C&C 3 is not C&C
This is why C&C 3 is not C&C.
On the good side EA's new game called C&C 3: Tiberian Wars is the next stage of the Generals gaming engine with so improvements. My personal favorite improvement is the construction interface in the sidebar. You can select buildings with construction options without going back to the building and selecting it. They made it more like real C&C (by real C&C I am referring to mainly C&C Tiberian Dawn and C&C Tiberian Sun, C&C's made by the original creators at Westwood Studios). Real C&C had all the construction options in the sidebar ready for you even if you are not near your base. The advantage is you can coordinate an attack wave while building the next. Unfortunately, the new system has a new level of complexity that requires a few more clicks if you plan to utilize the maximum output of multiple production facilities. To illustrate how these two systems work, C&C 3 has five category buttons (structures, support structures, infantry, vehicles and air craft). You pick one, for this example we will say you pick infantry. It brings up a section of the sidebar that shows all your infantry options and you can pick the ones you want produced, but to increase your production you can select another section of the side bar that shows a button for each infantry producing building you have. You can select other ones and build more infantry. In real C&C you pick units or structures from a two column list that corresponds to units and structures (it also included super weapons in the units list but there were only three in the original C&C). You could pick the units from the list and they you come out whatever building that produced them. If you had more than one production building of one type, then production would be faster. When dealing with more than one production structure of one type, you select a primary building and they deploy from that building.
The other great thing is that they abandoned the bulldozer idea and kept the original MCV system of real C&C. Now I'm done with the improvements. That's it. The rest took a turn for the worst.
C&C 3 is basically C&C Generals with changed graphics. C&C Generals lacked many things that Real C&C had. To name a few, varying missions that were testing and creative, a solid plot line and fast pace due to it’s simplicity. C&C lacks those things too. The above paragraph explains their one noteworthy improvement. Now we can explore where they went wrong.
Let’s start with the first important item in the tiberium universe: tiberium. I don’t see any tiberium in C&C 3. Where is it? I know what tiberium looks like and all I can find is mislabeled green crystal ore. They call it tiberium. They didn’t even try to make it look the same. It’s even the wrong color green. I can tell that and I’m colorblind. The Original C&C established pretty much all of what Tiberium is. It’s has bright green crystals protruding out from dark bulb things that stick out of the ground. You can see in the pictures below that Tiberian Wars just has green crystals that are too dark. A video in C&C explains that Tiberium changes the surrounding plant life into plants (blossom trees) that release spores that seem to propagate more Tiberium. Tiberium Sun introduces a more potent blue Tiberium that is explosive, but follows the same basic rules as green Tiberium. New mutated plant life appears in Tiberium Sun and the Firestorm expansion. Instead of mutated blossom trees and other such stuff to propagate Tiberium, they give us a hole with more green crystals in it to do that. It just ignores what Tiberium is.
You can see what Tiberium really looks like from C&C.
In game Tiberium from C&C, C&C: Tiberian Sun and C&C: Tiberian Wars.
Tiberian Wars “Tiberium field” verses C&C’s Tiberium field.
They also added this thing called a Tiberium Spike. It doesn’t look like it has anything to do with Tiberium. It’s not even made of Tiberium. It looks mechanical and more like a weather radar thing. Essentially it is an oil derrick from C&C Generals skinned to look different. I’m sorry but it doesn’t make much sense to me.
The Tiberium Spike.
It’s quite obvious that they didn’t spend any time trying to make their version of tiberium look like what was already established. It’s cheap. EA is full of cop-outs. It’s like making a new Star Trek movie and making Klingons warrior ballerinas in tutus. Yeah, that seems dumb, so does this.
The Veinhole monsters don’t seem to exist because, there are no weed eaters for Nod to harvest them. I hope they didn’t forget the other Tiberuim wildlife.
The MCV for GDI is fine, but it doesn’t
animate anything different when you place a building like the MCV’s of
old. I miss that. The Nod MCV is a mech (kinda like that spider thing
from The Wild, Wild West movie). It walks and has some of that Nod
stained glass like on the original Temple of Nod prefabricated while
it’s a walker (to be honest, the stained glass I think sound stay on
things like the Temple of Nod. MCV’s aren’t all that believable but
this may as well have started as a suitcase and unfolded into a
warehouse. Everything looks unfolded and nothing constructed. I just
found it silly. The surveyor, or emissary for Nod, helps you by
expanding your base building placement area, but once it is deployed, it
cannot be moved again. The MCV can be packed up and moved with no
problem, I wish surveyors could do that too. Plus, it’s an unmoving
sitting duck for about a minute while it deploys.
Nod’s MCV.
GDI power plants are fine, but upgrading power plants I think was a weakness of GDI in Tiberian Sun. Naturally, EA kept that weakness and extended it to Nod power plants. Good job EA! They even made Nod’s power plants look like those armadillos from Donkey Kong Country or Reavers from Star Craft.
The refineries are cheap. Zero innovation points there. I had always hoped for a way of adding multiple bays or a tank exchange system to increase harvesting efficiency, plus they look like a collection of structures instead of one heavily armored building. If you watch the animation for unloading the GDI harvesters, it picks up four green rods on the back of the harvester. Then it drops each one off into different post things (some glitches occur with the green rods on the harvester, cheap again). I think that once the crane thing picks the green things up, the harvester should be free to go and collect more Tiberium. As usual, they seem to have left us with a question, why does that harvester sit there empty waiting for the Tiberium to be processed when it’s ready to go out again? Must be a government worker. Just take a look at the GDI harvester for that matter. The Real C&C harvesters have large, armored storage tanks. That makes a lot of sense. C&C3’s harvesters for GDI just stick the stuff on their back in what looks like a fraction of what they harvested. The whole design like most of the other vehicles in the game, doesn’t look strong; there are too many moving parts. I was also hoping for a hovering harvester or a way of coordinating a carryall to assist your harvester, (think of Dune 2, the predecessor to the original C&C) or even a whole orca base harvester, rather than a war harvester like the one in Red Alert 2. Nod’s harvesters cloak like I hoped they would, but they too look like they don’t carry much and those scorpion arms harvest the crystals some how with little tiny points. I thought that GDI’s harvesters would get more Tiberium each time it scoops. Stealth harvesters are also invulnerable unless they are detected. You can’t force fire to scan for stealth anymore.
GDI’s Harvester and refinery.
Nod’s refinery and harvester. Notice the harvesting arms on the harvester (circled).
Barracks are hard to mess up, but the Hand of Nod is an important element to C&C. The original Hand of Nod is the best. I never liked the Tiberian Sun hand of Nod, but the C&C 3 Hand of Nod half an egg with an abstract hand holding an orange. I think it’s a subliminal message to eat food and make America fatter (yeah right). Simply put, it’s lame and doesn’t spew super destructive flamethrowers every few seconds. Anyone who has taken over a few Nod bases in the Original game knows what I’m talking about. Flamethrowers were a problem back then. I was sad when they were gone in Tiberian Sun. The flamethrowers in C&C 3 aren’t problematic enough to all units and structures. They can’t even catch trees on fire! You can knock trees over but you can’t “light them up.” Another infantry problem is the squad attempt; your basic troop comes in squads of six, your rocket squads come in twos and some infantry come in squads of one. APC’s can only carry one squad so they can carry six light infantry or two rocket men or one engineer. Yes, you need one APC per engineer! He sure doesn’t look so fat that he takes up six seats, but he won’t share his seats with anyone else. Another interesting thing is if one man is left in a squad after a fight he still takes up all six seats in the APC.
Hands of Nod.
The vehicle factory for GDI is fine; I’m not sure how the Juggernaught slides out mysteriously (maybe it’s like the penguin from The Blues Brothers). The Nod factory deploys units from underground. This round cylinder spins up out of the ground and then doors open on the side to let the new unit go. I’m sure the people added those doors just to use a little more graphic resources on your video card. I really can’t figure out another reason for having the extra door.
Nod’s double doors.
Juggernaught slide.
Let’s talk vehicles for a moment. They brought the Ye Olde Mammoth Tank back to us (how original). It’s the top level tank on the field. Even an idiot can use it. One of the best thing I loved about the original C&C is that with about six Mammoth Tanks I could take a small Nod base out even with an Obelisk supplementing its defenses without a loss. In the hands of another commander he could loose them all and may or may not take the base. You could learn how to use them to be extremely effectively by controlling whether they shot their main weapon or their rockets. Now they are simple point and shoot. I think the original Mammoth Tanks were far more destructive than these new ones are because EA made them throw everything they have at a target, so they had to tone them down so they wouldn’t dominate so much. It’s a shame EA can’t figure that out. They also made it so they move so slow. The tank head tanks forever to turn. In the original C&C they turn much quicker and make them all the more useful. Plus there is a glitch in the demo so that they shoot from the tip of their tank barrel when they aren’t facing their target. It looks very wrong. I hope they are smart enough to fix that for their complete version.
The Juggernaught is supposed to be a long-range artillery. It’s not really capable of shooting much further than other heavy vehicles and it has the same head turning impediment of the Mammoth Tank. The Tiberian Sun Juggernaughts would kill these new Juggernaughts. The old ones could shoot much further and could turn their heads much quicker. The new ones deploy automatically (it’s made for dummies) for each time that they acquire a new target non-consecutively. They don’t stand ready like the one do in Tiberian Sun. They are tactically slower and don’t shoot as far. I find it hard to believe that GDI downgraded their Juggernaughts and jacked up their price. They also added a Millennium Falcon cockpit to the left side that just sees dumb. There is a good reason why we don’t use them in the army today. It’s an easy way to snipe the driver; you don’t even need a sniper, just a well placed rocket. Plus they leave frowny faces everywhere they walk.
Juggernaught in C&C3 and undeployed & deployed in C&C2.
The real range of a real Juggernaught.
Scorpion tanks suffer from OAS (over animation syndrome). They have so many moving parts that I think the graphic artists at EA a little obsessed. There is a section of armor that moves for no reason; there is a weapon and a rear track pivot. I missed the point of having a piece of armor that can move around and look. Part of the advantage of having caterpillars is you don’t need wheels that steer. That’s less moving parts that you need to protect. The legs on the juggernaught look thick enough to be armored, but the scorpion tank looks weakly armored, especially from the back. Stealth tank and flame tank suffered from the same OAS. The fuel tanks on the flame tank are cantilevered to an extreme, but the stealth tank suffered the most. EA should have kept its dirty hands off of the Ezkiel's Wheel. They took the quad-track design and made it into a tri-track design. Ezkiel described four wheels, it seem fitting that stealth tank has four tracks. It did until C&C3. It also is over articulated and the cloaking effect is more like Red Alert 2’s chronoshift. A flash of light changes it from visible to invisible. Why? What was matter with having it distort and fade away?
Articulated tank bonanza
C&C3 Stealth Tank decloaking
C&C Stealth Tank
C&C2 Stealth Tank
I think the older Stealth Tanks look like they can take more of a beating.
Recon bikes are pretty much Harley Davidsons of the future. They shoot rockets larger than your torso and you have to toss them into the air since they didn’t equip the bikes with missile racks of any kind. The old ones had them, but they downgraded in C&C3. Luckily they included a custom exhaust system for the bikes.
A comparison of recon bikes, no launchers on C&C3’s bikes.
Nod’s buggies have a really smart thing. The driver sticks his whole body out the front. You should be able to pick him off easily. What were they thinking when they made that graphic?
Nod buggy.
There are a couple af buildings that have large rockets that serve no purpose. Take the Nod command center for example. It has a rocket, a model railroad and the overall look of an expensive toy store. I can almost accept the rest except for the rocket. Another problem with the command center is the real lack of a purpose. It doesn’t give you a map like all the other Command and Conquer’s before it did. You get a map now when ever your MCV is deployed. Sounds like they are slowly turning the game into Star Craft. They have already changed the mouse clicks so they are like Star Craft’s setup. It really messes with true C&C fans who are used to the normal system.
Nod’s command center.
The repair things are back. In C&C Generals they gave us things that floated mysteriously to help defend and repair the parent vehicle for the USA side. EA decided that they were such a great idea that they should incorporate them into C&C3. Personally, I want my repair bay or the mobile repair unit, but these things they have now are silly. They float around all the time near whatever building they are associated with. These tiny little things can repair the heaviest tanks with the heaviest damage with one of their little spikey things. They really don’t seem very substantial.
Hovering repair things.
What is Nod’s big toy? It is the Avatar war mech. It’s like giant robot with a laser. It can wage war on others well because it’s like having a mobile obelisk of light. It can also wage war on yourself. It can be “upgraded” with second laser, a flame thrower, a sensor unit and cloak. The only catch is that is costs you your own units to do that. Kane may be ruthless, but HE IS NO DUMMY! EA is working hard to make it seem like he’s a simple crazy leader. There are four units you can each get upgrades from by telling the Avatar to take their technology. That’s the first problem: it instantly destroys the unit with no problem. It can’t do that to the enemy. Another problem is that each Avatar has to be upgraded manually every time. Who really wants to do all that. It would make sense if it stole from the enemy to upgrade itself with the enemy’s technology, but it doesn’t. It steals from your army. You built all the units that it uses to upgrade itself, so why can’t just build it upgraded? The pointless sacrifice of your own units to make your Avatar better is just a way the EA wants to slow down Nod’s offensive power. It looks like another case of bad game design.
The Avatar War Mech!
A particular favorite tank of the C&C universe is the infamous Mammoth Tank. Well they managed to screw that one up too. The original Mammoth Tanks of C&C were the ultimate in power on the battlefield. They could be used in large numbers to destroy bases, but a skilled commander could use half the number to the same job with the same casualties. Unfortunately, C&C was the only game to be that way. They changed it in Red Alert so that the tanks would be somewhat smarter and pick the best weapon (rockets or tank shot) to level the enemy. It’s things like that, I think, that make the tank battles more than a simple attack and who ever brings more to the battle wins. That’s one thing that I think C&C3 is really lacking in. The true battle deciders are the super weapons, but that will be discussed later. In Tiberian Sun mammoth tanks were designed to be the same tank as in the original, but with the “improved” weapon discriminator (for lack of a better word) like in Red Alert. That’s quite acceptable I believe. The mammoth tank was however a thing of the past. The new Mammoth is the Mammoth tank Mark II. It was strong, powerful and walked on four legs. It wasn’t quite powerful enough to only allow one to be built, but it was a logical step forward. I also think that it need to be bigger, but a little problem like that can be excused, it was uncharted territory. I’ve seen a Tiberian Sun mod with a double size Mammoth II (dropships were also undersized). Then we arrive at C&C3. They give us a mammoth tank much like the original. It a tracked tank with missile launcher and double barrels. It’s also designed for idiots. It fires all its missiles and guns, so it just unleashes everything. They also made its turret take years to turn around. I could defeat it with old mammoth tanks by driving them around it faster than the turret can turn, except for one thing. The mammoth tanks cheat. Here we have another example of poor programming on EA’s part. The tank will open fire even when it is not facing the target. You’ll see the shot travel from the barrel tip to the target while the gun is pointed away from the target. What’s the point of making them turn so slow? Their slowness may have something to do with overlords from the other crappy EA version of C&C: Generals. C&C is about battles; especially, tank battles. EA has forgotten all about that. Not too mention the forgotten from C&C2! That’s later to be discussed. The mammoth tank as the superior tank in the game is a blatant downgrade from Tiberian Sun!. They jacked the price way up as if it’s something special. The Juggernaught’s price was raised as well.
Let’s talk super weapons. The Ion Cannon is now basically the same thing as a nuke, and nukes don’t even leave behind radiation! The Ion Cannon was very different from the nuke in previous games. It involved different strategy because of it. It was very destructive but very focused. Now it’s a base annihilator that eats up graphics. The Ion Cannon itself doesn’t follow any of the design basics of the original. C&C3’s version looks like a generic space weapon. Nothing set’s it apart as, “look that’s the ion canon from C&C.” Simply put, it’s cheap. Then you have the rest of the clutter on the left side of the screen: all sorts of drop off troop, units and scanning stuff, most of which cost you money too. It’s just too much. The game is so complex you can almost forget the tank battles. Just super weapon them to death. Ground units are just for support. More complexity doesn’t necessarily mean more fun.
While I only have the demo for my assessment, I saw no signs of mutant involvement on either side. Where did they go? Did they all die (not likely)? I figured that there would be more mutant involvement. Maybe EA forgot the Forgotten.
The civilian cars are static. They are pretty practically just terrain because they don’t move and they are almost indestructible. . The only way to destroy them is running them over. Then you get a typical Hollywood car explosion, but you are only running it over. You can pump those cars full of lead and nothing happens to it (they should make tanks out of that). In Tiberian Sun you could blow holes in the ground and ruin flat terrain. This added a cool element to the game and also the need to pave your base. Pavement and roads not only kept the land stable, but it make vehicles that drive over it go faster. It doesn’t affect walkers like the Titan. Sandy terrain also slows down the same vehicles that pavement speeds up. Make sense and it’s a simple addition to the game. Generals was the same way and they didn’t bother improving it much in C&C3. Generals also saw the end to walls in C&C games. They are not constructible in C&C3. Walls are key to keeping out sneaky units. In C&C3 they make it so a bunch of units and buildings can detect cloaked units. It almost makes stealth obsolete. They omit things then try to rebalance the game. It’s not C&C when it’s done.
On the subject of stealth technology, thanks to the avatar mech’s stealing ability, it make it seem like you can cloak anything by sticking a box on the vehicle. They replaced the stealth generator with the most screwed up stealth generator. It’s tiny and it doesn’t cloak itself. I’d take an old cloaking device any day, because it at least cloaks itself. Plus in C&C 3, when something is cloaked it won’t take damage when it’s cloaked or phase in and out of cloak while under fire. It’s not a shield. In previous games forced fire has been a good way to search for cloaked units. It makes sense. This new shield side effect limits the tactics that can be used against it. Part of the fun of real time strategy is the different tactics that can be used. Doing the same thing over and over again gets boring. The missions in Generals were pretty much all that way. They all ended by destroying the enemy base after you spent too much time building up your force.
Scout missions are suicide missions. Scout units are took weakly armored or not fast enough to pass by any group of enemy with their life. Generals had this same problem. Of course they didn’t fix that.
GDI has grenadiers. At first this seems acceptable. In C&C there were grenadiers, but in C&C Tiberian Sun they were replaced by disc throwers; essentially, grenades that could go further. I would have liked to see the game have disc throwers with increased range due to the hops that the disc do after it has hit the ground. The level of accuracy would increase as the enemy got closer to the first hop that the disc makes. EA copped out and just stuck us with grenades.
They gave Nod the carry all. That’s wrong.
GDI’s transports take hours to land. I want the old dropships back. They were fast and didn’t carry hexagonal, unaerodynamic logs under them. That container pod is cheap.
The basic troops are cannon fodder that’s relatively ineffective. Even in large groups they don’t get too much done. I think that is to balance the fact that they come in squads only. The graphic for their shots are crappy looking too.
The speech of the units is very Red Alert 2-ish. RA2 was supposed to be a bit of a joke. Now they continue with their annoying puns for speech. Is this not a military? Where is a simple “yes sir?” Most of the units have some little ‘cute’ thing to say. The big units sound insecure by the amount of times they have to build themselves up. It’s like the have to brag on themselves (that is reserved for the commando of C&C). I just want a simple response like “acknowledged” or “right a way, sir.”
Why have all the Titans gone? Yeah, remember the Titans? Oh yeah, those big tall walkers that were pretty much the backbone of the armor division of the GDI. Well now they upped the price and made them a tracked tank again. They call it the predator tank. I call it an expensive downgrade. Who doesn’t want a Titan? I wanted to see a double barrel Titan or a Titan with some sort of anti aircraft support too; maybe even one a lot like the Mammoths of old with two barrels and missile racks. EA omits things because they don’t care. They want money. They don’t care about loyalists, you can see how the bug laden, outsourced and promise breaker Ten Decades of C&C pack failed the loyalist who made the game a success. It sold well even though several game on it were not ready to installed onto a Windows XP computer with out sufficient modification. That is chintzy crap. Another omitted unit is Nod’s long range protection. They don’t have an artillery. The artilleries in Tiberian Sun were great. The artilleries in the original C&C didn’t have much of a longer range, but they had power. The greater range of the artillery was a great improvement. In C&C3 EA decided to drop the artilley for Nod, but this was just the beginning.
Nod had cyborgs. The cyborg was a strong resilient unit that could pack a punch. Fleets of them packed into make a quick strike force that isn’t easily destroyed. They are good at taking out Mammoth Tank Mark II’s with that strategy. They heal in tiberium, so they are tiberium mutated and enhanced. If they get severely damaged they keep fighting loyally without their legs. The cyborg commando had the same abilities except he was more resilient and was extremely destructive (almost too destructive). Cyborgs were only in Tiberian Sun, but it seems follows the philosophy that Kane seems to operate under. He doesn’t mind sacrificing the lives of his men or exposing them to risky technology interfaces for his whims. When you beat the Nod side of the original C&C, you see this clearly illustrated by his web runners. Cyborgs seem logical. In the expansion pack for Tiberian Sun, Firestorm, they added another cyborg to the bunch, the reaper. It’s scary. It has the torso of a man and a mechanical lower half with four legs. It’s moderately fast and fires four rockets. Against infantry it throws nets to stop them, then it fires its rockets to finish them. Like all cyborgs, it leaves tiberium behind when it is destroyed and heals when exposed to a tiberium field. In Firestorm cyborgs fight both Nod and GDI when they go astray under the command of Cabal, Kane’s AI (it’s smarter than the EVA and it is evil in the same way Kane is). EA could rationalize that cyborgs were abandoned by Nod because of the events in Firestorm, but that would only make sense if they hadn’t beaten Firestorm on the Nod side. At the end you find that Cabal is more than likely still loyal to Kane. Kane is back in C&C3, so there should be cyborgs at his command. Unless they plan on having two Kanes, the lack of cyborgs can’t be explained. Having two Kanes would be like finding out that Darth Vader has a brother (who is ruthless like him) in Return of the Jedi. I think most people would laugh and say, “what?” In other words I don’t think that it likely. I was hoping for a large cyborg scorpion in the final C&C. It could be made with a human or two directly interfaced with the machine like a cyborg. It would spread gaseous Tiberium when under attack, have a cloak, carry missiles in the claws and have a laser mounted in the tail. Essentially, it would be Nod’s super powerful unit that would make a little more sense than the before mentioned Avatar. The Avatar seemed to be EA’s “I didn’t bother doing my research about it” version of the Cabal core defender that we saw in the final mission of Firestorm. The core defender was surprising, but very cool.
Another thing forgotten is the Hovering MRLS. Actually now GDI doesn’t have a single vehicle that shoots rockets against aircraft besides the Mammoth tank. You either need rocket men or Mammoth Tank to defend against the air. EA of course fix that hole in their game by allowing smaller units to shoot their machine guns at aircraft. Who cares that these are the aircraft of the future that are capable or higher speeds. They shoot them down with their guns. I think in the future there would be some rocket defense in order for your troops. That’s just dumb on EA’s part. I like the MRLS too. In C&C they had a very distinct usefulness against men, aircraft or buildings when you need things like power plants removed quickly. In C&C Tiberian Sun they were useful as a scout because of their speed, ability to go almost an0ywhere and they could defend themselves from air attacks that could be used to stop other scouting missions. I was hoping to see a faster hovering scout (hover-hummer?) and maybe the whole GDI vehicle division would be made up of hovering units or walking units. EA decide to just forget the MRLS, hover technology and all, another downgrade. How surprising?
Commandos in C&C3 are an attempt at getting the same thing that the original C&C had; simply but, it reeks of lame imitation and in Tiberium Sun the “commando” (ghost-stalker) was much more powerful. The only real forward progression is the addition of jet packs to the commando, but that even has a flaw. The same thing goes for the troopers. The jump-jet technology of the GDI has gotten worse. They can only go airborne for a few seconds, majorly limiting the distance that they can jump. They also cannot fire onto a target while in the air. In Tiberian Sun units with jump-jets could do all of those. Technology just doesn’t get lost like that, only when entire civilizations have been wiped out has this ever happened. The GDI seem to be alive and thriving after each war. We didn’t loose nuclear technology after World War 2. I can’t accept this huge loss of technology. They must have no neat, new or better idea at EA.
The Orcas of C&C look dumb. The original Orcas were the best. They were killer whales for the helicopter world. They also had smooth and flowing lines. In Tiberian Sun, they looked more angular than the original ones but were still fluid. The Orcas in C&C3 look very unrefined, angular and like the graphic artists put very little thought into making the Orca look like the high speed attack helicopter it’s supposed to be. The C&C3 Orca looks more like the “slow” choppers that we use today: unaerodynamic.
The Missions of Generals were very typical. By this I mean that it seemed like every mission you had to destroying the enemy base after building your own. You can only do this so many times before it gets boring. They would try to spick things up by making the beginning of the mission different bay adding a short part where you have limited troops, but they all ended up the same long before you were halfway through the mission. There were no missions with one specific target that didn’t require the destruction of the enemy totally. There were no missions that required a take over for another objective. There were no missions where you had to recover some specific object. They all ended with destroy the enemy base. This and the fact that there was no plat to speak of, the single player missions had much to be desired. Hopefully C&C3 will not suffer from the same affliction as Generals did.
Let’s talk trees. Since the first Command and Conquer, trees are destroyable and burnable. In Tiberian Sun this is the case as well. In C&C3 You cannot burn a tree no matter how much flame you put to it. You can’t shoot them until the fall either. Your only option is to run them over. They forgot that trees can burn. This illustrates what EA has done with C&C. They have bought the name, grabbed Joe Kucan to play Kane and have made their own game without regard for what C&C was. They remade Generals (which deviated from C&C so far that it shared more in common with games like Star Craft, Empire Earth and Age of Empires than with the real C&Cs made by Westwood Studios) into another game using a little of the art from previous C&Cs to guide their design. It’s a whole different game and it seems to be set in a different reality than real C&C. Tiberium was based on C&C in almost every way. It seemed to forget nothing from the old C&C. Things like the CTL+ATL guard more or the F key, which forces the screen to follow the unit that you have selected, are small things that has been left out. The F key toggle would be quite handy in C&C3 because the camera view is too close and makes it hard to follow your own units sometimes. You also have a hard time coordinating large-scale battles (of course that is not necessary in C&C3 because units are there just to supplement your super weapons). It’s like EA made a new game and it was an after thought to make it into C&C3. That’s pretty cheap way to treat the fans who made this game the success it is.
The final problem is the name. Command and Conquer: Tiberian Wars. It was rumored the Westwood was to make the third and final installment in the C&C series called Command and Conquer: Tiberian Twilight. The original C&C has gained the name Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, and of course C&C2 is called Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Tiberian Twilight was to be the end of the series where all is concluded. Either; Tiberium and Kane take over the world or the world prevails over Tiberium. Maybe we would finally get that “deep back ground” on Kane that General Shepard promised, but ultimately the epic game would be complete. The Symbolism of dawn, sun and twilight seems to suggest this especially with the amount of symbolism in Command & Conquer (Kane of Nod from the bible, Kane killing Able in the museum during the ending credits of C&C, Ezekiel’s Wheel, Seth, Titans and other prophetic things). EA change the name to Tiberian War probably for the reason of allowing them to make more sequels (like Madden and Fifia). They just want to make more money by using the C&C name. They don’t care how far they mess it up. They want all the money they can get from us. Of course, we, the consumer, determine if the game is good or a financial success. EA doesn’t care about us, they are huge and money hungry.
The conclusion is that C&C3 has the makings of another descent real time strategy game, but it is not C&C. It is an attempt to use the C&C name to get money from the loyal fans of Command & Conquer. They may have throw Kane in there, but it looks like a sham as far as game play. They ruined the C&C creative style of game play and made it more like inferior games. Why? The basis of the game, Tiberium, has been grossly violated and changed without regard. It may be called C&C3 but it is not the same. EA has killed Command and Conquer, a personal favorite of mine and many others. The only thing they could do to redeem themselves is sell everything C&C and Westwood to Petroglyph, were some of the original creators of C&C have gone, for less than a dollar and not release the game. Otherwise, C&C is dead. Thanks EA.