Command & Conquer Generals 2 won't launch with single player
Command & Conquer: Generals 2 will pack eSports features, but won't have a single-player campaign at launch.
Command & Conquer Generals 2 from the newly-formed BioWare Victory will be free-to-play as part of EA's foray into that territory. As a result, it will carry a focus on eSports, and won't ship with a single-player campaign.
PC Gamer reports that the game will ship with competitive and cooperative skirmishes. A story mode might be added at some later time, but general manager John Van Caneghem says they "haven't announced yet how we're going to do it."
Instead, the studio is putting the focus on eSports features. Caneghem is cagey on which ones will be included, but says "you can basically make a list of the assumed ones that you'd need to be in an e-sports game, and it's definitely part of the plan."
As for long-term strategy with the series as a whole, Generals 2 is spear-heading the initiative, but EA plans to expand it to the full line-up eventually. "We decided to choose Generals as the first set of games we build under the universe, but we'll be expanding after that, like Tiberium and Red Alert as well as some others as well. But Generals 2 was the first one, and it was one of the biggest sellers, as well as the fanbase has been asking for it for some time."
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Command & Conquer Generals 2 won't launch with single player.
Command & Conquer: Generals 2 will pack eSports features, but won't have a single-player campaign at launch.-
If it doesn't have a story that I can play on my own, I like most everyone else on this planet, will not put any time into it.
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Yup, I no longer care. Moving on.
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John Van Caneghem, best known (and pretty only known) for the creation and work he did on the might and magic RPG games (not heroes of M&M), is overseeing the development of an online only, multiplayer-centered, RTS game. :/
Hey JVC, I have a better idea. Rather than burying the C&C franchise further into the ground, make another party-based, first person RPG game. Thanks.-
I'm pretty sure he was one of the major players in HOMM, at least until HOMM3.
I find it interesting that they decided to go in this direction because C&C:Generals was "one of the biggest sellers, as well as the fanbase has been asking for it for some time". Except that it was a big seller because of the story, and the fans have been asking for more story.
That's like 20th Century Fox coming out with a new Star Wars Trilogy that focused on Ewoks because the fans are asking for more Star Wars. -
Everyone that did RTS's before for EA left them. The guys that made C&C Generals and LOTR-BFME games left for Zynga and Blizzard. Other great RTS houses either closed (Ensemble) or had their visionary leave (Big Huge Games). The giants that made the RTS genre what it was are no longer around making RTS games. So I guess he is all that they could find. The franchise is already dead. EA killed it when they shuttered their RTS teams. He can't do any worse I suppose.
To me EA has just admitted they are an utter failure, again. They've lost half the NCAA & Madden fan base this gen compared to last because they don't believe in innovation. 2K bows out of MLB and EA said they weren't even going to work on a baseball game. They couldn't make an MMO out of Star Wars (Old Republic) that could compete even a little with WoW and now are scrambling to make it a F2P game. And now they are failing to make a "traditional" (ie retail .. boxed or download) RTS game with the C&C franchise when Blizzard succeed with Starcraft 2. EA continues to turn themselves into a joke, especially with this mad dash into F2P. Hope it works out better for them than it has for Zynga as of late.
Age of Empires got ruined to be by going F2P. It was a horrible grind like you'd find in a bad RPG. I hope they will learn some lessons from that RTS that went F2P. Maybe they can make a better go of it by focusing on skirmish and eSports. Not sure how eSports is going to work though when the F2P model means selling the game piece meal so not sure how eSports or competitive skirmish would be viable since the player base will end up very fragmented.
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What a tragedy :( will not play it. This game should never been F2P and defiantly had a engrossing SP campaign no matter what the model.
Why EA why? $ that's why, F2P makes you serious coin so they say. Man if their mandate is take all their IPs and switch them into F2P to make a constant revenue at the coast of the not making the games we want. I fear soon they will try and have everything online to play only and their games will become to be like TV series(play it this year and never again with no reruns or a box copy at the store you can get and play forever).
If this happens then I will stop supporting them(Crysis 3 may be the last SP game :( god I hope not). Well others will take their place if its the case. -
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I build for money
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Race to large amount of heavy tanks
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You never know unless you try.
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Well I guess that's that. RA3 was the end of the Command and Conquer series for me. Too bad, I really loved those games :(
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If the game had decent tutorial modes to help you learn the game and then skirmish with the AI that'd be nice. But seeing as pretty much no one has done that well I kinda doubt they will be the first.
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But I think part of the reason for that is the average player has no idea how to play skirmish mode properly. Similarly, they don't really know what they'd need to get better or how, so skirmish mode gets boring fast as you end up in a spot where you consistently destroy the AI at medium it whatever, but then the hard AI consistently beats you and you don't know what to do (and if you look at a replay and see the AI cheats then all motivation disappears).
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See, I think Zero Hour dealt with this problem nicely. It introduced a "campaign" which was just a series of pre-set skirmishes between you and a series of AI characters, but each one had specific strengths and weaknesses. It was tons of fun to play through the ZH campaign as different generals and figure out how to beat each enemy using your current generals strengths. I'd been hoping for a return to something like that with Generals 2, which obviously isn't happening now. :(
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I mean, I like me some campaign too (I only vaguely remember ZH campaign, I mostly skirmished after awhile), I just think skirmish is seen as a meh mode because that's about as much attention as it gets from devs. "Well we have this varying difficulty AI from the campaign already, just create a few maps and we'll have a skirmish mode" with the intention of campaign being a sufficient tutorial to make skirmish work afterwards. Of course we all know that's never the case and the campaign does little more than help you learn the tech tree, not actually improving your understanding of how to play the game, not offering feedback on ways to improve, etc. Think about even basic things like "Your average unused resources this match was 2000 minerals and your average factory was idle for 13 seconds between unit creation, try to focus on improving output by hotkeying your buildings" vs "Your average unused resources this match was 2000 minerals, your average factory was only idle for 1 second between unit creation. You should create more production buildings to increase your army size with the resources you've already collected." That's highly useful advice to a new RTS player that only requires correlating like 2 data points and making an inference from the combination. It's not highly complex higher order logic trying to determine effective strategies. Similarly basic end of match tips like "You made first contact with the enemy at the 4:35 mark and 66% of your army was killed by enemy infantry which are countered effectively by tanks. Consider using a scout unit earlier in the game to determine the enemy's favored unit type and build an appropriate counter unit before it's too late."
SC2 tried to add some tutorial modes but they were largely focused on micro of small squads and unit counters. But as we know, most beginner RTS players fail not because they did a select all -> attack move instead of careful micro, it's because the ball of units they selected is half the size it could be if their economy was better and a suboptimal unit composition due to not scouting (are there any mechanics campaign mode is worse at teaching than the importance of scouting?).
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Wow I didn't think they could screw up C&C much more after 4, but apparently they can.
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This is just false.
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Red Alert 2.
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I agree that RA2 was fun, but it was less than I hoped for. I would have much preferred the same gameplay with a serious tone like RA. Nowadays, when I see that the next installation of the series is a cartoon again, I immediately lose all interest. Something similar with the Tiberium series: when I see that they're trying to be campy on purpose, I don't want it. C&C was not intentionally campy, it's just how it formed, and there's a big difference in feel between it and later, intentionally campy efforts.
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WTF. No SP campaign? I've never played a C&C game multiplayer before.
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I cannot believe how quickly they have managed to destroy my enthusiasm for this game. When it was announced, I had not felt that excited for a new game in at least a couple of years. Generals is one of the most fun games I've ever played. And in the span of just a few days here this has gone from a day 1 purchase to a "I probably will never play this". Fuck you EA. FUCK. YOU.
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First C&C game I've skipped. GG EA.
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if you bought C&C 4 I'm not sure why you'd give up on this so quickly seeing as your quality bar is obviously already low
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No single player game. Same reason I skipped QW:ET.
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Wolf:ET was free with RTCW.
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Aha, We have found a traitor, go back to LoL.
C&C community is one of the strongest and consistent ones, peoples opinions rarely separate, no major conflicting splits. We ough to keep it that way!-
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You haven't played SCII in a billion years!
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What? RA3 came out way after Zero hour.
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I'm not totally against eSports, i just don't like the F2P model, it feels cheap as the stuff like LoL are prety much famous just because of a RTS mod, i don't like the western DLC model and stuff like that will be slapped to Generals 2. and there's no modding as they said.
But if you support F2P in that sense i meant I don't agree.
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A heretic appears!
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I am a developer on this game. I can appreciate the skepticism and dismissive attitude toward our recent announcement, and I would probably share it were I not daily helping to make the game and knew the speculation to be false. We all want to make a great game that fans of the series in particular will love and I hope we will be able to earn back at least some of your attention to give the game a try; then it can speak for itself.
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I thought C&C 3 and Red Alert 3 were both fun. Nothing amazing but they were worth playing.
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I really liked the direction C&C 3 was heading actually. I was very disappointed to see that potential completely wasted with C&C 4.
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SINGLE
PLAYER-
^^^^^^^^^^^
Make it payable DLC for all I care.
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"We all want to make a great game that fans of the series in particular will love" I love me some singleplayer, so of course this is wildly disappointing.
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Maarten is correct.
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I love single player as well, as do many on the team. I think the biggest piece of feedback we've gotten, is the disappointment over the lack of a campaign at launch. However, to quote some of JVC's comments from the PC Gamer interview:
“As a live service I think the exciting part is you can try things,” said Van Caneghem. “You can see what the community wants, you can give it a shot, you can put it up for a weekend and see how it goes, develop towards what the fans like.”
I hope we will be able to be responsive on this but it is a decision that is well above my pay grade.
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At least we know you heard us. Make some noise.
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If you're a developer, then please realize that GLA was always plenty powerful enough, and that it only got 'upped' in patches was because your average C&C player was too stuck in their old ways to understand GLA tactics.
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Well, your managers are awfully misguided. The fans of the series want SP and not a MP-focused game with eSports stuff built-in. You have a huge mountain to climb if you plan to compete with LoL, HoN, DOTA 2, SC2 and other competitive games.
With the limited amount of time I allocate to games nowadays (and with so many available, specially later in the year), I'll give it a pass - sorry. -
At least make modding possible in future please, so we can modify skrimish gameplay vs Ai, and to make maps, that's pretty much the only thing that will make up for it. Please take this advice seriously.
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The community never had anything against the actual developers, we all know how EA management works, they're too commanding from the top, they make quick and rational decisions.
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oh good. Another game I can safely ignore.
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i'm one of those retards who learn RTS games by only playing the SP campaign, looks like im not getting this one
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OK, in Red Alert 2, on the map Anytown (or whatever it was), you pick soviets and go in the lower right corner. There is a car dealership there. Build a Yuri, and mind control one of the cars. Load it with terrorists because you are Cuba. Use Crazy Ivan to put a bomb on it, and drive it into the enemy base. It is marked as civilian, so their defenses won't shoot it. Park next to their war factory and wait for it to explode.
EMERGENT GAMEPLAY IN A SPRITE BASED GAME. CAN'T BEAT THAT MOTHERFUCKER.
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Generals was a terrible game. A glorious, fun as hell unbalanced terrible game. Man I loved to hate that game.
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I didn't deny that!
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this made me want to reinstall Generals but then I realized my DVD drive doesn't work with this motherboard >_<
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Well, there goes any interest I had in this game. :(
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Always-on DRM? No thanks siree.
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I have always been a huge fan of C&C, i have owned them all, even the newer ones i didnt
care for but was willing to try, cc3 and 4, RA3, this however as a lifelong fan since the very
first C&C and drooling at the teaser to tiberian sun that was included, even though
C&C:TS was a let down i still enjoyed it, and like most C&C fans the single player
is what i love, i did play multiplayer a bit but it was not the bread and butter, it was
the quick dessert, C&C should be sinlge player with multiplayer being the afterthought
not the other way around, if EA really does care about fans thats the way it would be.
on a side note, i dont even have reliable unlimited bandwidth high speed internet
at my house so even if i did want to buy this and play it i couldnt, with the bandwidth
caps coming from all major cable/dsl and already in place for 3g and satalite then
this whole online only thing is a definite major business failure waiting to happen,
i cannot afford to waste extra money on very pricy overages, what i can do is play
single player games all day long and only pay for the boxed copy once. i guess to surmise,
its off my list too, and a sad day it is, first my beloved diablo 3 and now this, the online
only thing is just plain ol pissing me off.
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