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When did C&C fail?

Vaarna_Aarne

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The allied factions system in Emperor doesn't really add that much to replayability, and in the campaign you can't get the Guild anyway.

I had Emperor and can say that skirmish was meh even by other RTS standarts. Tleilaxu units were more annoying than useful, guild units were expensive and weak, sardaukars and fremen were flavor only as infantry could be kille den masse easily there and only Ix were useful as it could spawn duplicator tanks.
I would say that depends to a large degree. Any map with sufficient rock cover would render Fremen and Sardaukar better than tanks (with the possible exception of Atreides artillery mech spam), and outside of that their primary enemy is Harkonnen buzzsaw buggies. Now, there is a downside to the Fedaykin which is that they will eventually kill each other if you don't micro their aiming, and another for Sardaukar Elite because of what happens when they shoot at a unit with shields.
 

sser

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Tiberian felt like the start of the end even when it came out and was remarkably average.

But I think the completely non-canon or anything Generals series is some of the best pure RTS games there are so what do I know.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad had they had a intermediary game in between to see the world dying. The drastic change was too much for me both game wise and in the story.

I actually hadn't considered this but I think you're right. There was something off-putting about the setting, like it went from mild sci-fi to world to a place destroyed by a resource without any natural transition. Of course if the game were super good it would have been fine, but it wasn't. And yeah the colors were browned out pretty bad.
 

thesheeep

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What replayablility single-player RTS will have? I played skirmish A LOT back when I had no modem or internet or local network established in any way. And it was starting to be boring fast. Compstomps could do for a while but people always learned required tricks and beating Ais was a matter of time.
1. Why do you NEED replayability? If a game has a good campaign that keeps you busy for 30-60 hours and then you're done, what's wrong with that? Assuming the game comes with a reasonable price tag. It's not something you'd complain about in other genres, so complaining about it in RTS games makes little sense.
2. If the campaign was made more open, for example like the Warlords Battlecry 2 & 3 campaigns, or like the TW:WH campaign (yes, different genre, but you get the idea), you'd have your replayability. Or, to be totally crazy, combine it with some more randomness, maybe even roguelike elements. Has never been done, afaik, but sounds interesting to me.
 

Space Satan

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If the campaign was made more open, for example like the Warlords Battlecry 2 & 3 campaigns, or like the TW:WH campaign (yes, different genre, but you get the idea), you'd have your replayability. Or, to be totally crazy, combine it with some more randomness, maybe even roguelike elements. Has never been done, afaik, but sounds interesting to me.
It is fundamentally different systems, more of a sandbox than a campaign. The only somehow linear system I saw is modern Warhammer Total War, with stages and story progression.
 

Lyric Suite

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Heh, i have a friend who is a total RTS nut. Used to play Starcraft seriously and when Warcraft 3 came out he jumped on it like a lunatic, however, he never actually played the single player campaign. When i asked him he said there was no point, online play is where it was at.

And that's the mindset that killed the RTS genre right there. And making a successful online game is hard as fuck, especially if you are a little guy. Keeping up to Blizzard in terms of support, service, production values, balance etc is impossible if you are a small company, and those are all important, where as they don't matter as much for single player, where design, innovation and creativity play a bigger role. But since multiplayer became mandatory in those type of games it was game over for the genre. When Warcraft 3 came out i remember one of the biggest competitors was Battle Realms. Now the game was pretty cool, but it had neither the production values of Warcraft 3 nor did it have anything that could compete with Battle.net, so the game just faded out into oblivion.

I have a feeling something like this might have been the case for the FPS genre as well.
 

thesheeep

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If the campaign was made more open, for example like the Warlords Battlecry 2 & 3 campaigns, or like the TW:WH campaign (yes, different genre, but you get the idea), you'd have your replayability. Or, to be totally crazy, combine it with some more randomness, maybe even roguelike elements. Has never been done, afaik, but sounds interesting to me.
It is fundamentally different systems, more of a sandbox than a campaign. The only somehow linear system I saw is modern Warhammer Total War, with stages and story progression.
True.
A game with both styles of campaigns would be interesting, though probably out of scope.
 

Volrath

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Tiberian felt like the start of the end even when it came out and was remarkably average.

But I think the completely non-canon or anything Generals series is some of the best pure RTS games there are so what do I know.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad had they had a intermediary game in between to see the world dying. The drastic change was too much for me both game wise and in the story.

I actually hadn't considered this but I think you're right. There was something off-putting about the setting, like it went from mild sci-fi to world to a place destroyed by a resource without any natural transition. Of course if the game were super good it would have been fine, but it wasn't. And yeah the colors were browned out pretty bad.
You people are insane, the art direction of Tiberian Sun is one of the main reasons why that game is one of the most memorable RTSes of all time.
 
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Yeah, it's one of the only RTSs that can truly be described as atmospheric.

Lighting.1.jpg


Of course the Firestorm campaign took it to the next level, that was truly apocalyptic.

C&C3 sort of tried but it simultaneously went way too far with alien 3D landscape and reserved most of its stuff for unplayable land that you just flew over. Plus 3D RTS is just problematic in general, it's hard to get great, detailed art and units while still being easy to understand and control.

Don't know what sser is talking about "browned out" colors. Maybe it you only played the randomly generated multiplayer maps or something?
 
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sser

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Are you guys trolling. You google Tiberian Sun --> images and it's a wall of brown. Even the box art is brown.
 

sser

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Google search results:

qH6b5Dp.jpg



The game was pretty brown. Let's not pretend that it wasn't the theme. And GDI is also a beige colored faction to begin with. Bunch of biscuit colored tanks traversing a brown hellscape does not illicit the sort of memories found in the expansive colors schemes of the Red Alert franchises. Earth 2150 was also an apocalyptic RTS. IMO, it looks much better without going all dark and gloomy from a color standpoint.
 
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Just scanning through this whole thing the only instance of browning is in the mission at 4:16:00, and it's there because there's an ion storm so things are supposed to be hard to recognize, so the game desaturates a bit. That's what browning looks like, if the whole game like that you'd have a point.

Brown isn't a problem when things that are supposed to be brown are brown, it's when things that aren't supposed to be brown get a brown color palette and become indistinguishable from actual browns. Tib sun has vibrant greens and reds everywhere.
 

sser

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The first cutscene they're in a desert..........and the mission is a dreary grey and brown. And panning through it's almost unanimously those two color palettes for the primary theme with glowing green for the Tiberium and muted blue for water. The occasional snow map helps diversify it, but the colors are still ultimately muted; even the trees are a muted green. Wouldn't surprise me if this was intentional to make the resource itself stand out more. Thematically, makes sense.

Yes, things are meant to be brown, but we're discussing the failure of the game itself. If you look at the two other big RTS's of that year they were Age of Empires II and Homeworld. Compare the art direction of those games to C&C and it's easy to see why Tiberian chugged. Then if you look at Red Alert 2 which came out a year or so later and it's like night and day.
 

Dzupakazul

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1. Why do you NEED replayability? If a game has a good campaign that keeps you busy for 30-60 hours and then you're done, what's wrong with that?
Because most RTS games already have that, and after you're done with playing this cool game filled with interesting concepts and strategic depth, you might realize that it'd be interesting to measure up against someone online, because PvP in case of RTS games is generally a richer, more compelling experience than beating up the AI. Given the usual glut of vs AI gaming modes, after the campaign, you have your typical AI pile-up that can usually be destroyed 1v7 by employing some sort of wall technique that only works because the AI is stupid, FFA modes that cause the AI to bleed itself to death fighting one another while the player is walled off and turtling. The AI in RTS games simply gets old, and regarding thesheeep's point, which I generally liked the perspective of, I think figuring out a half-decent RTS AI is also a pretty tough job. Multiplayer modes, whatever they are (whether compstomps with a few buddies or gritty 1v1 matches) simply offer a greater wealth of interesting plays.

Hell, you don't even need to have a competitive focus in your game just to make it fun enough to play online. Most people who play RTS games play casual team games with non-meta tactics; the people who play the competitive ladder are actually just a couple percent of people. LS posits that Dawn of War didn't have the success of Starcraft, but was it really meant to? You have to make concessions when trying to make a game where each of the 9 factions has a level playing field and an unique flavor to them. DoW was a treat to WH40K lorefags and had four extensive campaign modes; DoW is still played, you have a modding community (with a large chunk of it playing Ultimate Apocalypse), you have a tight multiplayer community that plays and communicates in its own little echelons, and if you want to catch a pub game, they exist too. At most, you might be complaining that you'll mostly be playing the same couple hundred people, but I thought that you guys hated how B.net 2.0 makes every single match impersonal with a prospective player queuing into a match with a guy whose name they will completely forget in 5 minutes and with whom they won't even talk before the game (since the setup process is automated), and has completely killed socialization through its lack of chat, so I have absolutely no clue what the problem is here.

SC2 has good vs AI content, because there's multiple co-op missions with multiple commanders that each bring an unique playstyle and there's modes for both people who want to turtle forever and LARP with their bases and there are modes for adrenaline junkies who want the deck stacked against them (mutators and the like). Regardless of how you feel about SC2 as a game, I think that more games that would evolve the time-honored tradition of 2vX compstomp with a buddy are definitely very much needed.

I am not sure why, in every single "RTS are ded" discussion people insist that new RTS games aren't made at all (when they are, but nobody ever talks about them) and that they all have dead multiplayer when you can still log in and find a game or a dedicated community for most of them in like 2-3 minutes, tops. On RPGCodex, there's no Warparty thread, there has never been a Tooth and Tail thread, and the thread for a single-player RTS that arguably was a success, Frostpunk, has been deserted for three weeks now, with very few pages and very little discussion.

Codex, you play games that very few people still play and consider them a pinnacle of design, and I like that because it always helped me find cool new experiences through reading discussions and recommendations. Nothing stops you from playing your favourite RTS even now. Red Alert 2, according to a CNCNet forum post from June 2018, still has around 200~ players playing. That's why I'm bewildered about the supposed death of the RTS genre whenever I read about it because most of the good games are still perfectly playable but you don't play them, indie RTSes come out but nobody ever makes a thread on them (and if they do, they die), even just to say how shit they are, when even Codex's supposed pariah (jRPGs) gets a thread about every single little hentai curiosity that has been ported from an obscure Japanese computer from the 80s and gracefully localized by an IRL magical girl (male) that comes out.
 

Beastro

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You people are insane, the art direction of Tiberian Sun is one of the main reasons why that game is one of the most memorable RTSes of all time.

Like I said, if there'd been a bridge between it and and the first to foreshadow things more I wouldn't have had as much of an issue.

I don't hold issue with much the same thing in Fallout 1&2 because the landscape and aesthetics stayed consistent and was what you'd expect.

Consider if FO2 suddenly had things shift to a bright, vivid colour palette and how unexpected and off putting that may be. Especially so if the series had skipped what we saw in Fallout 2 and had set the sequel in the NCR of the FONV era.

The C&C setting is really neat not only for the world building it did, but also it being a reflection of the optimism of the 90s. It deliberately aped the zeitgeist around Desert Storm (especially the music) with its happy, righteous tones that were practically jingoistic. Much like how the world was wiping away the smaller tyrannies now that the Cold War was over from Iraq to Yugoslavia to the Congo, only to have those conflicts then drag out into an unending series of wars in an increasingly pessimistic world.

If there'd been that link we'd have been able to see the danger and how the world and GDI got sucked into the paradox of fighting Nod, increasingly reliant on a resource that wasn't going to leave them much of a world left to rebuild after their foe was defeated.

Actually, all of this is making me wish there'd been more done with C&Cs themes of war, self-destruction and resource curse all wrapped in an appropriately subtle and unforced allegory around civilization and the changes in climate.

Google search results:

qH6b5Dp.jpg



The game was pretty brown. Let's not pretend that it wasn't the theme. And GDI is also a beige colored faction to begin with. Bunch of biscuit colored tanks traversing a brown hellscape does not illicit the sort of memories found in the expansive colors schemes of the Red Alert franchises. Earth 2150 was also an apocalyptic RTS. IMO, it looks much better without going all dark and gloomy from a color standpoint.

Brown is to Tiberium Sun what green was to C&C1 and RA1, it's not entirely green, but it predominates.

Like I said, it's not bad on its own, but with the great tonal shift the game has compared to C&C1 it's too much. The tonal shift too isn't bad in and of itself and I actually like the use of all the dark colours to reflect the devastation of the world. The maps themselves always give an impression that sunny skies simply don't exist anymore and the world is covered in a dour haze or overcast all the time.

TibSun was Apocalypse-in-progress setting to be more correct

Thinking about it, it evokes an air much like Mad Max 1 did, where most major human population centers are ruined, depleted of their former numbers and the world can't sustain them anymore. Small, widely separated settlements are now the norm as the non-mutant world population plummets, but civilization has been able to fight that to a stalemate for now due to the leaps in tech Tiberium have given the world, of which we get to see a glimpse in the changed military tech everyone fights with, but it's a slow burn that Mankind cannot win fighting both it and Nod at the same time.

Instead of earth as we know it, the world's shifting into becoming more like something akin to what we all expect human colonies on other worlds would be like in reverse with more and more retreat from the open world into enclosed colonies along with very bad things happening in most places if you go around without a EVA suit on.

With that said, it would have been best to have things be with C&C1 showing the early changes in a world very much like our own fueled by optimism around the new discovery, then have that replaced by the world in C&C2 with people starting to get nervous and hesitant about the changes it's bringing on, that being reflected in both the rapid change in weapons tech in the game before that gives way to what is seen in Tiberium Sun with civilization holding its own on the cusp of becoming vestigial and unsustainable followed by a C&C4 that has earth having turned into an uninhabitable planet with Mankind last living species able to still hold on, and only then through tech as things are even too bad for even Tiberium mutant people to survive.
 
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Darth Roxor

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Yes, things are meant to be brown, but we're discussing the failure of the game itself. If you look at the two other big RTS's of that year they were Age of Empires II and Homeworld. Compare the art direction of those games to C&C and it's easy to see why Tiberian chugged.

This is nonsense. For as long as I can remember, TibSun has always been praised for the art direction and atmosphere.
 

thesheeep

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1. Why do you NEED replayability? If a game has a good campaign that keeps you busy for 30-60 hours and then you're done, what's wrong with that?
Because most RTS games already have that, and after you're done with playing this cool game filled with interesting concepts and strategic depth, you might realize that it'd be interesting to measure up against someone online, because PvP in case of RTS games is generally a richer, more compelling experience than beating up the AI. Given the usual glut of vs AI gaming modes, after the campaign, you have your typical AI pile-up that can usually be destroyed 1v7 by employing some sort of wall technique that only works because the AI is stupid, FFA modes that cause the AI to bleed itself to death fighting one another while the player is walled off and turtling. The AI in RTS games simply gets old, and regarding thesheeep's point, which I generally liked the perspective of, I think figuring out a half-decent RTS AI is also a pretty tough job. Multiplayer modes, whatever they are (whether compstomps with a few buddies or gritty 1v1 matches) simply offer a greater wealth of interesting plays.
But that is only because vs AI is nothing else than a regular MP match - just vs a bot instead of a human.
That IS multiplayer - but with an opponent who doesn't really change at all.
What I'm (and I'd say others, too) are talking about when it comes to replayability with single player is either a campaign that allows strong variance of some kind (like playing through it with different routes and/or factions). Or a well-done sandbox mode.
But that doesn't change anything about what I said. When you got your money's worth from only a campaign, and there's nothing else, then you got your money's worth.
You just won't come back in a few years, and likely so will nobody else. You just got fond memories (well, if it was good). That was enough for Spellforce 1-3, so why shouldn't it be for any other game?
An RTS doesn't have to have hundreds playing it still after three years in order to be considered a success. That is simply a false assumption. What is important is how many bought it vs production costs, as with any other game, and that's it.


Hell, you don't even need to have a competitive focus in your game just to make it fun enough to play online.
I agree. I wish there were more interesting game modes - SC2 with its co-op is a step in the right direction. But it is lacking the concept of persistance, IMO, so why stop there?
Why isn't there something like a co-op campaign (Emperor: BfD or Warlords Battlecry 3 style, but with some more interesting levels maybe) that allows a handful of players to play whenever they want? Like, you can play two levels per day, but especially early on, many will be against the AI - so you can do it at any time. Playing against another human obviously requires all participants to be online (and if that can't be done it will be AI-resolved after a day or two), of course, but that is just one of multiple things to be done in the campaign.
This is pretty much the norm in games like Total War or EUIV - you play together in the same world, but not everything you do involves other players directly.


I am not sure why, in every single "RTS are ded" discussion people insist that new RTS games aren't made at all (when they are, but nobody ever talks about them) and that they all have dead multiplayer when you can still log in and find a game or a dedicated community for most of them in like 2-3 minutes, tops. On RPGCodex, there's no Warparty thread, there has never been a Tooth and Tail thread, and the thread for a single-player RTS that arguably was a success, Frostpunk, has been deserted for three weeks now, with very few pages and very little discussion.
First time I hear of Warparty, but then again it has only been released a few days ago. Looking at it, I don't really have much to say as the game seems to contain only skirmish for now. Only three factions. Hmmm...
Well, might be worth playing through the campaign and maybe dip a bit into other modes once it is out.
But it also showcases a problem: What exactly does that game bring to the table that isn't already there? Doesn't seem like much to me. To make matters worse, it reminds of that famous failure Paraworld - that might have spoiled dino RTS for me eternally :lol:
Anyway, thanks for the mention, wishlisted.

Tooth and Tail was a much better example, IMO.
As for why there is no thread here... I honestly think the furry theme wasn't helping it. Neither on the Codex nor anywhere else.
But I played it and while I did not like it (the randomness in the procedural levels was just too unrestrained and it had some other flaws), it was finally something entirely new. I even bought it despite every fiber of my being screaming at the furry stuff.

Frostpunk never really made the impression of being an RTS to me, to be honest. More of a short-burst survival strategy game. Don't think it belongs in that list.

Nothing stops you from playing your favourite RTS even now.
I do. I play Warlords Battlecry 3 probably once per year, DoW once every two years or so, as well.
Recently played the Age Of Mythology campaign, too...

But this is the RPG Codex, the strategy forum is really more of niche within our realms, so you can't really expect the same fan base or interest in RTS discussions as for RPGs (even jRPGs ;) ).
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Aesthetically Tiberian Sun is probably the best C&C game and best Westwood put out. It's also got a lot of interesting features, like terrain deformation, mutant wildlife, and stuff like that. It's definately still a pretty unique and memorable RTS game, and my personal favourite C&C (even if it's balance was kind of out of whack and Hunter-Killer was the most annoying shit ever).


PS: The most amusing thing about Tiberian Sun skirmish is that it's not all that uncommon to find that the deciding factor was someone getting an early Tiberian Floater right in their base.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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I don't think EA or whoever holds the game license would be interested in versus eroge about special sex moves.
 

Lyric Suite

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Those are some pretty sexy shots.
 

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