RTS Command & Conquer Remastered Collection from Petroglyph

[kangaxx]

Command & Conquer is nice, but Red Alert is when things get really good.

There is little difference between the two, tbh.

Fake news. The differences between GDI and NOD in TibDawn are much greater than the allies and soviets in RA1, which leads to significantly different playstyles for both. Also the campaign in TD is generally much harder than RA1 and has a lot of specific quirks, like the endless GDI bombing runs.

TD and RA1 may look the same but in practice play much differently.

Also the crucial difference of allowing spaces between buildings in RA.

Isn't a silent Kane in RA as an advisor?

 

[Storyfag]

Also isn't a silent Kane in RA as an advisor?

He is. That's nothing compared to the Messiah in all His TD glory though.

 

[Hellraiser]

He's more of a cameo or easter egg in RA.

 

[kangaxx]

Power shifts quickly in the Brotherhood Soviets.

 

[Caim]

The Allied ending in Red Alert 1 leads into the rest of the Red Alert series, while the Soviet ending leads to the Tiberium series. Things can still get interesting in Red Alert, since it takes place in the 70s-80s and Tiberium doesn't land on Earth until 1995.

But the C&C timeline is all sorts of fucked up. They had World War 3 three times: once in Red Alert 2, an altered version in Yuri's Revenge and a third when Tim Curry went back in time for Red Alert 3.

 

[Daedalos]

I wish they had kept up with the grimdark stuff from Red Alert.

Instead, Red alert 2+3 was fucking bad, goofy and just overall completely shit compared to RA1.

C&C3 and dlcs were really good, too bad we never got another good C&C game.

Stormgate is looking good and so is tempest rising. so theres that. 2023 gon b gud

 

[Storyfag]

I wish they had kept up with the grimdark stuff from Red Alert.

Instead, Red alert 2+3 was fucking bad, goofy and just overall completely shit compared to RA1.

RA2 was good as a game, but the FMV were too corny, that is true.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Command & Conquer is nice, but Red Alert is when things get really good.

There is little difference between the two, tbh.

In this version, or in general? Red Alert is the first C&C I played, (this is back when it came out) and enjoying it so much I ended up going back and playing C&C. My memory of it was that there were a number of little things Red Alert does better that just made the overall experience better.

 

[80s Stallone]

First C&C is more puzzle -like, Red Alert is tank rushes

 

[luj1]

Tiberium games feature visceroids, neutral units which can destroy your entire base.

 

[Storyfag]

Tiberium games feature visceroids, neutral units which can destroy your entire base.

I don't think one ever spawned on me in TD. You're sure it's not from a fan mod?

 

[Maggot]

Tiberium games feature visceroids, neutral units which can destroy your entire base.

That's really just Tiberian Sun, in TD they only appear in a couple expansion missions or in multiplayer they can randomly spawn from the tiberium fields with the "trees" that spew more tiberium.

 

[Alienman]

Stormgate is looking good and so is tempest rising. so theres that. 2023 gon b gud

Looked this one up, everything was looking great until I read free-to-play

 

[Daedalos]

Stormgate is looking good and so is tempest rising. so theres that. 2023 gon b gud

Looked this one up, everything was looking great until I read free-to-play

Free to play is a very good decision business-wise AND marketing wise.

You realize how hard it would be to release a AAA RTS game that you have to pay up front for? The market for RTS is basically dead, and needs to be revitalized.

Starcraft 2 is Free to Play too, and it ensured alot of new players installed and played the game, very important for player retention etc.

The stormgate devs have put out several devblogs explaining their decision to go F2P. they know what they are doing...(its basically the Starcraft 2 devs from blizzard anyway so)

 

[80s Stallone]

The Allied ending in Red Alert 1 leads into the rest of the Red Alert series, while the Soviet ending leads to the Tiberium series.

How is that going to work? The first Tiberium game is pretty much real world 90s.

Nah, does not work at all, when you think about it.

Either the Allied ending is ALSO the backstory of C&C1, or the Red Alert Universe is mostly separate.

When you think about it, Blizzard had this large backstories in the manual, while Westwood games were very "bullet point form"-like. We don't even know when the alternative World War 2 started, heck, I am not even sure if the Americans are supposed to be part of the Allies. You certainly cannot pick them in multiplayer.

 

[Darth Roxor]

How is that going to work? The first Tiberium game is pretty much real world 90s.

because NOD operates under the guise of the Soviet Union until the 90s

rewatch the final Soviet cutscene

 

[Infinitron]

The Red Alert manual describes the Allies as a "modified military junta". I don't know if that was the intention but I like the implication that they're an alliance of Engelbert Dollfuss-esque lite-authoritarians.

 

[ArchAngel]

The Red Alert manual describes the Allies as a "modified military junta". I don't know if that was the intention but I like the implication that they're an alliance of Engelbert Dolfuss-esque lite-authoritarians.

Creators of C&C were based and already understood at that time what the West really is.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Red Alert lore shouldn't be considered in the Tiberian timeline.

 

[Caim]

The Allied ending in Red Alert 1 leads into the rest of the Red Alert series, while the Soviet ending leads to the Tiberium series.

How is that going to work? The first Tiberium game is pretty much real world 90s.

Nah, does not work at all, when you think about it.

Either the Allied ending is ALSO the backstory of C&C1, or the Red Alert Universe is mostly separate.

When you think about it, Blizzard had this large backstories in the manual, while Westwood games were very "bullet point form"-like. We don't even know when the alternative World War 2 started, heck, I am not even sure if the Americans are supposed to be part of the Allies. You certainly cannot pick them in multiplayer.

Red Alert 1 apparently takes place in an alternate 50s timeline, with Tiberium Dawn in the 90s. Apparently in a Soviet victory in RA1 Kane engineers the downfall of the Soviets and a liberation of Europe, which lays the groundwork for the New World Order that the GDI grows into.

The Red Alert manual describes the Allies as a "modified military junta". I don't know if that was the intention but I like the implication that they're an alliance of Engelbert Dollfuss-esque lite-authoritarians.

Apparently a special operations group was founded by the UN to ensure a Third World War would never happen. This group eventually grew into the GDI, which in the interbellum between Tiberium Sun and Tiberium Wars grew from the military arm of the UN into a super-state that superseded all former nations, even though said nations technically still exist.

While NOD primarily opposes them it's actually the Forgotten, the outcasts, lower class and other undesirables who were left behind as tiberium started to spread across the world, who oppose them in this regard. Don't want to play by GDI's rules? Sure, join the Forgotten who live in squalor in the extremely dangerous yellow zones. Hope you don't mutate too much, and fuck off!

 

[janior]

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ho...cheesed-together-fmvs-gave-us-command-conquer

How the Gulf War, Apple's drag-select and "cheesed together" FMVs gave us Command & Conquer​

"If we were trying to make it cheesy, it probably wouldn’t have worked"

There’s always been something quaintly practical about the name Command & Conquer. Sure, there’s a touch of Julius Caesar’s ‘veni, vidi, vici’ in there. But less romantically, the title evokes Internet Explorer or Acrobat Reader - sitting comfortably alongside the clearly and sensibly labelled Windows software of the mid-90s. It’s a reminder of just how early Westwood happened upon the blueprint for real-time strategy, right as many PC users were buying their first trackball mice.

Back then, the developer was fresh from Dune II, its unlikely David Lynch adaptation and progenitor of the RTS genre as we know it today. Inspired by the house politics and struggle for resources that consumed the desert planet Arrakis, Westwood had come up with an addictive formula for harvesting spice and converting that wealth into military power, which in turn could be used in the battle to secure more spice. The team was, quite frankly, surprised by how much fun that formula had turned out to be.

“But the more we played it, we realised the user interface needed drastic improvement,” recalls C&C co-creator Joe Bostic. “In Dune II, you’d have to single-click a unit, click on an order like ‘attack’ or ‘move’, and then click on the destination. People started using hotkeys at that point, because the UI was just so hard to navigate with the mouse. And that’s when we said, ‘Well, we have to find something else. That just won’t fly.’”

At the time, Apple was breaking new ground in desktop navigation. And occasionally, Westwood co-founder Brett Sperry would call his team away from their Windows machines to show off the magical powers of his new Mac. “Look at this,” he’d say. “Look how I just drag-select files. Look where I drop them, it knows what to do.”

If you’ve played a real-time strategy game since, you’ll be able to guess what Westwood did next: nabbed the drag-select for themselves. “Once we did that, we thought, ‘Well, why do we even need an order button? You know what to do by what you clicked on,’” Bostic says. “Context-sensitive clicking made such a huge difference to gameplay. Hats off to Apple in the early ‘90s, to figure that out. We were not ashamed to copy a good idea when we saw it.”


The team looked around themselves for inspiration when it came to C&C’s setting, too. While Westwood is remembered partly for its mastery over movie licenses - the all-time classic Blade Runner adventure game would arrive in 1997 - the studio wasn’t inclined to return to Frank Herbert’s universe for a Dune sequel. “Why pay a percentage to an IP holder,” they wondered, “when really Dune II didn’t have much to do with the Dune story?”

As a D&D fan, Bostic immediately set about pitching fantasy armies - one faction of wizards, another made up of knights and archers, and a third given over to fantastical beasts. In a fateful team meeting, however, Sperry pointed to the Gulf War that was playing out on TVs all over America. “Maybe people don’t know what a dragon is, and how much stronger it is than an armoured knight, or an archer on horseback,” he said. “The average person might not even care, but everyone knows what a tank is. Everyone knows what an aeroplane is. It’s in the forefront of peoples’ minds because it’s on the news.’”

Thankfully, Westwood chose not to adapt the Gulf War too closely - a mistake EA would later make with Command & Conquer: Generals, which controversially cartoonified the concept of the suicide bomber just as the world was coming to terms with it. Instead, inspired by a Universal Pictures B-movie named The Monolith Monsters, the studio imagined a meteor landing in modern-day Italy that would introduce a toxic and powerful new element to the world. As the crystalline substance spread from the river Tiber across the planet, it would become known as Tiberium, and trigger a global arms race between a NATO-esque faction and an ancient cult named Nod.


“Let’s make it reality-based, but not handcuffed to reality,” says Bostic of the team’s thinking. “Let’s stretch beyond the boundaries of physics a little bit here and there to make it more fun. If you jump into a completely science fiction world where nothing is recognisable, people tend to get lost.”

Ever since the invention of Tiberium, resource-gathering has been a fixture of real-time strategy, for the same reasons Westwood discovered during the development of C&C. “It keeps the player wanting to venture out from this little bubble of defence,” Bostic says. “It gives you something to push out and potentially fight over, and it’s dynamic, because fields get harvested, so you’re moving to different places.”

In retrospect, Bostic considers Tiberium the ‘secret sauce’ of Command & Conquer. “We needed that,” he says. “It breaks the staticness of the game. There was no way we could have C&C without resources.”

Smart players weaponised the harvesting process by clearing the fields near enemy bases first, so as to starve their opponents in the late game. This kind of creative strategy blossomed in multiplayer - which Westwood added after becoming enamoured with the new speed of play enabled by its interface. “We’d all play around the office,” Bostic says. “Our mantra was that there should be enough spinning plates that it’s really hard to keep them all going. You have to prioritise where you want to put your focus.”

The legacy of that mantra is clear to see in today’s esports scene. But C&C’s two opposing single-player campaigns are just as well remembered - not least for their memorably broad characters, like Nod’s “larger-than-life” quasi-spiritual figurehead, Kane. “We needed someone who was over-the-top in his nefariousness and Bond villain-esque,” Bostic says. The specifics came from a writer named Eydie Laramore, who had previously worked on Westwood’s influential dungeon crawler, Eye of the Beholder.

“She was obsessed with ancient conspiracy theories and secret organisations,” Bostic says. “There’s a legend of somebody who can never die, the Wandering Jew, who lives throughout history.” The man in the myth is cursed after taunting Jesus on the way to his Crucifixion - doomed to walk the Earth until the apocalypse. Some scholars link him to Cain, who is similarly condemned to wander after killing Abel in the Book of Genesis. “Why don’t we call this guy Kane?”, Laramore suggested. “Maybe he goes back that far. Maybe he’s never died and has stayed behind the scenes, low profile but pulling strings.”

Kane was brought to extremely large life by the director and actor Joe Kucan. “He used to direct local amateur theatre,” Bostic says. “That’s why we hired him to direct and cast the FMV videos we were doing. But sometimes he couldn’t find the right people.” As a result, members of the Westwood team popped up in front of the camera - like artist Eric Gooch, who played second-in-command Seth to Kucan’s Kane. “In some of the videos, I’m in the background wearing a hat,” Bostic says.


Kucan’s on-air executions, as well as his bald-pate-and-beard combo, made Kane a fixture of C&C even after Westwood’s demise. Over time, he was joined by celebrity actors like Tim Curry, who leaned into the hamminess of the cutscenes as the series went to “SPACE!”

But Westwood didn’t know in the beginning that they were making cheese. “I thought it was really cool,” Bostic says. “I didn’t know any better back then. The flaw and the charm was that we didn’t know what we were doing. We cheesed it together, and I think it’s that cheese that gives C&C FMVs their charm. If we were trying to make it cheesy, it probably wouldn’t have worked. That’s just how it fell out.”

In the aftermath of that first hit, Westwood capitalised with what the studio intended to be a quick expansion pack. But the project wound up spawning an entire spin-off series rooted in tesla coils, time travel, and goofy Soviet imagery. “We really cranked it out pretty fast,” Bostic says. “I think it was nine months between the release of C&C and the release of Red Alert. That’s crazy talk these days.”

Bostic worked on the recent C&C Remastered Collection, but today he sits adjacent to the mainstream influence of Command & Conquer. His world isn’t that of international esports championships or greenscreened Hollywood studios. Rather, he and Petroglyph are readying a new historical RTS for release, named The Great War: Western Front, which launches on March 30th 2023. It’s a project designed to celebrate some of the forgotten joys of ‘90s real-time strategy, like turtling, and alternate history.

“It answers the age-old question, ‘If I was there, and I was in charge, would it have turned out differently?’”, Bostic says. “That’s what a computer game’s great at being able to answer. And so that’s the motivation for The Great War, to put the player in the shoes of the commander, with the decisions he had to make.” It’s subtler than sending Einstein back in time to erase Hitler, but if you squint a bit, it’s still very much C&C.

 

[Space Satan]

In retrospect, Bostic considers Tiberium the ‘secret sauce’ of Command & Conquer. “We needed that,” he says. “It breaks the staticness of the game. There was no way we could have C&C without resources.”

*Laughs in C&C4*

 

[Hellraiser]

In retrospect, Bostic considers Tiberium the ‘secret sauce’ of Command & Conquer. “We needed that,” he says. “It breaks the staticness of the game. There was no way we could have C&C without resources.”

*Laughs in C&C4*

REEEEEEEEEEE

DON'T EVER UTTER THE FORBIDDEN ACRONYM OR NAME

REEEEEEEEEEE

 

[Storyfag]

In retrospect, Bostic considers Tiberium the ‘secret sauce’ of Command & Conquer. “We needed that,” he says. “It breaks the staticness of the game. There was no way we could have C&C without resources.”

*Laughs in C&C4*

REEEEEEEEEEE

DON'T EVER UTTER THE FORBIDDEN ACRONYM OR NAME

REEEEEEEEEEE

Laughs in... what?

Forbidden... what?

Both of you repeat after the Confessor: "There was never a C&C4. Nothing worth mentioning, nothing worth getting worked up about."

Please, try to relax, take a deep breath and be compliant about it. Listen to the Confessor, he has your best interests at heart. Otherwise we'll have to proceed with the Tib infusions and the Divination procedure to ensure you see the matter with one vision and one purpose, perhaps needing to go as far as cerebral control implants. And nobody want's that, least of all LEGION who would have to enact the control. Please. The Confessor is your friend and wants the pain to end.