Blbpaws

On some level, I agree with this. There's a lot of possibilities when you radically change the model. There's a couple reasons why I'm not at all optimistic. 1) If you're going to start out a new model, it might be a good idea to do it with new IP, rather than by taking one of the few decades-old storied franchises out there and trying to shoehorn it into something else. Doing it EA's way means you have thousands of fans revising their expectations, confused about what exactly you're changing (EA has been unable to convince people it's not a browser game at this point, thus negating the selling point of a nice engine), and angry that you're destroying what they took as part of a rich tradition. 2) If you're going to radically change the model, it's probably a good idea to not cut the exact things the company you brought in (Bioware) is known for doing really well: story and singleplayer engagement. EA hyped the Bioware move and it made a lot of sense as a way to return C&C to its roots and now, eight months later, they're backing away from it. Looks like erratic decision making as part of a broader corporate push to move to a service model. That kind of erratic decision making almost always results in disaster, to say nothing of the months of developed time EA wasted on trying to have a plot and use Bioware's skill set. 3) If you're going to claim to a skeptical fanbase that you can change the model (see number 1) with people who you hyped as being good at something else (see number 2), you might want to put the details of that model out early on. They didn't. Now they have to figure out how after the fact to convince people of what it is they're producing--most fans right now are confused about the name of the game, for goodness sake, to say nothing of the nuances of free to play vs. play to win. This furthers the impression its a rudderless ship, with no clear vision, subject to broader corporate whims. 4) If you're going to do 1, 2, and do it in such a way that it essentially amounts to "Just trust us, we'll tell you the details later when we figure them out" (3), it's probably best if you're not a widely distrusted company with a long history of overpromising and underdelivering in your previous "innovations," especially in the C&C franchise. Remember the C&C Generals ladder kit, the future of multiplayer? Remember The First Decade, supposedly in development by a second team in EA, but really outsourced to another company? Same with Kane's Wrath? Remember the promised "Live support team" to develop Mod support and patches--now all fired? Remember Tiberium, C&C's glorious return to FPS? Remember the claim that C&C 4 could credibly take on Starcraft 2? Who trusts the promise that this time is different? Why? 5) If you're promising this time is different, don't do it with something you tried and failed at before (EA claimed that C&C 3 would supposed to dominate e-sports, promising matches with "thousands" of spectators), and that your nearest competitor, Starcraft 2, has been perfecting for years, while you're starting over, again. No one will believe you. That's just it. I don't believe EA on this. I have zero faith, zero trust, zero evidence that they have any capacity whatsoever to pull this off. Since at least 2007 or 2008, and probably before, C&C has been a bumbling, misguided ship with no clear direction at the mercy of broader EA corporate whims. Cypher, you've been around the community as long as I have. I value your view. Why do you think this time is different? There's one final part: I really want to be wrong. I love C&C, consider it a true part of my childhood and adolesence. I'm proud to have orchestrated and designed three of the most well-received C&C mods ever, including two that introduced new players to past games and the series's rich tradition. I loved going to EA, and I'm immensely grateful that Aaron Kaufman gave me the chance to do it. I met a lot of really nice, cool, people there, folks who--in an honest moment--would admit to exactly what I wrote above. They want to make games people like, they got jobs they thought were dream jobs, and they're at the mercy of broader decision makers who are short-sighted and tone deaf. I feel bad for Eric, because I'm sure he's a fan, and he knows, or will know soon enough, that this thing is off the rails. He's a good guy, and it's his job to sell this, so I'm not trying to attack him. I just wish I believed what he and his bosses had to say.

I'm not sure how much of ack's last two posts were directed at me, but I'm not trying to ban criticizing, especially not constructive criticism. I'm just noting that as someone who's now made three big mods, not everyone is going to like everything and indeed, that's one of the things that makes C&C neat. People want different things, and the whole value of modding is that it can create a whole multiplicity of options for players. But I'm not in any way against feedback, provided people have given the work a fair shake and experienced it pretty fully. In fact, I just PMed someone at moddb because he left us a low rating but didn't leave any comments go with it and I want to hear what he didn't like. Again, there are many players, and the neat thing as far as I'm concerned is that I get to hear from a lot of them about what they thought when they played our work.

Hey guys, interesting discussion. I do always like to hear feedback (I read literally every word of fan feedback on our mods), and on this question I think I ultimately agree with Nmenth's viewpoint: it's basically impossible to please everyone, as much as we try. This doesn't delegitimize people's perspectives but just may mean this is not the mod that corresponds to exactly what you're looking for (and of course, you can always start your own if that's the case). One of the really neat things about Red Alert is that everyone has their own memories of it, which shows their deep engagement with the C&C series. This was a huge issue we confronted when we did C&C All Stars, and we got the same feedback about the art not corresponding to exactly how people remembered it or imagined it today, so I'm used to hearing it. Ultimately, we can just do what feels right to us and I'm grateful that the reviews on balance have been very favorable, and on the strength of them the mod has spread to the front pages of most of the C&C sites as well as gaming sites like FilePlanet and atomic gamer. I know the C&C team at EA will be playing this in their weekly playtesting, just like with The Forgotten and I'll be curious to hear their input on the art. I do recommend the PCNC interview I did, though, if you want to hear more on our perspective on this. You can hear how we approached some of these questions and how we were thinking about it, even in advance of getting this feedback. But yeah, in case you are wondering about our intent, the bottom line is we deliberately sought to recreate the in-game art, not the FMVs or purchase icons or modern day US Army equivalents.

Indeed, the mod is released: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-red-alert

Thanks for the comments. We expect to have the release done within a month, so this is definitely the time to stick around, especially as I know we have another--even better--trailer just about finished. It seemed the embed didn't work on the newspost, so perhaps this youtube link would work better:

Sonic, how do these two statements match up (the first being from you, and the second being from EA at http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/201...es-project.aspx )? It seems like things haven't changed that much, but maybe I'm missing something. All these threads and posts seem like an overreaction to one offhand comment. My take: there's a C&C in development in LA, by the new EALA team. What it is, we'll know soon enough, but I don't think anyone knows yet.

I almost didn't post this, but I do think it's important to give criticism a fair hearing, and ignoring it wouldn't do that. I quote the other participants here not to respond argumentatively, but to be clear about what they are saying and about what I say. First, let me point out that the Lead Designer of the C&C development team, Sam Bass, seems to match what I say. He specifically commented on our creative use of EA's tools and overcoming technical challenges. See: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/22...3-the-forgotten But I don't think just because Sam Bass agrees with me that something is right. Let me address each point in full: I think it's pretty apparent that the process of doing FMVs was indeed quite complex. Even if you want to put aside the non-technical work (screenwriting, casting, directing), there's still the technical process of setting up a film capture environment that's similar enough to EA's so that we could use the result--this involved the challenges of matching lighting, etc. Broken Wall Films, a key part of our team, handled this very well. After that point, there was the matter of getting the raw video footage edited into the discrete videos, more than a dozen in all. And then there was the technical process of getting those videos into EA's format, decoupling the sound and video so that the engine could recombine them, continually adjusting the video codec to suit our footage (I believe that EA's codec was not usable with the tools we had, but I'd need to check that with the film guys). Then, after that, there was the INI and XML coding to get the videos in-game, the only part acknowledged in Lauren's post. It's worth noting that no one else has done FMVs on any scale, much less this one--there's probably a reason why. Tsumetai and CommieDog handled the intricate details of the XML, though I edited some of it as we went along. I've never had a reason to look at the Rift Generator code--maybe they did--but I can tell you the Vein Monster is a nine-stage weapon to better simulate a monster growing, attacking, and dying. I think we could have gone to a simpler weapon, but it wouldn't have been as good. As far as the Beastmaster, I haven't looked at the code--that was all CommieDog--but I know there were a number of revisions to it over time to get it right. I think the broader point when you talk about code is that it's a mistake to conflate something being difficult with something being impossible. Of course it's possible--if it wasn't, it wouldn't be in the mod. It doesn't mean that the process of making it didn't have some challenges, which I tried to convey. The impression I get is that Unreal, Oblivion, and Starcraft all have very solid tools that are relatively better than EA's offering--in an internal email last year, Apoc even said as much. Even putting aside other games, look at how few C&C mods are finished nowadays. Even the very talented modders in this thread--so far as I can tell--haven't ever released a 1.0 version of a mod for C&C 3 or RA3 with original units, much less a faction(I want to be clear that I say that not as a personal attack, but as a demonstration of how difficult it is to complete a full project). I'll look into the MissionObjective List. I feel like we tried it and disregarded it for some reason, but I don't recall what that was offhand--this was probably well over a year ago. One comment in particular bothers me: As I noted, I don't think Lauren's claims are terribly in context, but I certainly dispute that I was "bragging about nothing." First, I think The Forgotten is a lot more than nothing in the context of RTS modding. Second, I specifically highlighted again and again the many staff members who made this possible and how nothing would have gotten done without them, so this certainly isn't about my "fame," if you call C&C fansites famous. By the way, one of the people I highlighted as being helpful was bibber. Thirdly, we run a site that's dedicated to helping people get better at both modding and mapping, so I don't think the criticism that we're all about ourselves is accurate. Bibber, we do have the capacity to patch the mod, and we will indeed release one in response to the feedback and suggestions we've gotten, including yours. In terms of the claims of bad blood, I don't know of any. I'm not really familiar with Golan or Lauren's projects (though I recall promoting them in newsposts over the years as part of our efforts at C&C Labs to foster creativity), and bibber's tools have been helpful, as I said in the interview. Maybe I'm missing something, but I see no reason for bad blood here, and I certainly don't feel any. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the mod, and here we got some negative feedback--it's not the end of the world, and I hope by addressing it I helped clarify things. Does that clear things up some? In terms of judging the mod's quality, I'll let the results speak for themselves. You can read plenty of unbiased fan comments on joystiq, escapistmagazine, rockpapershotgun, filefront, moddb, strategyinformer, fileplanet, or any number of C&C sites.

Thanks for the kind words guys. We're also very excited about this, and really believe we won't disappoint. I didn't do the directing or casting, so I can't speak to that, but I did write the script (and all of the story elements such as the Forgotten Fiction pieces), so I do truly hope you enjoy it. Is there anything you guys would want to see in future updates? Parts of the fiction you'd like to see explored, or certain units? More shots of the missions, perhaps? We'd like to keep you in the loop as much as possible, and we know that nothing helps something cool spread like word of mouth. We hope to be that cool thing--let us know what you want to see so we can make it happen!

That's still undetermined. For now, we're focusing on getting stuff in-game.

And I've managed to find another person who worked on C&C 4, as well as get some more evidence for my previous proposed timeframe for C&C: Arena. I still think it's a code-name for a C&C that's been released, but I think C&C 4 is in at least pre-development. http://www.cncgeneralsworld.com/newscomments.asp?NewsID=1746

This mod looks interesting, but it isn't the first one announced. We've been hard at work on one for many months now (The Red Alert) and already have quite a few renders and promo images up for people to see. Nonetheless, you can never have too many mods, so I hope this one makes it to the hands of the community.

I've investigated this and I don't think it's a new C&C game. More details here.

Don't take this the wrong way Blbpaws..... but who the hell cares :roll: Are you implying that Hpnotist is not allowed run his own contest because Lion as already done back in August 2005 for C&C10 on CNC Den? No, it's perfectly fine with me, and it wouldn't matter anyway if it wasn't. I'm just saying that's it's already been done. I don't remember Zee Hypnotist being in the community back then, so he might not have been aware of it and in any event, I thought CNCNZ always tried to come up with new things to prevent too much similarity among fansites. But don't take my comments the wrong way either. I'm not criticizing--just stating.

This type of contest, with the exact same topic, has already been done: http://cncden.com/cnc10.shtml .

Hypno, I know who C&C King is, given that I was also involved with CNC 10 with him. However, I can't see, and I certainly hope I'm right, EA taking that as a rational argument.

Homework? Teacher? No, no, no. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought this topic was for readers' comments on the article. I commented on it. If you weren't trying for any sort of intelligent article or analysis, but rather a mindless tirade that doesn't have any benefit to anyone, then that's fine by me. You're certainly entitled to write what you'd like. I just thought that someone who claims at pretty much every oppurtunity to be a veteran and caretaker of C&C might have higher goals. If all you wanted to get out of writing an article--not that you spent much time writing it--was a mindless unhelpful tirade, then I won't object. I misread your intentions. I thought you were trying to actually present something of value. Maybe you consider your article something worth your time writing, but I don't. That's my comment. That's not a personal attack. It's a comment, in the thread designed for comments, on what you produced. Again, I agree with you about the change in online play. I'm just disappointed that instead of creating something of value, you opted for a rant that doesn't benefit anyone, and certainly won't bring about any change in C&C 3.

I thought that article was mindless throughout, not just at the end. The sad part is, I agree with you. Online play has changed quite a bit over the last few years, obviously. However, rather than giving a thorough analysis of why its changed, what the developers have done, and what you'd like to see in C&C 3, you instead chose to go on a horrible tangent with no real point, and insult the players and the developers. The fact is, yes, the games are different. There are a number of factors contributing to this, none of which are analyzed well, if at all mentioned, by you. There are a number of specific things that should be done differently in C&C 3, though again, you fail to give any constructive suggestions, instead cursing at the developers. That'll help, I'm sure. The point is, developers create gameplay; players try to innovate with the framework of the game. While this might, judging from your article, be far over your head, that's the nature of the beast. The article I would have liked to see, and maybe was expecting, would have examined what decisions by the developers allowed this trend toward shorter games, which no doubt exists, to permeate, and how the players responded to those decisions. That would have been the proper way to isolate the issue, and actually create a good discussion of the points that maybe EA would consider for C&C 3. Again, I agree the trend exists, and I agree it's probably not something I love, despite playing online in all C&Cs on occasion. But your article was a horrible attempt at the issue, and while I'm sure you'll claim it was "opinionated" or whatnot, but the truth is, it was a piece without thought, a waste for all involved.