C&C 3 Announced

Reading a trivia of Mobygames. This might be interesting:

Dune was Cryo Interactive Entertainment's first game.

The game should not have existed : during the end of 1990, the project was officially abandoned by Virgin Games, who then hired Westwood to work on a Dune license-based strategy game... A few months later, Cryo, who had secretly continued working on it, succeeded in convincing Virgin to release it (although the game was then much simplified on Virgin's request). That's why Dune & Dune II have nothing in common...

The battle images were inspired by the worldly famous CNN pictures of the Gulf War (green skies with explosions...).

Many Fremen pictures were inspired by real famous people like Kadhafi, Khomeyni, Salvador Dali, Salman Rushdie.

Very much more details about Dune's creation can be found in French journalist Daniel Ichbiah's book, "La saga des jeux vidéos". If you were interested by the informations above, I suggest you to buy this book which is very well documented and pleasant to read.

Trivia contributed by a fellow named Yeba at Mobygames.
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My guess is that the concept of an RTS game that soon would become C&C was long initialised, perhaps when Dune was still in the making. Or perhaps the concept of such game was derived of the Dune RTS design. Either way C&C planning stages went from 'scratch to metal' when it found itself at Westwood(Partly working for Virgin Games who owned Cryo), or maybe even just before, and by then its game engine had evolved to an RTS material that we now know as Command & Conquer.

A wild or a pathetic theory...none the less an educated guess.
 
I'm shocked that it actually has been so long. Zero Hour seems pretty fancy and new still, and it doesn't seem that long ago that I dashed to the store for Tiberian Sun or RA2.
 
My guess is that the concept of an RTS game that soon would become C&C was long initialised, perhaps when Dune was still in the making. Or perhaps the concept of such game was derived of the Dune RTS design. Either way C&C planning stages went from 'scratch to metal' when it found itself at Westwood(Partly working for Virgin Games who owned Cryo), or maybe even just before, and by then its game engine had evolved to an RTS material that we now know as Command & Conquer.
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You're all confused about Dune.

Dune (Cryo Interactive, 1992) and Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (Westwood Studios, 1993) are entirely different and unrelated games. The 'original' Dune is an adventure game developed by a French company - it is not any sort of RTS precursor. Dune II is the game people site as being the first modern RTS - it was developed three years before C&C... but it was developed by the *same people*. Dune II was done by the same Westwood team that would later go on to do C&C a few years later... which is why it's a very, very similar game.
 
I hope EA makes gobs and gobs of money off of this. Why? Because I like EA. And because that will give a very visible example of how a classic game license can be brought back to life with a new engine, state of the art graphics, and a return to the gameplay that made it fun in the first place. We've already got one example - Tomb Raider. I have no idea how well it's selling at this point, but it's certainly not doing badly. The more examples we can have of game IP being resurrected the better. It just gets us that much closer to a officially revived Wing Commander. And that's something I think we can all support.
Plus, Tiberium Wars! I mean, come on! Who doesn't want to play this game?
 
Plus, Tiberium Wars! I mean, come on! Who doesn't want to play this game?
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I'll be honest: I'm glad C&C is coming back, I hope it's an amazing success, I'll certainly buy a copy the day it comes out... but I don't really want to play this game.

The appeal of the original C&C was that it was a fun, fast modern war game - you built tanks and airplanes and so forth. The sequels got far, far too hung up with a continuity that wasn't very interesting: C&C as a futuristic science fiction war game with space stations and jump troopers and mech-bots doesn't do anything for me. It's shocking to me that C&C2 exists in the form that it does: a giant FMV production with a weird setting based entirely around the original game's excuse for why you were still harvesting Melange.

(Red Alert and its followup, though, were brilliant, and I wish EA had gone with the now-dead Red Alert 3 concept they had in pre-production a year or so back... it's just a perfect mix of a wonderful pulp setting and the fun gameplay that made the original C&C work.)
 
I'll be honest: I'm glad C&C is coming back, I hope it's an amazing success, I'll certainly buy a copy the day it comes out... but I don't really want to play this game.
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Funny line there, LOAF. :p

It's shocking to me that C&C2 exists in the form that it does: a giant FMV production with a weird setting based entirely around the original game's excuse for why you were still harvesting Melange.
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I probably agree there. The FMVs in the later sequel of C&C (Tiberium Sun especially) did not really serve their purpose, unlike the previous ones (i.e. Yuri's Revenge):D . But i still enjoyed watching them and it added a good blend of an action sci-fi story though completely seperated the context of who controls the game - the player OR the story.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The appeal of the original C&C was that it was a fun, fast modern war game - you built tanks and airplanes and so forth. The sequels got far, far too hung up with a continuity that wasn't very interesting: C&C as a futuristic science fiction war game with space stations and jump troopers and mech-bots doesn't do anything for me. It's shocking to me that C&C2 exists in the form that it does: a giant FMV production with a weird setting based entirely around the original game's excuse for why you were still harvesting Melange.
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Well, come on - the original game had a lot of the stuff you're aparently not interested in now - Mammoth tanks, Cloaked Tanks, Ion Cannon Satellites, Futuristic helicopters, Obelisk of Light...C&C was always a futuristic science fiction war game, and no mistake. Then again, I really liked the original C&C for what it was - good fun, and not too focused on story. What story it did have was good and thoughly enjoyable to a simpleton like myself. When I got around to playing Dune II, I couldn't stand it. It just wasn't fun, at least not to me. I can't really explain it.

(Red Alert and its followup, though, were brilliant, and I wish EA had gone with the now-dead Red Alert 3 concept they had in pre-production a year or so back... it's just a perfect mix of a wonderful pulp setting and the fun gameplay that made the original C&C work.)
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They were certainly enjoyable - I'll never argue with that - but I never got as much out of them, and I don't know why. I could never get as enthusiastic for the Red Alert games as I could for the Tiberium timeline. This is strictly personal opinion. Something about the original just struck a chord with me, I suppose.
Aw, nevermind - they were all excellent games...
 
I believe it's impossible to go back to Dune II - the inability to multiselect units makes it very, very hard to get used to the game after C&C... but Dune II was truly amazing to those who played it before C&C game out. (Although in terms of setting, we had the same c omplaint in reverse -- it should be a weird sci fi game and it isn't, it's a modern war type game set on sand).
 
I know what Loaf is saying- all of the C&C's except for Tiberian Sun featured pulp sci fi technology that was modern day technology with a "Popular Mechanics" style spin- for example, tanks with laser defense systems, or orbital Reagan-esque "Star Wars" style Ion Cannons. More or less technology that could possibly see the light of day in our lifetimes.

Tiberian Sun had a totally different flavor to it, in that it was more or less completely disconnected with the "Popular Mechanics" rigged modern day technology and kind of went off on its own technological tangent- which is fine, but it did lose a lot of the flavor that made C&C so much fun to play.
 
Yeah, that's exactly right -- at worst (and best), the original C&C was like playing the game version of one of those magazines with a rocket-powered stealth aircraft carrier on the cover that says "NAVY ANNOUNCES NEW CV-X DESIGN!" (and then inside the article is about how the CVX will have a slightly different catapult).

C&C has been very weird about continuity, too. That is, it's a rare case of the developers being as interested in it as the tiny hard core fanbase... it's neat that the first level of Renegade is the same as the first GDI level of the original C&C -- but with eight years between the games, the man on the street didn't care.

I still feel bad that they disconnected Red Alert as a 'prequel' game... because while it didn't necessarily make sense, it was a lot of fun to think about the series that way. The impression now is that they're zealously guarding some grand overarching storyline 'ideal' that they have for the main games... which just isn't appropriate for the feel of the releases that made the series great.

C&C2 is just a strange game on all levels, though -- from the weird trying-to-be-better-than-it-is FMV sequences to the simple fact that while the characters are surprised that Kane is back, they're not *very* surprised. Everything about playing C&C2 today feels strange.
 
I still kinda like the one-unit-selection thing in Dune II - sure, it's annoying, but it's neat because it *requires* you to micromanage. In all the other RTS games since then, with the exception of WarCraft I, I always find myself tempted to just select a bunch of units and send them to the enemy. In Dune II, on the other hand, I often experimented with different kinds of formations and such - all in all, I'd say it's not really worse in terms of gameplay than the average modern RTS, it's just different.
 
The tiberium series storyline was okay, but the FMVs for the second seemed lacking and the story is just not as interesting. There is something about the FMVs and story, though, in the Red Alert 2 and its expansion that I really liked. I suppose the fact that the story was more intense and relatable (invasion by a foriegn power as opposed to a war over a factastical new resource). Well thats my opinion.
 
I dunno, I thought the Yuri expansion fiction was borderline ridiculous, and the Yuri side itself made the game seem unbalanced. You know what I really miss, and where I think Generals could have hit the mark, but missed wildly? I really enjoyed how the first C&C employed propaganda and political intrigue (like framing the other side for torching a village). That style of backstory seemed to me to have went out the window after C&C 1. Generals was especially guilty of this; the GLA faction just liked random suicide attacks on everything and anything, and the game provides no context for GLA's motivations. Instead, they are the scapegoats (and whipping boys) of Generals.

It would have been much cooler if the developers had made no side "good"- for instance, have the USA faction determined to maintain global influence by any means possible, have the China faction just power hungry to seize control of certain resources at any cost (say, oil?), and have the GLA faction rise up out of client states of the USA faction and China factions used to fight proxy wars between USA and China....
 
I agree with Loaf totally. While I have all "tiberian" c&c games, I had no motivation to finish them. On the other hand I still play Red Alert 1 and 2 (killing Stalin is always fun :D). I look at these games as a parody (I don't know if this is the best word here) of cold war. C&C Genrals and Zero Hour were also made in the same spirit.
 
The C&C2 single player stuff was crazy, but the multiplayer was really great. All the games since RA2 have been hyped as fast-paced and action-packed, but I loved how slow Tiberian Sun was. Hades, Kris and I used to have crazy 4-5 hour multiplayer battles. The enemy assaults were slow in coming, but they were hard to stop and wreaked havoc on your base. The entire dynamic involving walled bases, concrete floors and mobile construction yards delayed base destruction long enough for someone to get a transport helicopter in and carry you to safety. By the end we'd have one giant megabase and eventually build up the forces for a exciting successful offensive strike.
 
I find it funny that no one in the gaming press comments how much Act of War is similar to Generals, at least in look-and-feel. It is a great RTS game...

But I really want the next C&C to be GDIxNod. That, and RA, is where it's at.

I got me the 1st decade box, the video-dvd is pretty useless, but it's kinda funny. Very nice having all games in one DVD, anyway.
 
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