Thrik

Command & Conquer: Generals 2

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... has no single-player.

This falls squarely in 'wat' territory for me. What is C&C without its amusing single-player campaigns?! I really enjoyed the relatively realistic tone of Generals too, as it was set in a more believable near-future rather than the usual craziness. Bah!!!!!

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I can't struggle through the single player in RTS games any more unless they're sufficiently different from the RTS formula (Homeworld, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Dawn of War II, Men of War, etc). The last one I finished was Company of Heroes and even then I'm not sure why I bothered. To give some perspective, I play single player for basically EVERY game I buy even if it sucks (hello, Bad Company 2), so not playing the campaigns for RTS games speaks to how much I can't stand it. Starcraft 2 sits unfinished and I'm probably not going to bother with Company of Heroes 2. I'm glad they're putting effort into the only parts of C&C I care about, especially because Red Alert is the only one that has ever had amusing single player, largely because of the FMV cutscenes.

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As I mentioned in the Planetary Annihilation thread, if there is not single player, you can count me out. However, to be honest, I'm not very interested in C&C Generals 2 to begin with. I loved the old C&C games but, for some reason, I only played like five missions of Red Alert 3 before I was utterly bored.

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Yeah I wasn't able to stick with RA3 either. I did really enjoy C&C3 though and thought that the series was going in a great direction, but RA3 for some reason looked worse, played worse, and despite the admittedly amusing theatrics just couldn't hold my attention. From what I heard C&C4 was an absolute joke so I'm not going to bother with that. Even now C&C3 still looks pretty good though, maybe I'll get the expansion for it at some point and/or replay it.

It's a shame because C&C always walked the right line between being quite realistic and having some crazy sci-fi stuff going on. When a game gets that balance right I get a really good feeling from it, the same thing that made me fall in love with games like Battlefield 2142 and Metal Gear Solid.

Oh well. EA will inevitably return to the series again and again, it's like things such as Sim City and Civilization in that respect. Hopefully a future try will be another hit.

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I feel like a very weird person writing this, but Generals 1 was my favorite C&C. RA1 comes close, but I was too young to have any coordination when playing that. I spent many many nights playing 2v2 Generals with 3 friends of mine. I really don't care for much RTS single player these days, I find it hard to connect to a narrative from that perspective. I'm pretty excited to a point about Generals 2, or rather "Command and Conquer", but I do fear what EA will do with their f2p model.

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Despite the hate for it, Generals is a solid, enjoyable RTS with a pretty high skill ceiling in places. The issue being that it was branded Command and Conquer and is almost nothing like the other games. While the campaigns in TibSun and RA2 and things like that were really fun, Generals was a departure in that the campaign was more of a standard RTS campaign with in-engine shots of humvees giving expository dialogue. I don't really mourn the lack of a single-player in Generals 2, but I do mourn the idea of a F2P competitive RTS. That has to be handled very delicately.

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I was always a grumpy pants that felt Generals shouldn't have had the C&C name on it, being such a radical departure from the series. Thing is, now we live in a world where C&C4 was a thing, and in retrospect, i have greater appreciation for what Generals achieved. (In that it was successfully not terrible.)

I'm not sure i'm into the idea of having a C&C game without a campaign though. The C&C campaigns were always kind of a big part of why i've kept coming back to that series, they were always pretty consistent about finding cool ways to spin their game dynamics into interesting missions. (I mean, and the hammy FMV doesn't hurt.)

Also, since the gauntlet has already been thrown down, i'm going to say Red Alert is still my favorite C&C, followed by Tiberian Sun. (Which is a ridiculously underrated game.)

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I wonder what the Bioware label even means any more.

Literally nothing.

It is a label, a valuable one, and EA is going to stick it on anything they feel needs a boost.

My understanding is that the team at BioWare Victory is basically still the same crew EA has had on C&C since C&C3, and that Generals 2 was already well into development before the BioWare rebranding happened. (The studio was originally just called Victory Games, and was born out of EALA.)

Any involvement of the original BioWare is likely quite limited.

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Literally nothing.

It is a label, a valuable one, and EA is going to stick it on anything they feel needs a boost.

My understanding is that the team at BioWare Victory is basically still the same crew EA has had on C&C since C&C3, and that Generals 2 was already well into development before the BioWare rebranding happened. (The studio was originally just called Victory Games, and was born out of EALA.)

Any involvement of the original BioWare is likely quite limited.

Which is nothing short of batshit to me. By developing a strategy game under the Bioware aegis, you're marketing on a segment that must be incredibly slim: someone who's fan enough to respect Bioware, but not to know that this is smoke and mirrors (or at the very least a bad idea). When they formed Victory Games, I was intrigued. When they gave their project to Bioware, I was confused. When I realized that it's all jive, I was done.

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