It apparently has some old Westwood talent on staff :shrug:
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Incline C&C Generals 2 is dead - evolves into Free2Play gayfest... and then it dies. Amen.
- Thread starter Wirdschowerdn
- Start date
It apparently has some old Westwood talent on staff :shrug:
Whisky
The Solution
Normally I like to keep my news posts neutral, so that what is said in articles or by companies speaks for itself. If EA says they're streamlining a game, I don't usually feel the need to say anything more, because that speaks for itself.
This time, I could not help myself. This game was a clusterfuck and all-around bad idea from day one and will not be mourned. Feel bad for the studio though, they never had a chance.
This time, I could not help myself. This game was a clusterfuck and all-around bad idea from day one and will not be mourned. Feel bad for the studio though, they never had a chance.
Good riddance, but I don't know this is good news or bad news since they said "To that end, we have already begun looking at a number of alternatives to get the game back on track."
Space Satan
Arcane
You can't kill what's already dead
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http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/29/command-conquer-and-the-curse-of-the-free-to-play-rts
Command & Conquer and the Curse of the Free-to-Play RTS
Can the RTS genre survive in a free-to-play world?
by Dan Stapleton
OCTOBER 29, 2013
Today EA's Victory Games announced that its free-to-play Command & Conquer reboot has been scrapped, without so much as an open beta. "Your feedback from the alpha trial is clear: We are not making the game you want to play," reads the letter announcing the cancellation, which also rather courteously states that EA will refund all money spent in the alpha. (Which, I have to imagine, isn't very much.) Thus ends a relatively short tale that took us from a December 2011 announcement of Command & Conquer: Generals 2 as a retail product to the August 2012 revamp that dropped the Generals subtitle and the single-player campaign in the process of switching to a free-to-play business model.
I'm a bit surprised by this - from what I played at the unveiling event and E3 this past year, C&C appeared to be coming along nicely. It wasn't super-impressive, but it wasn't really trying to be - it felt like a fairly decent recreation of the original Generals, with a much-improved UI and some additional StarCraft-inspired tweaks that further differentiated its factions. Of course, I never touched any of its free-to-play elements, which were supposed to sell additional sets of powers and superweapons (called Generals) so those are likely the parts the alpha testers so roundly rejected.
Command & Conquer is the third big-name RTS to try and fail to go free-to-play, and the second to be canceled before its official launch. We've gotten to the point where it's clear that most free-to-play models are incompatible with the RTS genre. Unless it's as wildly generous as Valve's approach with Dota 2, the problem is that these are games that depend on a level playing field, and any buyable upgrade more significant than a skin will damage that balance. No one wants to go into a 30 to 40-minute multiplayer battle they don't think they can win because the enemy has an advantage – beyond being a better player.
C&C's Frostbite-powered graphics looked respectable.
Here's a brief history of the major attempts at free-to-play RTS games over the past few years. If someone tries again – perhaps Wargaming, now that it's acquired the Total Annihilation license and Supreme Commander developer Gas Powered Games, or perhaps Blizzard, which has publicly commented that it's toyed with the idea of a free-to-play StarCraft II (though couldn't find a way to monetize it) – let's hope they learn from these mistakes.
Relic and THQ launched Company of Heroes Online into beta in September 2010, but the experiment was short-lived – it closed down just a few months later in March 2011. My brief experience with it was mixed - it felt very much like Company of Heroes (and included the outstanding campaign for free) but it had serious balance issues due to its stackable upgrades. For example, some purchasable items allowed a commander to reduce or eliminate the delay between when smoke signals were laid down and when a strafing run decimated the troops in that area. The result was a game vastly inferior to the real Company of Heroes, which even then was available extremely cheap on Steam.
The second attempt was Microsoft's Age of Empires Online, which successfully made it out of beta in August 2011. Initially developed by Orcs Must Die! creators Robot Entertainment (formed by remnants of the dissolved Ensemble Studios, creators of AoE) and handed off to Gas Powered Games to develop updates, it combined a lite version of Age of Empires II's gameplay with a persistent home town with Farmville-like item crafting. It was received with mixed reviews, due in large part to balance and grinding concerns, and also a questionable business model that treated it more like a demo version than a free-to-play game. Overpriced civilization packs ran between $10 and $20, and you had to buy one in order to use the upgrades you then had to grind for. Those upgrades themselves were problematic, as they made the barely functional PvP play wildly imbalanced. On top of it all, it depended on the reviled Games for Windows Live for its multiplayer connectivity, which made interacting with other users a pain. Despite numerous significant improvements, including a revamped business model, it never took off. In January 2013, Microsoft announced that all development of new content had ceased, and in August the word came that servers will close on July 1, 2014 - along with the rest of Games for Windows Live.
Honorable mention (because it lacks the big name) goes to End of Nations, a sci-fi MMO-RTS project begun by developer Petroglyph (a studio formed by former members of C&C home studio Westwood Entertainment) and publisher Trion Worlds, and announced in April 2010. The plan was to build a free-to-play (or subscription-based) tactical RTS in which up to 52 players could play in co-op or competitive matches using highly mobile and customization squads of units, with no base-building involved. In the handful of times I played its demos, it was exactly as disorganized and chaotic as it sounds - even with its sluggish pace, telling friend from foe was difficult, and in the middle of the fray units died so quickly it was hard to keep track of what was going on at all. Units weren't distinctive, and animations were clunky. Some modes were better than others, but overall it wasn't terribly promising. After a tumultuous beta period that ran from July to September of 2012, Trion removed Petroglyph from the project in December 2012 and moved development to its internal studios. In July 2013, End of Nations re-emerged as a "tactical MOBA" game instead of an RTS. That's where it lies today, in closed-alpha testing, and it remains to be seen whether it'll ever fully release.
The fact – and the fundamental problem – is that none of these games has delivered an experience that's in any way better than a traditional boxed RTS game. Hell, they're not even as good. It's bad enough that they're competing for attention with the genre-dominant StarCraft II, which has best-in-class multiplayer features, but doing it while attempting to persuade RTS fans to jump on board with a new and often hostile-looking business model is practically impossible. Until they have something new and interesting – an actual good idea – to draw us in, this genre won't be moving to free-to-play anytime soon.
Command & Conquer and the Curse of the Free-to-Play RTS
Can the RTS genre survive in a free-to-play world?
by Dan Stapleton
OCTOBER 29, 2013
Today EA's Victory Games announced that its free-to-play Command & Conquer reboot has been scrapped, without so much as an open beta. "Your feedback from the alpha trial is clear: We are not making the game you want to play," reads the letter announcing the cancellation, which also rather courteously states that EA will refund all money spent in the alpha. (Which, I have to imagine, isn't very much.) Thus ends a relatively short tale that took us from a December 2011 announcement of Command & Conquer: Generals 2 as a retail product to the August 2012 revamp that dropped the Generals subtitle and the single-player campaign in the process of switching to a free-to-play business model.
I'm a bit surprised by this - from what I played at the unveiling event and E3 this past year, C&C appeared to be coming along nicely. It wasn't super-impressive, but it wasn't really trying to be - it felt like a fairly decent recreation of the original Generals, with a much-improved UI and some additional StarCraft-inspired tweaks that further differentiated its factions. Of course, I never touched any of its free-to-play elements, which were supposed to sell additional sets of powers and superweapons (called Generals) so those are likely the parts the alpha testers so roundly rejected.
Command & Conquer is the third big-name RTS to try and fail to go free-to-play, and the second to be canceled before its official launch. We've gotten to the point where it's clear that most free-to-play models are incompatible with the RTS genre. Unless it's as wildly generous as Valve's approach with Dota 2, the problem is that these are games that depend on a level playing field, and any buyable upgrade more significant than a skin will damage that balance. No one wants to go into a 30 to 40-minute multiplayer battle they don't think they can win because the enemy has an advantage – beyond being a better player.
C&C's Frostbite-powered graphics looked respectable.
Here's a brief history of the major attempts at free-to-play RTS games over the past few years. If someone tries again – perhaps Wargaming, now that it's acquired the Total Annihilation license and Supreme Commander developer Gas Powered Games, or perhaps Blizzard, which has publicly commented that it's toyed with the idea of a free-to-play StarCraft II (though couldn't find a way to monetize it) – let's hope they learn from these mistakes.
Relic and THQ launched Company of Heroes Online into beta in September 2010, but the experiment was short-lived – it closed down just a few months later in March 2011. My brief experience with it was mixed - it felt very much like Company of Heroes (and included the outstanding campaign for free) but it had serious balance issues due to its stackable upgrades. For example, some purchasable items allowed a commander to reduce or eliminate the delay between when smoke signals were laid down and when a strafing run decimated the troops in that area. The result was a game vastly inferior to the real Company of Heroes, which even then was available extremely cheap on Steam.
The second attempt was Microsoft's Age of Empires Online, which successfully made it out of beta in August 2011. Initially developed by Orcs Must Die! creators Robot Entertainment (formed by remnants of the dissolved Ensemble Studios, creators of AoE) and handed off to Gas Powered Games to develop updates, it combined a lite version of Age of Empires II's gameplay with a persistent home town with Farmville-like item crafting. It was received with mixed reviews, due in large part to balance and grinding concerns, and also a questionable business model that treated it more like a demo version than a free-to-play game. Overpriced civilization packs ran between $10 and $20, and you had to buy one in order to use the upgrades you then had to grind for. Those upgrades themselves were problematic, as they made the barely functional PvP play wildly imbalanced. On top of it all, it depended on the reviled Games for Windows Live for its multiplayer connectivity, which made interacting with other users a pain. Despite numerous significant improvements, including a revamped business model, it never took off. In January 2013, Microsoft announced that all development of new content had ceased, and in August the word came that servers will close on July 1, 2014 - along with the rest of Games for Windows Live.
Honorable mention (because it lacks the big name) goes to End of Nations, a sci-fi MMO-RTS project begun by developer Petroglyph (a studio formed by former members of C&C home studio Westwood Entertainment) and publisher Trion Worlds, and announced in April 2010. The plan was to build a free-to-play (or subscription-based) tactical RTS in which up to 52 players could play in co-op or competitive matches using highly mobile and customization squads of units, with no base-building involved. In the handful of times I played its demos, it was exactly as disorganized and chaotic as it sounds - even with its sluggish pace, telling friend from foe was difficult, and in the middle of the fray units died so quickly it was hard to keep track of what was going on at all. Units weren't distinctive, and animations were clunky. Some modes were better than others, but overall it wasn't terribly promising. After a tumultuous beta period that ran from July to September of 2012, Trion removed Petroglyph from the project in December 2012 and moved development to its internal studios. In July 2013, End of Nations re-emerged as a "tactical MOBA" game instead of an RTS. That's where it lies today, in closed-alpha testing, and it remains to be seen whether it'll ever fully release.
The fact – and the fundamental problem – is that none of these games has delivered an experience that's in any way better than a traditional boxed RTS game. Hell, they're not even as good. It's bad enough that they're competing for attention with the genre-dominant StarCraft II, which has best-in-class multiplayer features, but doing it while attempting to persuade RTS fans to jump on board with a new and often hostile-looking business model is practically impossible. Until they have something new and interesting – an actual good idea – to draw us in, this genre won't be moving to free-to-play anytime soon.
Space Satan
Arcane
There's nothing wrong with F2P, it's retarded developers who can't do shit blame F2P to excuse their incompetence. DOTA2 had no problems with F2P and EA bitches have, what a surprise!
Suicidal
Arcane
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I was hoping for a Generals 2 cause C&C Generals is my favorite multiplayer C&C game (the only thing I really hate is the horrible coding with constant crashing and network sync problems), but oh well, can't really expect anything decent from a big-name company these days, I guess.
Hellraiser
Arcane
I'm not sure DOTA2 broke even for Valve yet. They dumped a lot of money into development and the invitational prize pools, the game has been publicly available for just a few months now. Valve has the cash to burn until DOTA2 starts making them a profit. At the same time the game has one proper map, a tutorial ones and most of the content are heroes and cosmetics. No AI to program, not that many art assets to make and only heroes to balance. Also they already had a gameplay template they merely ported over to a new engine, they didn't have to design all those heroes from scratch or the mechanics. Upkeep overall should be fairly low so living off cosmetics is possible. A proper RTS would be more costly and with few ways to earn money, even blizzard had trouble monetizing it.
The other problem is RTS lack mass appeal, MOBAs despite what their communities like to claim are fairly easy to get into, despite all the nuances of the mechanics, teamwork and metagame. Sure you'll suck but mostly due to your poor decision making (not knowing what to build, when to fight and how to fight), not because playing the game is mechanically hard and complicated. Managing one hero and four abilities is piss easy compared to basic micro and macro in say Starcraft 2.
Space Satan
Arcane
DOTA2 started to earn money since early beta. And there were no problem with getting access way earlier before "official" release, people were swimming in invitations.
Well that's the fucking point. People don't need 1000 maps, 1000 heroes and cinematics - they want DOTA. With optimised UI, handy tools and nice grapchics. And that's why EA and other faggots failed - they started to mess with the game. Turn Tiberium Twilight into a pinnacle of retardation. Scrap all that made C&C - C&C. We goddamn don't need overhauled game - we need game we liked. But no, they go and try to fix what is not broken and then ask with surprised looks on their degenerade faces - how could we fail?
Because all recent RTS made shitty work with balance. To be correct- they made no work at all. "Let's pile up X units for Y sides and release it" Players ask us to fix this shit? Fuck it! Move all team to another project, release a patch a year after.
Average Manatee
Arcane
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DOTA is a shit game for shit players. Turns out you have no problems if you target people with low standards.
Abelian
Somebody's Alt
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I'm still mad at EA for removing resource gathering and base building from C&C 4, so good riddance.
Maybe Jon Van Caneghem is now willing to start his own Kickstarter projects, in the Might & Magic or Heroes or Might and Magic vein... one can dream.
Maybe Jon Van Caneghem is now willing to start his own Kickstarter projects, in the Might & Magic or Heroes or Might and Magic vein... one can dream.
Dr Tomo
Learned
I think it is silly to compare a RTS game with dota 2 as I would see this as comparing apples to oranges. How would you monetize a rts game? Cosmetics changes? Yea I am sure the studio will make the money back within a decade at best.
Still, back in the day, multiplayer in games like Red Alert was very much F2P before that term was even invented. Somehow those games were profitable...
Whisky
The Solution
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Dr Tomo
Learned
Liston
Augur
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Well you could pirate a game and play multilayer over LAN, best kind of F2P.
Abelian
Somebody's Alt
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I think what he meant is that back in the day, gamers bought the game in order to play multiplayer and it didn't require a monthly subscription.
There is still a vibrant Red Alert 2 community at http://xwis.net/forums/. It became the official RA2/Tiberian Sun site after EA stopped supporting internet play for the games.
Also, after playing the same game for few years, the cost/per hour of gameplay approaches zero
(not to mention the money you're saving not paying for C&C 3 and 4).
Dr Tomo
Learned
I think what he meant is that back in the day, gamers bought the game in order to play multiplayer and it didn't require a monthly subscription.
There is still a vibrant Red Alert 2 community at http://xwis.net/forums/. It became the official RA2/Tiberian Sun site after EA stopped supporting internet play for the games.
Also, after playing the same game for few years, the cost/per hour of gameplay approaches zero
You are aware that the entire RTS and FPS genre had the same "free" multiplayer, after your purchased the game. The only thing that required a sub were mmorpg's.
Abelian
Somebody's Alt
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Blitzkrieg
Novice
i need Tiberium wars 2
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...be-resurrected-after-its-untimely-cancelation
They are not gonna let it rest in pieces...
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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...be-resurrected-after-its-untimely-cancelation
They are not gonna let it rest in pieces...
Herp derp.
Edit: More her derp, I commented for this one when Morgoth shared the link...
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