The slow death of Command & Conquer

Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, was a game I purchased after an unsuccessful attempt to get Mass Effect 2. The game was out of stock the day I went to buy it, so rather than leave empty handed, I decided to pick up something else, and there was C&C4 sitting there in the new releases so I said fuck it, I’ll get it. Why I did this I still don’t know as I hated their last effort, Red Alert 3, and its predecessor RA2.

Now I am a big fan of the C&C games, well the older ones anyway, so I hoped that with this one, heralded as the closing chapter in the C&C storyline, would be a fitting farewell to great series. My first C&C game was the Red Alert port onto the Playstation. This was epic, with me spending a good chunk of my early teens sitting in front of the TV, kicking Allied ass with my army of Mammoth Tanks. I also got the all of the expansion packs, Tiberian Sun and its expansions, the Generals series and the terrible Red Alert 2 & 3. C&C 3 I thought was pretty good, keeping to the well known formula with a lovely overhaul of the graphics and interface.

Then came along C&C4. Where to begin I don’t even know. I hated this game. Hated, hated, hated it. Within 10 minutes of me playing it, my excited anticipation had turned into a grim realisation of what was in store, and that I should have held out for Mass Effect 2. The graphics are fine, not too much different to C&C3, but there the similarities ended. The designers made some rather drastic changes to the well known series. Rather than improving on the formula, some dickhead in EA decided to rewrite one of the most successful game series of all time. Why they did this on the very last game in the series I cannot fathom. The game begins with the live action cuts scene, with Kane and NOD being all evil and mysterious and GDI being all noble and honourable... boring. The game is played with the player controlling one of 3 different types of MCVs, (Mobile Construction Unit for all you noobs) that are all used for one aspect of play, i.e. Defensive, Support or Offensive, each MCV can build different units according to their role. Defensive build turrets and infantry, offence builds all the different tanks, and the support has air units and artillery etc. The MCVs can also move around the map and can be redeployed anywhere. Meaning you can advance along, bringing your base behind you to reinforce your army. If you lose your MCV, you can redeploy it in one of your deployment zones where it will arrive in a suitable dramatic and ludicrous manner, GDI dropping from orbit, and NOD burrowing from under the ground like Shedder in TMNT.

This style of play seemed to me to be designed for quick multiplayer skirmishes, rather than the long strategic story driven missions in the previous games. There is a story in there somewhere, but the cut scenes are so bad I just skipped all of them, but more on that later.

Another design decision that I struggle to understand, is their decision to remove the whole base building/harvesting aspect from the game. For me, a long time lover of strategy games, with my affair beginning way back with the classic Dune 2, this is absolute and utter heresy. In Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, the base building was left more or less intact, with the new ability to build on water as well as land. However the developers changed the resource gathering system by making the player build their refineries directly onto an ore mine, therefore greatly altering the gameplay by eliminating ore fields. This was a bit similar to games like Supreme Commander. This was fine for SC, where the scope was huge, but not in a C&C game where the armies and maps are much smaller. 

I hated this, and for me heralded the beginning of the slow and inevitable death of the C&C franchise. Unfortunately, my prediction was true, with C&C4 getting rid of the whole base building aspect altogether, with the designers going for a more multiplayer oriented game of a small tactical force with limited rebuilding capability. Funds were allocated to your MCV, and you could build a certain amount of units until you reached the unit cap. That was it. You could only replace lost units so long as the cap wasn’t exceeded. Each unit being worth a certain amount. So gone are the days of building a big army, sending it off to war, and having a second army being built while the first was out getting slaughtered. This was a strange decision to make, alienating a huge portion of their fan base. Now I know the game was praised for its multiplayer mode, but as iv previously mentioned in my blog, I’m a single player man, and for EA to leave me out of what should have been a great game is disappointing to say the least.

Uh oh, better build some defensive structures ASAP.. Oh wait.....

The base building was a huge part of the older games and with the removal of this feature, I feel this effort cannot even be called C&C as it now so fundamentally different from the other games in the franchise.

The other notable feature of the Command & Conquer series are the live action cut scenes. When I first saw them, way back during Red Alert on my PS1, they were cool. The crudely rendered backgrounds with the actor super imposed over were great, the acting was cheesy but completely appropriate to the game at the time. Who could forget the rants of Stalin, or the subtle subterfuge between his commanders, they were great fun and added a lot to the atmosphere of the game.

So WTF happened?!?!?!?

Oh Tricia Helfer, you were so much sexier as a Cylon

The effects have improved, the cast has many notable names, with some EA execs obviously recently having lunch with someone working on Battlestar Galactica. George Takei also needs to have a serious discussion with his agent. However, despite all of EAs lovely money, they are mind numbingly cringy. The acting is laughable, the writing as if it was done by George Bush and the whole look was just so cheesy. If i knew the game came with block of cheddar this size I would have ran out of Game all the way home. It was honestly like trying to sit through an episode of the X Factor. I know its only a small part of the package and doesn’t directly impact the gameplay, but even when your playing and you skip the intros, you cant escape the awfulness, with one notable moment where an enemy commander taunts you with the horrendous jibe, ‘Your units are weak, just like you….’.Whoooooooooohh, oh how I shat my pants after hearing that. I more likely turned off the game and went outside for some exercise, so disgusted was I by this idiotic writing. The fact that some moron in EA sat there and wrote that and with no one picked up on how stupid and childish it sounded. Its as if they thought they could get away with it because it was a game and gamers wouldn’t notice.. Oh how it makes my blood boil.

It might seem like I’m being over critical of this part, but really, when a game with such a long drawn out story, that has literally spanned over 15 games, you would think they would have tried to make the final chapter decent and watchable, rather than as a test bed for a new style of gameplay. The gameplay is so radically changed that it doesn’t feel like a C&C game. Westwood Studios must be turning in their grave. I have to confess, that I never completed this game, so bad did I find it, so I never even found out what happened to Kane, NOD, GDI or even Tanya (in RA3 only), who was played by Jenny McCarthy (the casting speaks for itself). However I honestly didn’t care, and will be forever wary in the future of anything that comes out of the carcass of Westwood Studios, so horribly butchered by EA in their quest to dominate the world.

I will grieve for C&C, but nothing will make me appreciate the horrible death rattle that is Tiberium Twilight.