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When did C&C fail?

sser

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Dune was too brown and yellow, way too much sand. Would not play.

The Emperor game actually looked amazing when it came out and has great color schemes.


As for Tiberian, whatever. Feel like I'm in an alternate reality cause when that game came out it was a big disappointment to every C&C player I knew and a big indicator the series was treading water.
 

Darth Roxor

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As for Tiberian, whatever. Feel like I'm in an alternate reality cause when that game came out it was a big disappointment to every C&C player I knew and a big indicator the series was treading water.

Stop being obtuse. TibSun was a "disappointment" because it was broken and unfinished at launch, not because zomg muh browns.
 

sser

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As for Tiberian, whatever. Feel like I'm in an alternate reality cause when that game came out it was a big disappointment to every C&C player I knew and a big indicator the series was treading water.

Stop being obtuse. TibSun was a "disappointment" because it was broken and unfinished at launch, not because zomg muh browns.

No because it did not advance the series at all. C&C and Close Combat are why I ever got on the internet in the first place, and just from my personal recollection TS was disappointing to those circles. Similarly, Civ IV was the most broken game ever released in the series but nobody remembers that part because what was under the hood. Only weird nostalgics for TS thinks it's error was a janky release.
 

Darth Roxor

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:nocountryforshitposters:

TibSun at release had NOD artillery with guided projectiles that obliterated anything that stepped into its firing range. I'm sure absolutely nobody who played it multiplayer at the time minded that slight weird janky nostalgic detail.
 

sser

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Uh, the point was if it's release issues were the sole problem then its reception today would be different. Few people remember a poor release if the fixed game is great, that's why I pointed out Civ IV. Everybody loves CivIV, nobody remembers how utterly broken it was at release and for a year+ later.
 

Darth Roxor

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Uh, the point was if it's release issues were the sole problem then its reception today would be different.

you mean mayhap like in this thread

and even then, nobody sane will ever tell you TibSun excelled at anything other than atmosphere and things like that in the context of the C&C series

nobody sane is also going to tell you it sucks because it's brown
 

sser

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Didn't realize it being brown was the primary point of it being a failure , this is pretty dishonest of you to represent discussing a single thing like that.
 
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Tibsun gameplay was never "fixed" in the same way Civ4 was. It was always bare bones and the sides were too one-dimensional. Balance patches "fixed" Nod artillery but that just made GDI the uber unstoppable rape machine. It was never going to have the strategic depth of Red Alert 2 unless they spent an extra 6-12 months on the game.

The campaign still has great atmosphere and some great mission design with optional maps affecting the next mission. Funny thing is that the C&C aspects (codex version) of Tibsun probably came about as a consequence of the rushed development, rather than make 3 or 4 missions makes 2 or 3 and have the final one with some alterations depending on what which route you took.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
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.

Great post. I've pointed out this aspect of C&C before but you explained it better than I ever had the patience for could.

I agree that Tiberian Sun was unappealing because it lost this relevant-to-real-life quality. Sort of the Deus Ex: Invisible War of RTSes.
 

Zarniwoop

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Emperor is still Westwood's best game, though sadly it's also the one that will probably never get re-released or freewared.
It will also not get "re-imagined" as a dumbed-down console game á la Civ: Revolutions and riddled with millennialisms like microtransactions or social network integration. So that's :incline: in my book.

The freeware thing can be gotten around by dropping your anchor in the Bay of Pirates.
 

Space Satan

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30 year boomer meme is the best depiction of C&C audience.
cover3-2.jpg
 

Chippy

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
ALways enjoyed the C&C games. Think I stopped at Red Alert 2. Just been trying C&C3 these past few days, and gotta say it's a chore. No more slow burn strategy and base building. Now everything is rock, paper, scissors gamplay, and sacrificing troops. And then trying to work out what the optimum way to play the campaign missions are (that the developer intended) before the AI comes out with the big guns.

I know it's got some good reviews and it's 'hard'. But that doesn't mean it's an improvement. The pathfinding is shit, your troops attract aggro from enemies, hold position and fire doesn't really work, and units don't have any staying power.

Edit: Red Alert 3 was my last Tiberium game. Just completed C&C3 and I wasn't really impressed. Everything is a chore. You can't build on the land clearly. Units have tourettes. Enemies cheat resources. It was too short.

:3/5:
 
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luj1

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2. Tiberian Sun(1999) vs Starcraft(1998)

No, it was Red Alert 2 (2000) and Generals (2003) vs Starcraft (1998) and Warcraft III (2002).

Blizzard's games just had more hype surrounding them.

Tiberian Sun was more of a story-heavy, single player game than an esport. But it was amazing nonetheless.
 
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Zeriel

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2. Tiberian Sun(1999) vs Starcraft(1998)

No, it was Red Alert 2 (2000) and Generals (2003) vs Starcraft (1998) and Warcraft III (2002).

Blizzard's games just had more hype surrounding them.

Tiberian Sun was more of a story-heavy, single player game than an esport. But it was amazing nonetheless.

I think Battle.net was a force multiplier. C&C/Westwood had nothing like that. Before the internet became a big thing, I think C&C actually had the edge over Warcraft 2. It was very popular at the time. They just sort of fell off with the sequels in popularity, Starcraft hit at the exact right time that every serious gamer was starting to get decent internet access and was familiarized with it, throw in Battle.net being at the time a huge outlier in terms of ease of use (anyone who remembers all those random online game services back then like Gamestorm knows what I'm talking about, other game franchises outside of Blizzard were often just a huge fucking annoyance to get MP setup).

Starcraft was definitely a good game for the time, but it's incredibly unfortunate that it made all devs after that point focus on micro-heavy RTS design, that killed the old appeal of basebuilding RTS and I think prematurely buried the genre. There was a large contingent of old school/more casual RTS gamers who were left orphaned and with no games to play, and eventually that withered away into no interest for the genre overall.
 

Trithne

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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.

Yeah the jump to the apocalypse felt sudden and jarring. Ironically C&C3, I feel, shows what that interim period would've looked like - while Tiberian Sun is the end state.

Beastro's comment about the world turning into something like a colony is a good descriptor for it - the C&C timeline became about living on a world that was being actively terraformed by an alien force. It's an ecological apocalypse, before they were cool, and they did a bang up job of capturing that, which is what everyone remembers and likes about TS. I could leave the actual gameplay on the floor.
 

Zeriel

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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.

Yeah the jump to the apocalypse felt sudden and jarring. Ironically C&C3, I feel, shows what that interim period would've looked like - while Tiberian Sun is the end state.

Beastro's comment about the world turning into something like a colony is a good descriptor for it - the C&C timeline became about living on a world that was being actively terraformed by an alien force. It's an ecological apocalypse, before they were cool, and they did a bang up job of capturing that, which is what everyone remembers and likes about TS. I could leave the actual gameplay on the floor.

Original C&C was a bit of a flash in the pan/exact right perfect game and setting for the time period it came out. It was during Desert Storm era, the game launching with an installer that put you in setting and made you feel like you were just tapping into command and control of a real-life military that could really exist in the real world, with just enough spice of something different/sci-fi to give it an interesting edge, it really did something that none of the sequels managed to do, and they kept getting further and further away from that charm with the more games they put out.
 

luj1

You're all shills
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Before the internet became a big thing, I think C&C actually had the edge over Warcraft 2. It was very popular at the time.

Yeah

Don't forget C&C and Red Alert 1 were actually played on Playstation 1 a lot unlike Starcraft/Warcraft
 

Trithne

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Before the internet became a big thing, I think C&C actually had the edge over Warcraft 2. It was very popular at the time.

Yeah

Don't forget C&C and Red Alert 1 were actually played on Playstation 1 a lot unlike Starcraft/Warcraft

Had both Red Alert and Warcraft 2 for the PSX. Starcraft had an N64 port that I remember being okay.
 

Perkel

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C&C was fun but it wasn't even in top 10 of great RTS games.

I had more hours in Tzar than C&C, then there were amazing things like Total Anihilation and few others.
 
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I think Battle.net was a force multiplier. C&C/Westwood had nothing like that. Before the internet became a big thing, I think C&C actually had the edge over Warcraft 2. It was very popular at the time. They just sort of fell off with the sequels in popularity, Starcraft hit at the exact right time that every serious gamer was starting to get decent internet access and was familiarized with it, throw in Battle.net being at the time a huge outlier in terms of ease of use (anyone who remembers all those random online game services back then like Gamestorm knows what I'm talking about, other game franchises outside of Blizzard were often just a huge fucking annoyance to get MP setup).

Starcraft was definitely a good game for the time, but it's incredibly unfortunate that it made all devs after that point focus on micro-heavy RTS design, that killed the old appeal of basebuilding RTS and I think prematurely buried the genre. There was a large contingent of old school/more casual RTS gamers who were left orphaned and with no games to play, and eventually that withered away into no interest for the genre overall.
Starcraft also had a huge custom map scene with a powerful map editor. Probably ~80% of players playing multiplayer spent most of their time in custom maps, which were incredibly easy to play since you could just join a lobby to download the map in-game. C&C games had nothing comparable.
 
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I think Battle.net was a force multiplier. C&C/Westwood had nothing like that. Before the internet became a big thing, I think C&C actually had the edge over Warcraft 2. It was very popular at the time. They just sort of fell off with the sequels in popularity, Starcraft hit at the exact right time that every serious gamer was starting to get decent internet access and was familiarized with it, throw in Battle.net being at the time a huge outlier in terms of ease of use (anyone who remembers all those random online game services back then like Gamestorm knows what I'm talking about, other game franchises outside of Blizzard were often just a huge fucking annoyance to get MP setup).

Starcraft was definitely a good game for the time, but it's incredibly unfortunate that it made all devs after that point focus on micro-heavy RTS design, that killed the old appeal of basebuilding RTS and I think prematurely buried the genre. There was a large contingent of old school/more casual RTS gamers who were left orphaned and with no games to play, and eventually that withered away into no interest for the genre overall.
Starcraft also had a huge custom map scene with a powerful map editor. Probably ~80% of players playing multiplayer spent most of their time in custom maps, which were incredibly easy to play since you could just join a lobby to download the map in-game. C&C games had nothing comparable.
That stat is probably true mostly due to the big game hunters map. I mean people did play actual custom maps that weren't just extra resources but from what I saw the majority were still play starcraft, rather than proto-mobas. It was really warcraft 3 where the true custom stuff got good and popular.
 

AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
The C&C flavour was always verging on the silly but still kind of grounded in real current events and history. It was more pastiche of military propaganda than a spoof.

Red Alert 2 was a fun play through but it crossed the line into cartoon territory making it a lot less memorable.

But yeah, I remember getting hold of Tiberium Sun, found it completely unplayable. It lacked both the cartoony fun and any sense of being grounded, worst of both worlds really.
 

tritosine2k

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Highly likely micromanagement was euphemism of tedium all along.

Also the utter failure to make a C&C tower defense (and now they push plants & zombies lol lmao) cannot be understated.
 

Space Satan

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Worst online system iа memory serves, was GameSpy. This shit buried future of Civilization IV - because degenerative CivV had steam online service plus digital distribution. It buried whole Red Alert franchize because one day they just switched it off.
Again, RTS cannot survive in single-player mode long enough, nobody can enjoy skirmish matches forever. But both Warcraft II and C&C had a localized but steady audience - of people who already had local networks. I remember guys organizing 3-house block network, dragging wires and interconnecting people. Most played Doom back then but those who catered to strategy genre soon found joys of night sessions of HoMM, Warcraft and C&C. And that was people who grew to be a dedicated fans decades later. But you cannot survive on old farts alone.
 

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