RTS Command & Conquer Remastered Collection from Petroglyph

[catfood]

Stronghold HD is good.

 

[Space Satan]

People are getting desperate

 

[Digital Monocle]

Surprised EA can be this competent, trailer looks amazing and all those features look good and don't even impede with the core gameplay. Funnily enough, if you said 10 years ago that W3 Remastered would be complete shit while C&C looks better, you'd be called a retard.

 

[mindx2]

The Limited Run Games special boxed editions are officially delayed. I received an email from them stating they just don't know when their people will be back to work to ship things out (or even when they'll get things from China). However, they are still taking orders of course...

 

[YLD]

Unless I missed it, I saw no mention of shortcuts for game speed and possibly an active pause, otherwise it looks almost too good to be true: mission selection, FMV gallery, old/new instant switch, construction queues, even the little things from RA Portable like the PS1 FMVs and customizable controls.

Though in all fairness the core formula is so strong that most of the "remaster" is simply touching it up with modern quality-of-life features that we take for granted, which is also probably the reason it's looking good despite the EA umbrella: the budget must be very modest, it must have been very easy to get the greenlight from EA execs. "Sure, here's your Big Mac with Fries, do whatever".

It does make me wonder how many old classics are a limited remaster away from excellence even in the eyes of the "new" young crowd.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I played WARCRAFT II: THE DARK SAGA on a PS1 once

We used to play Red Alert and Quake II on PS1 too...

Aye, first time I played an RTS was on PS1.

 

[Digital Monocle]

Unless I missed it, I saw no mention of shortcuts for game speed and possibly an active pause, otherwise it looks almost too good to be true: mission selection, FMV gallery, old/new instant switch, construction queues, even the little things from RA Portable like the PS1 FMVs and customizable controls.

Though in all fairness the core formula is so strong that most of the "remaster" is simply touching it up with modern quality-of-life features that we take for granted, which is also probably the reason it's looking good despite the EA umbrella: the budget must be very modest, it must have been very easy to get the greenlight from EA execs. "Sure, here's your Big Mac with Fries, do whatever".

It does make me wonder how many old classics are a limited remaster away from excellence even in the eyes of the "new" young crowd.

Agreed, I wonder if an exec must have been a humongous fan to green light this and also just do it right without the shit that Blizzard did. Makes me wish this was done earlier, so we could have gotten more games modernized the right way instead of retarded remakes like W3R.

I do think that people who never played the first C&C are going to be in for a rude awakening on how hard it is compared to the other games

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I played WARCRAFT II: THE DARK SAGA on a PS1 once, it was one of the most mindfucking experiences I've ever had. The game came out in that time when the PS1 didn't have the analog controller as the standard so you had to use the D-Pad as the mouse. Holy shit. Holy fuck. The game was also pretty zoomed out compared to PC and lacked a lot of detail on the units.

And looking it up apparently there was Command & Conquer on the PS1 as well AND the N64? The latter looks like an entirely new game too. Hahaha, imagine if you challenged kids at school back then when you'd talk massive amounts of shit on who was better. "Play me in Command & Conquer on the N64, BITCH." Hahahahahaha, god you'd deserve to be bullied.

Yeah, the N64 version is the first 3D Command & Conquer game. It's a total remake of the original. It's also kind of a weird decision that Command & Conquer 64 was a pretty straight version of the original Command & Conquer, when Red Alert was the bigger (and better) game, and it was coming out the same year as Tiberian Sun.

I can't remember if it had a unit cap like Starcraft 64.

 

[fantadomat]

I just watched the video and it looks pretty incline. I am surprised that we could get an actually good remaster this days.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Yeah, this does look good. Although seeing the concept art for the original game, it would have been cool if the sprites were brought more in line with them since you can actually see detail on them now. Tiberian Dawn has some very good concept art.

 

[Jarpie]

This is interesting analysis on the problem with enhancing the FMV scenes.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I'm Seth.

Just Seth.

From God, to Kane, to Seth.

 

[Storyfag]

Yes... Power shifts more quickly than some people think.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/candc-remas...es-with-a-treasure-trove-of-rediscovered-fmv/

C&C Remastered is looking good, and comes with a treasure trove of rediscovered FMV
Command & Conquer and Red Alert are back in June, with redone 4K graphics and lots of fun extras.

The C&C Remastered Collection is out on June 5, making two great '90s real-time strategy games much more playable on modern PCs. I attended a virtual demo for the collection last week to see how it's shaping up, and it looks good—all the graphics have been redrawn to support 4K monitors, and the UI includes modern conveniences like build tabs, unit queuing and custom hotkeys. After my demo, though, I'm less excited about replaying Command & Conquer and Red Alert, and more excited about diving into the extras packed into this re-release. The biggest draw, by far, is four hours of behind-the-scenes footage taken during filming of the famous live action cutscenes.

EA sent over an example clip of Westwood's Joseph Kucan, better known as Kane, delivering his lines in front of a green screen. All C&C fans know Kane, but they might not know that Kucan actually directed the FMV scenes for the series through Red Alert 2. An example video I saw during the presentation showed the FMV set, with Kucan directing, while a scene played out.

Apparently all these videos were discovered at EA's LA studio on tapes presumed lost in the years since original developer Westwood shut down. C&C's cutscenes were cutting edge back in the '90s, even if they were also cheesy as hell. Seeing that little bit of gaming history being made will be a delight.

Those videos aren't the only extras in the remastered collection, either. The original C&C and alternate history spin-off Red Alert both include all their expansions, which encompasses some really obscure stuff like the Nintendo 64-exclusive C&C levels and the PlayStation-exclusive Red Alert bonuses. Funpark missions and dinosaurs, ants, console cinematics—those Easter eggs are all included.

All the music from both games are in there, including some unreleased tracks composer Frank Klepacki discovered. Klepacki is part of a band called The Tiberian Sons that does rock/metal covers of C&C songs, and something like 20 of their covers will be included in the music options, too. You'll be able to create custom playlists of your own songs and mix them up however you choose, which means you can play Red Alert's Hell March while conquering the world as the Brotherhood of Nod, if you so choose. (By the way, if you ever wondered what the words in Hell March were, so did EA producer Jim Vessella, who actually asked Frank Kelpacki. "It's just gibberish," Klepacki told him.)

I asked EA Vessella if the developers decided to make any balance changes with the remaster, or tweak things like unit pathfinding that wasn't the smartest back in old RTS games. He said no—that they played around with that a bit, but found that the campaign missions were so tightly designed, even very small changes to balance data caused problematic ripple effects. In general, the remaster aims to be as close as possible to the original games, including the option to change graphics from original to remastered on the fly, and new vs. legacy toggles for things like left-click or right-click to issue commands. The same toggle exists for classic music and sound effects and remastered, re-recorded versions.

Where they deviate it's for good reason, like making different team colors more visible in multiplayer, which now runs on dedicated servers. Hopefully the remaster inspires a lively multiplayer community—there's a built-in map editor, which should keep things fresh.

From what I've seen, the new, redrawn graphics look great. They're very true to the original art, just far sharper and cleaner than the low-res pixel art designed for 640x480 monitors. The only disappointment in the collection I've seen is the quality of the upscaled FMVs. EA ran them through the same kind of AI upscaling technique used in a lot of texture mods for games like Final Fantasy 7 today, but the results aren't too pretty for these videos that mix human actors and '90s CGI. Unfortunately, the source footage for all those cutscenes wasn't stashed away with the behind-the-scenes tapes. It's likely lost forever, so upscaled versions are the best we can get.

But that's still a lot better than trying to watch these videos at their tiny original resolution, and there's a lot of other great stuff packed into the collection. It's out on June 5 for $20.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...-hit-of-nostalgia-but-will-it-be-a-great-rts/

Command & Conquer Remastered is a big hit of nostalgia - but will it be a great RTS?
You can command a horse to water, but you can't make it conquer.

Ahead of its launch on June 5th, I’ve been able to see the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection in action, and it certainly looks the part. The quarter-century-old RTS, as well as comrade Red Alert and their squad of three expansion packs, have been sent over the top of their pixellated trench, and into the high-res carnage of no-man’s-land. Malaysian art house Lemon Sky Studios have armed them with visual assets suitable for the rigours of combat in 4k resolution, and they’re entering the fray to a remade soundtrack by original series composer Frank Klepacki. Their FMV cutscene artillery has been digitally embiggened through a combination of digital archaeology and machine sorcery, while their archaic multiplayer setup (I guess it can be a metaphorical tank), has been scrapped in favour of a much more robust new system.

I’ve no doubt that fans of these two grizzled soldiers will be delighted that they’ve been commanded back onto the battlefield of PC games. But as faithful as their rearming has been, they’re still working to a set of mechanics that are old enough to join the army themselves. The question, and the reason for this whole tortured allegory, remains: will these very old games have what it takes to conquer new hearts?




From the old to the new: the remastered collection will let you switch between original and remastered visuals on the fly, so you can see the way things used to be.

Spoiler

In truth, the C&C remaster project doesn’t have much warlike ambience at all. Instead, it glows with the energy of an amiable dad, who’s spent every Sunday for the last decade out in the garage, tinkering with a 1952 Morris Minor to make it good as new. The whole endeavour seems to have been a genuine labour of love, and chatting with lead producer Jim Vessella, who fell head over heels for C&C when he was 12, it’s easy to see that his affection for the games isn’t being hammed up for the sake of PR. Vessella, after all, is getting to work with his heroes. His team at EA has put the remasters together with the aid of Petroglyph Games, the studio formed by veterans of C&C’s original developer Westwood Studios, after it burst in 2003.

But Vessella acknowledges that at this point, nobody knows more about these games than those who’ve been steadfastly playing them for 25 years, and so he’s been working with players too. A lot of studios engaged in remakes and sequels bang on about “the community”, saying the phrase so often it becomes entirely meaningless. But I think Vessella’s earned it, frankly. C&C Remastered seems to have been shaped by constant interaction with fans of the game, with EA rebuilding systems that annoyed them, and keeping their hands off beloved relics. The fans have even been sucked into the work itself, building AI algorithms to increase the resolution, framerate and audio quality of old FMV sequences. It’s great to see, but I do hope they got paid.


Watch, in mounting horror, as Stalin becomes larger and blurrier before your very eyes. If you keep watching to the end of the FMV, he stares through the screen for ten minutes straight, and then begins to climb out of your computer.

I guess the detail that really sold the whole hobbyist/enthusiast mentality for me – and which may have even earned Vessella the right to use the word ‘passion’ (which is more overused even than ‘community’), is the moment he hired a cover band on a whim. Vessella had been at videogame music event MAGfest in 2019, where C&C composer Frank Klepacki had performed a 90-minute set of tunes from the series, along with the adorably named Tiberian Sons, a band describing themselves as purveyors of “jimmie-rustling metal”, and specialising entirely in covers of tracks from Westwood and Petroglyph games. They’re great, in fairness: ‘Hell March’, from Red Alert, remains one of the best bits of music ever to appear in a game, and one of the beastliest basslines ever composed, and the Sons’ cover of it is extremely rowdy. They were hired on the spot, apparently.


Klepacki and the Tiberian Sons. Bless their goofy hearts <3

There’s more of this sort of thing, too. You know how every single strategy game ever features an AI with a soothing voice and an acronym for a name, that offers you varying levels of tutorial advice and tells you when things are ready? That monolithic tradition began (as far as I’m aware) with Command & Conquer, and with the “Electronic Video Agent”, a.k.a EVA, a lady computer voiced by Kia Huntzinger. Huntzinger was an employee at Westwood, who produced the recorded messages for their phone system with such benign authority that audio director Paul Mudra decided she’d be good as the voice of a war computer, thus laying the foundation stone of one of PC gaming’s greatest cliches. Well, Huntzinger’s back for the remaster, and she says “our base is under attack,” and “construction complete” just like she did all those years ago.


Kia Huntzinger, centre, with Frank Klepacki (left) and Jim Vessella (right)

If there was any doubt of the extent to which this project is aimed at nostalgia, let it be extinguished by the fact that the collection will be released not just on Steam and EA’s Origin platform, but as a Big Box Edition full of C&C merch, and an even-bigger-box 25th Anniversary Edition, with even more merch. They’re practically useless, given that each contain a steam code for the download of the actual game, but they’ll be packed with nostalgia for ardent fans, even going so far as to let them relive the way they bought games in the 90s. It’s clearly a winning prospect in that regard, as both have sold out already.

It’s all heartwarming stuff, and I really get what they’re going for: everything about this remaster makes me smile. But I still can’t help but feel it’s a tiny bit of a wasted opportunity. It sort of reminds me of the new Star Wars movies, which rely on “look, you remember this guy!” moments to do an awful lot of heavy lifting. And while nostalgia is a powerful fuel, it’s a volatile one, that burns out fast. Like tiberium.


Remember tiberium? That mineral, from the games you liked in your teens? There it is, in the top right! Good times.

I’m really not trying to be snide here. I’m pretty much the same age as Vessella, so Red Alert ate a big chunk of my teens, just as C&C ate a big chunk of his. But I left it behind in the end, to play other games. That is, by and large, what what people do, even with games they love. Because for all that Westwood’s games were foundational to the RTS genre as we know it, they’ve been succeeded by many, many other games that have refined their formula since. Sure, there have been precious few new RTS games for a long while now, but even the state of the format in the mid-2000s made C&C look primitive.

And while it’s commendable that EA have done such a thorough job of communicating with C&C’s fans to shape this remaster, they’ve entered into something of a devil’s bargain by doing so. Because when you’re working to the specifications of The Community, any time you choose to take your own path with design, you risk your very own tiberium poisoning, as whole swathes of the market you’ve staked the success of your game on turn against you in outrage that you’ve not worked to their vision.


You can command a horse to water, but you can’t make it conquer.

And so, for the sake of authenticity, the remastered Command & Conquer will still not have move-and-fire commands, for example, which other games have included as standard for decades. Even production queues, vital in mitigating RTS micromanagement slog, precipitated a massive round of internal debate before they were cautiously included in the remaster. Admittedly, the in-game UI has been rebuilt significantly – the sidebar is tons better, and saves a lot of scrolling, plus camera controls and unit selection have been reworked. Then there’s the new map editor, and the brand new multiplayer system. But all the changes have been made around the actual core of the game. And there’s the thing. Will today’s 12-year-old Vessellas and Crowleys, coming to this remaster for the first time, get hooked as they did in the 90s? Or will they just wonder what all the fuss is about, and laugh at their dads for getting so excited? In truth, I don’t know, because I’ve not had an opportunity to play yet. And because I’m not 12 anymore, I suppose.


I mean, working strongly in the remaster’s favour in terms of impressing 12-year-olds is the spectacular tesla tank from Red Alert’s Aftermath expansion. I mean, just seeing it again is enough to make me want to play, to be quite honest.

It could work brilliantly. You’ll all now be sick and tired of me mentioning Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition every time I open my goddamn mouth, but it’s a great example of how to do a remaster. Yes, it made everything prettier, and it collected together all the scattered expansion packs for the original material (which to its credit, EA’s project also does, including the variant missions from console editions). But what drew me in was the new stuff. There were new civilisations to play! New maps! New campaigns! Monthly balance patches after launch, and new features such as auto-scouting and automatic reseeding for farms. The base game was still essentially the same, but there was just enough fresh meat to incentivise me into a nostalgia buy.

And it’s not just me. AOE2’s player base is still expanding rapidly, nearly six months after launch, and a big proportion of its new players weren’t even alive when the original game came out. But as a counterpoint, see the HD remaster of Praetorians, which lavished a lot of attention on graphical improvements, only to achieve a sobering lesson in how much strategy games have improved since the mid-90s. And then there’s Warcraft 3, which managed to demonstrate not just the dangers of changing too little, but the mess that ensues when hardcore fans feel they’ve not been given the product they asked for.


This is the new multiplayer lobby, btw.

Vessella certainly respects what was achieved with Age Of Empires 2, and understands the perils of the Praetorian Way. Talking with me, he implied pretty heavily that should the C&C remaster do well on launch, he’d love to get the internal backing to produce new campaigns and the like. But it’s clear that was just too big a risk to take for launch. And while I completely understand the decision, I still wish he’d been able to just go ahead and roll the dice. Indeed, for all my misgivings, I’m rooting for the Command & conquer Remastered Collection to be a resounding success, so he can do just that. Seeing the Petroglyph team let loose on designing new content, with two and a half decades’ worth of additional game design experience under their belts, would be an utter joy. And especially when set to a jimmie-rustling cover of Hell March.

♬ DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA… DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA… DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA… (theeeese warthogs…they suck!) DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA-DUGGEDA… DOOBEDY-DEEBEDY-DOO! ♬

– Hell March, 1996




Confession: I have edited this image to include a recursive chain of grinning generals receding into infinity, because I couldn’t resist doing so. Welcome back, commander.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Rock Paper Shotgun continues their on-going feud with logic.

 

[Toffeli]

https://www.pcgamer.com/candc-remas...es-with-a-treasure-trove-of-rediscovered-fmv/

Remember tiberium? That mineral, from the games you liked in your teens? There it is, in the top right! Good times.

Except that's a screenshot from Red Alert and there's no tiberium in Red Alert and that's ore and gems.

 

[Storyfag]

https://www.pcgamer.com/candc-remas...es-with-a-treasure-trove-of-rediscovered-fmv/

C&C Remastered is looking good, and comes with a treasure trove of rediscovered FMV
Command & Conquer and Red Alert are back in June, with redone 4K graphics and lots of fun extras.

Reading this just gave me cancer. The cutscenes weren't cheesy until RA2!!!!

 

[Cyberarmy]

The cutscenes weren't cheesy until RA2!!!!

Yeah, they were really well done for that time.

 

[Nito]

The cutscenes weren't cheesy until RA2!!!!

Yeah, they were really well done for that time.

I dislike how in retrospect, Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn's universes have been sorted into "the serious futuristic sci-fi one" and "the retro-sci-fi wacky pinup one", when both the original C&C and Red Alert were both pretty grounded, topical, dark settings that *occasionally* had one or two silly aspects to them. That silliness was there to juxtapose with the more serious parts; but over time it flanderized its way into being the entire theme of their respective universes.

 

[Endemic]

The briefing for the first Soviet mission involves the military leadership casually discussing nerve gas tests on civilians, so...

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

The briefing for the first Soviet mission involves the military leadership casually discussing nerve gas tests on civilians, so...

The cutscene that plays after that mission spooked me the fuck out as a kid.



While Red Alert 2 was still great, not only was it more silly but it also got rid of the cool post-mission cutscenes entirely in favor of the FMV sequences.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm Seth.

Just Seth.

From God, to Kane, to Seth.

Seth or... SSeth?

(It was either that or "No, I'm Seth!")

 

[Nito]

I'm Seth.

Just Seth.

From God, to Kane, to Seth.

Seth or... SSeth?

(It was either that or "No, I'm Seth!")

Hey hey people, Seth here.

Today, i'm gonna be showing you, why you should be silencing Nikoomba, permanently.

 

[LESS T_T]

Is this the same EA?

Fellow Command & Conquer fans,

Since the announcement of the Remastered Collection, one of the top questions from the community has been if the game would provide Mod Support. Given the incredible C&C community projects over the past two decades, we appreciated how important this was going to be for the Remastered Collection. It’s time to finally answer the question around Mod Support, but it first requires the reveal of a special surprise for the community.

Today we are proud to announce that alongside the launch of the Remastered Collection, Electronic Arts will be releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license. This is a key moment for Electronic Arts, the C&C community, and the gaming industry, as we believe this will be one of the first major RTS franchises to open source their source code under the GPL. It’s worth noting this initiative is the direct result of a collaboration between some of the community council members and our teams at EA. After discussing with the council members, we made the decision to go with the GPL license to ensure compatibility with projects like CnCNet and Open RA. Our goal was to deliver the source code in a way that would be truly beneficial for the community, and we hope this will enable amazing community projects for years to come.

So, what does it mean for Mod Support within the Remastered Collection? Along with the inclusion of a new Map Editor, these open-source DLLs should assist users to design maps, create custom units, replace art, alter gameplay logic, and edit data. The community council has already been playing with the source code and are posting some fun experiments in our Discord channel. But to showcase a tangible example of what you can do with the software, Petroglyph has actually created a new modded unit to play with. So we asked a fun question - “What would the Brotherhood of Nod do if they captured the Mammoth Tank?” Well, one guess is they’d replace the turret with a giant artillery cannon and have it fire tactical nukes! Thus the Nuke Tank was born. This is a unit which is fully playable in the game via a mod (seen in the screenshot above), and we hope to have it ready to play and serve as a learning example when the game launches.

Alongside Mod Support, I wanted to be transparent and address a feature which many of you have also been passionate about, which is LAN Play. Earlier this year, we had every intention of including LAN Play in the launch version of the game, but sadly this feature did not make it in time. Unfortunately LAN Play became the key impact of the Covid-19 situation as we realized the challenge of developing / testing a “local area network” feature in a workplace time of social distancing. We understand this feature is vital as both an avenue to play mods in multiplayer, and also to serve as a backup in case the online systems are ever down. We’re bummed this one got away, and will continue to keep this on our priority list going forward.

Now in terms of discovering user content, we wanted to take full advantage of the PC platforms to streamline this process. For Steam players, we’re utilizing the Steam Workshop for sharing both maps and mods. Players can subscribe to maps and mods directly in the game’s Community Hub within Steam, or utilize in-game menus to browse / download content as well. Origin players can use the same in-game process for downloading maps but will need to manually install mods into their respective folders outside the game. For both versions, once you’re in the game, you may navigate to the Options / Mods tab where you can then activate the mod. We’re aiming to put together further documentation on uploading content and the entire UGC process around the launch window.

Overall, we are incredibly excited to see what the community creates over the coming months. We anticipate some fantastic content for the Remastered Collection itself, some great updates in current community projects as they incorporate the source code, and perhaps we’ll even see some new RTS projects now made possible with the source code under the GPL. One final note we want to emphasize - we’ve done our best to bug fix and prepare these UGC systems for launch, but we have no doubt that once thousands of you begin creating and sharing content, some quirks will be discovered. Please continue to share your experience once the game launches, and let us know how we can continue to improve these tools for your benefit.

We look forward to seeing all of you on the battlefield in less than three weeks, and in the meantime please stay healthy, safe, and thanks for all your support and feedback.

Cheers,

Jim Vessella

Jimtern

 

[Storyfag]

Is this the same EA?

It is. But Jim appears to be a faithful acolyte who has infiltrated them. In the name of Kane!

 

[Hellraiser]