lazygecko

I am old enough to have experienced the original game around the timeframe of its original release. It was at a friend's place. I may or may not have experienced Warcraft 2 prior to that, I can't recall that vividly, but Command & Conquer certainly left a much heavier impression on me. The unique gameplay with hovercraft loading units off at the beach, the entire concept of the MCV, the "real" music in all its mono 22khz glory selectable from a playlist, the FMVs... All of these things coming together made it an unprecedented video game experience.

I've been trying to play Tiberium Wars using a third party graphics enhancement tool such as ENBSeries, SweetFX or ReShade but I'm having issues getting it to work so I was wondering if anyone here has any experience and can help out. The traditional method of using these things is to just dump the files (like the d3d9.dll and the preset .ini or .txt) in the root folder where the executable is, but that doesn't seem to work for this game. The SweetFX website has specific notes for C&C3, along with a custom preset for it which seems to work for the author, which tells you to place the files in the RetailExe/1.9 directory, which I did to seemingly no effect. The only progress I've made is doing the same thing with ReShade (which is the successor to SweetFX), which gives me the text overlay after launching the game telling me it's active, but none of the actual shaders seem to be working. I am trying this with the Steam version of C&C3 if that makes any difference. But I've installed it outside of the default Program Files directory to mitgate any typical complications with administrator rights and the likes (and of course I've tried running it as administrator).

This isn't really about any particular game in the franchise, but since there isn't any forum for general C&C discussion I am putting it here. What do you think about the unit rank up mechanics? They were introduced in Tiberian Sun, and solidified into what we're familiar with in Red Alert 2 with much better stats, self-healing and sometimes a new weapon. Initially this was something I really liked, but when I think further about it, I realize that it ended up changing my gameplay style, as I would give more attention to units that gained a rank and would micro-manage them more to get more kills than the others and stay alive so they can reach max rank. Ultimately i came to view this as a kind of obsessive compulsive behavior and added a dynamic to the gameplay that I don't really want. Do you think the series would be better off without this, or could the system be tweaked to be better, or is it just fine as it is?

Well, Interplay did sell off Fallout to Bethesda around 2004. Not that they were in great shape themselves by then, but unlike THQ they're still around. Technically at least.