at War. It's a great RTS.
    • I'm not sure I agree. Generals with the Zero Hour expansion was a fantastically good game, even compared to favorites like RA2 or WC3, and the ratings it got seemed to reflect this. If they can pull off another Generals-level performance, C&C 3 will be an EXCELLENT game.

      -Erwos
      • If only they fixed the incompatibility with the Nvidia 6600 chipset. I get so tired of lime-green almost featureless terrain just because there are weather precipitation effects overlaid.

        Maybe it's Nvidia's fault; maybe it's Westwood's fault. I don't know or care. I just wish I could play all the maps and scenarios without being nauseated.

    • Re:New direction needed.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Friday April 21, 2006 @01:25PM (#15174951) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • Generals had C&C damage balancing. Instead of bashing and bashing at buildings until they finally explode you just pump a few tank shells into them and they're gone. But the same shells do next to nothing to infantry so you better have some machineguns ready. Try comparing the damage system in Warhammer^H^H^H^H^H^Hcraft and C&C. The only similarity is the build system, even the unit specials aren't that prevalent.
        • Yeah. You know, the funny thing is, if you take a tank and shoot it at an infantry unit (and hit it), it would kill them.

          Hitting and accuracy against small targets may be an issue, but hey, that could be the downfall of trying to mow down troops with a tank.

          I used to love playing Tiberian Sun (or was it Yuris or RA2?...) playing with the artillery deployed would kill anything. Drop a few around the edges of your base (they were mobile, iirc) and hit anything 1.5 screens away. Even if you attempted to mov
          • If you understand each unit as a group it actually makes sense, a machinegun is much more effective for mowing down a group of infantry (especially when they are spread out) than trying to hit them with the main cannon. Though running infantry over wouldn't be possible/practical with groups, in real life that'd just end up giving the surviving infantry a clear line of fire to your vulnerable rear armor.
      • you liked sole survivor? i tried that and i didnt get it - you were simply a level 1 car and u drove around until you died...

        Did I just not "get" the game?

      • Looking at the screenshots so far, the biggest problem with Generals as far as I am concerned is still very evident - you can't zoom out far enough to see what the hell you are doing.

        If you go back to C&C and particularly Red Alert 2, you can crank the screen resolution and see a very large area on the screen - maybe a few hundred metres or so, certainly most of your base at one time.

        In Generals, you can see one or two buildings and a few units. I always found this made it extraordinarily frustrating tr
    • I never played a single Command and Conquer game until Generals and Generals: Zero Hour. So I have no history with the franchise, other than with that game.

      The controls were a little foreign at first, being backwards to what I was used to. Once I got past that, I discovered a highly detailed and very immersive game. I bought this game about 2 years ago and have played it consistently online with friends ever since. Last night being the most recent. :)

      In my opinion, if they can make the game as good as G
  • I just bought the 10 anthology of C and C and for the past two weeks have been running thru the general set and the expansion - I love the challenges section where you pit yourself against all of the generals - I especially love the finger of death weapon - the particle cannon.

    Can't wait to see the new game - I usually wait months before purchasing a new release, but I'll prolly pick this one up the day it's released.

  • Possible Hope (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Clazzy ( 958719 ) on Friday April 21, 2006 @12:13PM (#15174255)
    As a member of the C&C community, I can actually say that this could have potential to be good. In many ways, they're returning to the roots of the game with GDI and Nod, live-action cutscenes (although it's unknown if Joe Kucan will return as Kane) and an immersive single player campaign. EA have actually taken some time and care to get a bit of science behind tiberium, which I feel is a good sign.
    I still feel betrayed by EA for letting the community down at so many points - Generals, their interference in Tiberian Sun (look at prerelease info about the game to see what I mean), the dumbing down of Red Alert 2 (the original RA was serious, RA2 was all cartoony and not serious at all) and then the fiasco surrounding The First Decade pack they released. If they can release a solid C&C game that lives up to the expectations of myself and other C&C fans, I could probably forgive them.
    Also, not mentioned there but there is to be a third side available once GDI and Nod campaigns are complete, but it's unknown as to who you'll be playing as. If you're in the US, there's a PC Gamer coming out that will have a lot of info about the game, and a Dutch magazine, PC Gameplay, also has a preview of the game.

    • Re:Possible Hope (Score:3, Insightful)

      by identity0 ( 77976 )
      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 especia
      • I agree. I didn't totally like the change from "near future" to
        "waaay in the future a la cyborgs/mechs/subterranean vehicles" in tiberian sun. However, I thought the overall atmosphere was pretty cool. The tiberian minerals were taking over the planet with their rapid growth (almost reminded me of the red weed from war of the worlds). It was poisoning entire populations of people, and transforming others into superhumans.

        I loved Red Alert, and was totally disappointed when RA2 was corny and cartoony. I h

        • I thought the overall atmosphere was pretty cool. The tiberian minerals were taking over the planet with their rapid growth

          Yeah, I especially remember the fifth mission on the GDI side of the Firestorm expansion pack. The terrain was almost entirely covered with various forms of Tiberium, the mission took place at night, and the Tiberium was the main light source, in various shades of green and blue. It was a one-man mission, using a Ghoststalker, sneaking around various sleeping Tiberium lifeforms. Ver

      • 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.

        Sorry to disappoint you, but you are far off. The first game, Tiberian Dawn, was supposed to take place around 1995. The second game was supposed to take place around 2015 (I specifically remember that it mentioned that 20 years had passed since the first tiberium war). And C&C 3 is supposed to take place in 2047 according to the press release itself. So I assume th

      • I urge you not to let Red Alert put you off from Tiberian Sun. As other posters have mentioned, the C&C/TS universe may as well be completely separate from RA.

        Plot-wise, TS is a completely logical extension of C&C. Yes, it's more "out there" when compared to the real world, but not when compared with the world in the original C&C. That's pretty much a necessity in any divergent timeline plot. After all, C&C took place in what- 1995? TS takes place in 2030 (the manual is absolutely clear on t
    • I'd have to take exception to your comment about RA2. It's probably my favorite WinXP-playable C&C game. I remember what TS was suppose to look like, and it was a real let-down. It had really slow action, a poor interface when compared to RA2, and had serious gameplay issues (which I recently rediscovered with the release of the first decade pack). RA2, however, was certainly a much better playing experience all around. True, it wasn't as serious, but it was fun. And it looked prettier as well.

      Person
      • doesn't matter what EA does with this game. As long as the storyline is good, that's all I care about.

        Mod me troll, but the SAGE engine kind-of seems to suck. I mean, generals got old after a couple weeks, unlike previous CnC games.

        When I want gameplay, I go for RA2: Yuri's Revenge with the deezire mod. Now THAT'S fun.

      • Re:Possible Hope (Score:2, Informative)

        by sirnuke ( 866453 )

        Petroglyph will be releasing a military style RTS around the same time (actually a guess, since neither EA's or Westwood's games have solid release dates as of now).

        http://www.petroglyphgames.com/press/segaann.html [petroglyphgames.com]

        Coincidence?

  • The original Command & Conquer has always impressed me. Sure it wasn't the first RTS, but in my opinion it was the first one to get it right. Both Nod and GDI were fairly well balanced, and the game had a lot of depth and replayability (most levels had multiple battle fields). The graphics were good for the time (even the FMV), and looked great when C&C Gold came out for Windows '95. There were a lot of tools out there to create your own levels, and playing friends over a LAN was a great experie
    • C&C did have huge "replayability" i.e. addiction potential. I played it in 4-player LANs constantly. The original was hilariously unbalanced: Nod could build swarms of Nod Bikes and vast fields of Turrets at a tiny cost. GDI had no equivalent. But by the time the 1.22 version was patched up, the cost of Nod Bikes and Turrets was brought back in line with comparable GDI units.

      I hope they can come out with another C&C that is just plain fun, like the original. Looking back at C&C, the graphic
      • What you *did* notice was a half-dozen guys with hard hats and blueprints piling out of a stealth APC you didn't see coming, and putting your Mobile Construction Yard on the real estate market :)

        Oh dear god, you just reminded me about the single most annoying thing I ever encountered in that game... but it also made me want to play again and again....

        Addiction is a funny thing...
      • To get this aside so I can type the rest of my post: The APCs could only carry 5 people at once--RA2's Flak Tracks could carry 6, but all the APCs previous to that were 5(except possibly TS--don't remember if they could carry 5 or 6). Done with the nitpick, now for the real post:
        I completely agree--I still play Tiberian Sun and RA2 to this day--can't play the first two because Windows 2000 refuses to play them...*checks WINE to see if it plays them* And, since it plays, this post will have to get cut off,

  • Don't forget... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by casualsax3 ( 875131 )
    ...as much as you might like to play this game - it's coming from EA. It irritates me it's even getting publicity...
  • I loved C&C Tiberium Sun, it was the game that really got me hooked on RTS. To this day, I still fire it up to play a multiplayer skirmish now and then. The tech tree was great, and I loved the story line. The graphics weren't bad, but when Generals came out and after I'd played it, I wished they'd taken the Generals engine and slapped a sequel to Tiberium Sun on there.
    Even without that, Generals was one of the best RTS games I'd ever played.
    This, if EA doesn't screw it up, has the possibility of bestin
  • You know, I really REALLY love generals and have played it multiplayer online with friends
    until just recently when the bugs and network difficulties got to be too much for us.

    I think whoever designed the networking code was either inexperienced or lazy or both.

    Why can't they just use a SIMPLE network protocol??? For example, if you have a
    firewall, you have to open up the TCP ports: 80, 6667, 28910, 29900, 29920
    and UDP ports: 4321, 27900. That's just part of it. There's loads more "fun" if NAT
    is involved.
    • Could you be using a basic hub, as opposed to a network switch? Tray and see if you're getting any packet collision.
    • So true. I also liked Generals a lot as a game, even though it's by EA, but it's just not stable enough when it comes to multiplayer. Most of the time I could only play 1on1s because games with more than 2 players either couldn't even initialise, or I'd get "mismatch" sh*t like you said. The few times that didn't happen, the actual network performance was horribly bad. I'm not sure what the cause was, but the game was extremely sluggish. Even on normal/fast gamespeed, everything was moving at snail-speed, a

      • I'm still waiting for Battlefield 2 to get patched to a more stable state before I plan on buying it.

        If you had bought it, you would have noticed that it's been very stable for about 9 months, and EXTREMELY well balanced for about 3 months now (since the patch that improved anti-air missiles). Balance was only a problem in the first couple months; a recent balance patch fixed the last remaining significant balance issues (all the remaining balance issues tend to come down to player preference more than a

        • (Regarding Battlefield 2) I play it for an avg of an hour every night, some weeks 2 hours, and have absolutely no crashes or problems with it (it was never unstable for me anyways).

          So basically, what you are saying is that it was stable ages ago because YOU never had an issue with it? Ummm, No. 9 months ago it was still crap. I know, because that's about right when I purchased it. You know what? April was the first month that I've really been able to play it.

          I am stuck on a wireless network. I have ga
    • Amen brother.

      From a standpoint of the network ports, you can choose just one port in the settings for generals, and it will stick to that - but you do have to (on your firewall) dedicate that port (UDP AND TCP - if you don't do UDP, you'll have issues, as I've found) to your internal box.

      Oh yea, and the mismatches - WTF. I know they're attempting to run in lockstep so they're not being overly chatty, but look at Age of Empires (another one that me and my friends got into big time) - if there was ever a "mi
    • If you think network play in Generals was bad, you must've never played Red Alert. It was so horrible, but the addiction kept us trying again and again!

  • Yay (Score:2)

    by GmAz ( 916505 )
    I am excited for this. I like the genre of the C&C series. Generals was fun, but not as fun as Red Alert 2. I do hope it goes back to the classic style.
    • To me, it seemed like as the series progressed, they got more infatuated with graphics over gameplay. RA1 and C&C1 were the best by far. RA2 was OK (the killer bimps were awesome). C&C2 did nothing for me. It felt like they changed nothing expect making fancier graphics to the detriment of gameplay.

  • Some goodies. (Score:3, Informative)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Friday April 21, 2006 @02:20PM (#15175556) Homepage Journal
    There are various links to drool on: #1 [gamespy.com], #2 [gamespy.com], #3 [cncden.com], and #4 [apathbeyond.com] for magazine scans, information, and discussions.
  • I've been waiting since I was a little kid for a sequel to Red Alert 2. The C&C universe was always boring to me. The Red Alert universe was always exciting and the games themselves were always better. Stick with the Red Alert series. You guys already put out a C&C sequel since the last Red Alert sequel.
    • You have been waiting for a sequel to Red Alert 2 since you were a little kid? Red Alert 2 came out late 2000, with the expansion in 2001. You might not know this, but Red Alert was supposed to be the prequel to C&C95. Red Alert 2 screwed up the timeline.

      There hasn't been a Command & Conquer sequel since RA2 at all. That is, unless you count Renegade, but that's not a realy RTS game anyways.

      Oh, and Generals doesn't count. That was in another universe entirely.
      • The "since a kid" bit was hyperbole. However, it does seem like an incredibly long time. Even if Red Alert and non Red Alert are the same universe, I still prefer dealing with the Soviets and their kind.

  • Lack of Care for Customer Concerns (Score:3, Interesting)

    by moochfish ( 822730 ) on Friday April 21, 2006 @02:32PM (#15175696)
    I loved Generals. It was an awesome game. For a while.

    But I have vowed never to give EA another dime for that franchise if it's the last thing I ever do. Why? Because their commitment to their customers is crap compared to their RTS rival Blizzard. Here's what happened for you non C&G:G players:

    First they released the game. It was cool. People noticed it was blantantly unbalanced. It was still imbalanced. They released 3 or 4 patches and then Zero Hour came out. Zero hour further screwed up the balance of the game. In the end, they patched it a few more times and then left it in a crippled, obviously screwed up state. I remember being so frustrated with the game being one sided that I was posting in their support forums. EVERYBODY was angry about the game. It came down to a point where people were telling prospective customers to not purchase the game because EA doesn't care about you once you cough up cash. It was only after insane amounts of anti-EA posts when EA staff finally started interacting - on a very limited basis - with the community. I remember their first post being an apology of sorts. But it was clear the higher ups were telling them to can support and move on to working on the LoTR game that was coming up.

    The consensus was that the game coulda been great, but EA's lack of commitment to release balance patches (is it that much work???) killed hard core players' will to keep playing. I remember vowing to never play again until they patched the current version. I haven't picked up that CD since.

    Why would I complain about the game's balance? Because the expansion set made the game have TWELVE sides and yet at the end of the day there was one or two CLEAR superior sides to play (inf and usaf). It became boring and frustrating to play when two out of three random opponents you played was one of the two cheese sides.

    I don't care how shiny and flashy their next game is. I'm not giving them a damn dime. If they are going to release a multiplayer RTS and then not bother to make sure it's balanced, I'm not interested.
    • You didn't play it for long enough.

      The clearly superior sides change depending on the experience of the player. You just keep learning new tactics.

      However, for the very experienced player the Toxin General is the strongest.

      We've been playing Zero Hour non-stop every lunchtime at work for over 2 and a half years. That's the longest I've played *any* game daily.

      We patched it ourselves to limit each side's money-generators to 10 black markets, 10 drop zones, and 40 hackers... otherwise in 3v3 games, one play
      • notice you had to patch it? i remember playing the game with a balance patch too. i do remember the toxic gen being very strong (esp tunnel). i played the game for about a year straight every day before giving up. i remember the GLA was tough to beat once you got into a super weapon match (china get owned by them there).

  • Always seemed like a pale immitation of... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Friday April 21, 2006 @03:14PM (#15176124) Journal
    Total Annihilation.

    Blizzard is good for micromanaging. Age of Empire was good for huge wars and economic games. TA was for downright fighting and it seemed to me that C&C was going for the TA feel but never achieved it.

    • Ok, im a big TA fan too, but you do know that the original C&C was released before TA, right? If memory serves, C&C was '95, Red Alert was '96, and then Total Annihilation was released in '97. Oh and then Starcraft appeared in 98, but who cares about them, right? :P

      Also, for the record... the sequel to the most amazing RTS ever, aka Total Annihilation 2, aka Supreme Commander [supremecommander.com] is scheduled to rock the RTS world some time in 2007. Oh hell yes. *Fanboi drooling noises*
    • Actually C&C is more arcade-like and puts emphasis on quick battles and obvious unit strengths and weaknesses while TA takes a highly realistic approach. TA isn't just about fielding more and the right units, it's a lot about information warfare. If the enemy's scouts can spot your force before you see theirs you'll take heavy losses before you even get to fire one shot. When I was a noob I sent 20 goliath tanks towards the enemy and got them wiped out by a single HLT.
    • Supreme Commander

      Check it out here: link [slashdot.org].

      And let's hope it happens - still the best, most complex RTS game ever, all it needed to be perfect was some improvements to the AI.
  • C&C 2 was one of the worst piles of trash to visit the PC. Dune 2 was more fun than C&C 2.
  • I still play generals ever week. Im sure Ill buy it the day it comes out.
  • EA games are developed for console(X360, etc.), because
    console games dont need support and balancing.
    They dont care if it is a RTS game or anything else.
  • There is something enigmatic about the character Kane [wikipedia.org] that just makes the whole C&C series what it is, and what Generals was not.

    Not only did Joseph D. Kucan [imdb.com] do great acting for the games but he also directed them.
    My Hero!

Slashdot Top Deals

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

Close