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[NE]Fobby[GEN]

Retired Staff
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About [NE]Fobby[GEN]

  • Rank
    Corporal
  • Birthday 14/05/1989

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  • Location
    Canada
  • Interests
    C&C Series, C&C Renegade, modding.

Command & Conquer Profile

  • Favourite C&C
    Renegade X

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  1. C&C (especially Red Alert 1) was really popular in the Middle East in the 90s, so although it's spooky news I'm not super surprised
  2. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    CNCNZ.com Will Prevail

    It was initially very sad to see CNCNZ closing down. I've been checking it on a daily basis for the last 13 years or so. CNCNZ is truly the last stand for C&C news in English, especially after CNCDen, PlanetCNC, and CNCHQ died many years ago. CNCNZ and Sonic in particular have been a great help to the modding community, especially our indie game, Renegade X. We truly could not have succeeded without you. It's sad to see Sonic leave, but it is good to see so many concerned community members come back and ensure that CNCNZ remains up. I hope Sonic comes back if EA decides to breathe some new life into the franchise. The last I heard about the C&C franchise was at the beginning of 2016 - EA corporate was looking (but not too actively) for a studio that could take over the brand. I think C&C is on the backburner, EA may or may not bring it back. At the same time, there are so many amazing initiatives in our community, from RenX to W3D Hub to OpenRA and many others. Our game is still actively being played and worked on, and that will continue. We've got some huge plans for our 1.0 update, and I hope CNCNZ will be around for that. I hope this is goodbye and not farewell, Sonic, do come back and visit.
  3. I can't believe it's been 7 years. I'm still checking CNCNZ everyday, hoping that new life will be breathed into this franchise. My memory of the C&C4 experience is a bit fuzzy, probably because my brain tries its best to block it out. But my impression is that the C&C4 gameplay model was a Chinese skunkworks project that EA corporate forced onto the C&C franchise, and the developers had to just stick with it. I was a part of the alpha tests, and I remember that none of the fellow testers (literally zero) liked the gameplay. I remember writing long detailed lists of suggestions for the developers, and some of those ideas were incorporated, but most of them were totally ignored. By the time the game was in beta, the testing team grew substantially, and the outcry grew even larger. They stuck with it, and it was a massive flop. After Tiberium was cancelled, the developers at EALA knew that they were about to get laid off at some point, and they were looking for jobs at other studios while C&C4 was being made. It was clear to them that they had little job security and no creative authority, and so that probably contributed to C&C4's lack of quality. As for the story, the cringe-worthy wife scenes come to mind, but I vaguely remember serious plot holes, and being saddened by the entire experience. Generals 2 could have been the high-budget reboot that C&C needed - I wasn't a huge fan of Generals, but C&C badly needed a triple-A game that didn't ruin the Tiberian and RA universes. Then, it became a F2P game with no singleplayer, and they lost me. Then, they cancelled the entire game in 2013, and the rest is history. Renegade X had a good relationship with EA, including with Patrick Soderlund, but unfortunately the corporation has a very high turnaround, so we lost most of our contacts. Everyone else bounced us around between different people, but since no one is in charge of the C&C franchise, we got no solid answers on anything, and no one had the full authority to make lasting deals with us. No one wanted to risk their job to give us conclusive answers on anything. So we just gave up with them. A lot of people cite RTS's decline as the reason why we didn't see another C&C game, but Starcraft 2 was immensely popular just after C&C4, and it used a traditional 90s-style RTS formula. Even if EA didn't want to take a risk with building a high budget RTS game, they could have made a C&C-themed shooter, as people still play Renegade and Renegade-themed games till this day, 14 years later. But like other companies, developers at EA don't have much creative control, and the corporation is more interested in short-term profits than building a quality franchise with a loyal following.
  4. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    Renegade X: Red Alert 2 Announced

    Very ambitious and I hope more people get on board. It is fairly easy to add buildings and vehicles using our framework. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHUAClssxG4
  5. My first exposure to C&C was the C&C95 demo. I played those missions over and over again at the age of 5. After that I became a comitted Westwood fan - bought all of the C&C games on PC, bought the Dune games and Nox. C&C was a huge part of my life. I helped develop two indie games (Renegade X and C&C Reborn), I started a huge clan, I wrote fan fiction, and I spent hours on community forums. I played over 3000 hours of C&C Renegade and got some of my RL friends into it. I absolutely loved the C&C95 and Tiberian Sun stories and spent many days thinking about it all. I do hope this is not the end of the franchise, but in some ways it is for me. I have a great deal of nostalgia for the older games, not just because they were good, but because they were unique for their time, and they filled my childhood with great memories and feelings. Unless EA produces a high-budget triple-A C&C RTS or FPS with a compelling story, I doubt I'll be getting back into C&C. Until then, I've been keeping myself occupied with Renegade X.
  6. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    W3D Hub Launched

    But why make a move to a new forum without involving W3D's biggest mod?
  7. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    W3D Hub Launched

    What does this mean for Bluehell Productions ad APB?
  8. I didn't visit the official C&C forums much, but its shutting-down symbolizes another end for C&C. It shows that they are no longer willing to even host a C&C-themed message board, let alone continue the franchise for the time being. It reminds me of the period between 2003-2007, where we saw no C&C games or news until C&C3. Hopefully C&C will come back someday, but who knows. For the time being, it's important to continue supporting C&C-themed indie games and mods.
  9. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    ModDB's Mod of the Year Awards 2014

    And be sure to vote for Renegade X for Indie of the Year http://www.indiedb.com/games/renegade-x
  10. Wow, this was a tough choice. Good poll. I was stuck between C&C95, Tiberian Sun, and Red Alert 2. I chose C&C95. Musically, RA2's soundtrack may be the best to me, but C&C95's was the most memorable. Call it nostalgia, I had a lot of fun as a kid listening to Act on Instinct, Mechanical Man, and No Mercy. They were very simple, yet made an unforgettable impact. TS had amazing ambient tracks. They really set up the mood and the feel of the game. I remember Klepacki once said that in hindsight, he should have made a few more musically-traditional tracks for TS, and that's why for Firestorm they included Killing Machines and Slave to the System. For RenX, we composed a lot of tracks that were remakes of original C&C95 tracks:
  11. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    Renegade X Beta 3 Almost Ready

    Hey, thanks for the feedback. Quite honestly, upon release, we were not sure what was causing the crashing problems. In beta 2, we thought we fixed it, but instead, crashes became more frequent. That problem has taken us months to pinpoint and fix. Early testing shows that the problem has been fixed for Beta 3. So it's not that we had a fix and saved it for a big content update. The problem actually took us several months to figure out. In that time, we've also fixed a number of other issues, added Volcano, among many other things.
  12. They've either given it to a new studio, or they're putting it on the backburner. If the former, I'd expect to hear from them in Q4 2014. If the latter, I don't expect anything this year and perhaps next year too.
  13. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    New & Improved CNCNZ.com Launched

    I too originally had trouble finding the forums (not really trouble, it just wasn't obvious where it was). Now it's fine, I'm glad it was fixed. Great work on the site. Same issue with me.
  14. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    EA_CIRE Says Goodbye

    Have some sympathy for him, people. CIRE/Eric is a great guy and I can attest that he was doing a lot behind the scenes for the C&C community. Remember that a PR guy's job is to represent a company, even when that company does things he disagrees with. I think Eric was a real fan genuinely working towards a good F2P C&C game. But like C&C4 and Tiberium, marketing probably made some bad decisions for this game and pushed them onto the developers. Besides that, there's things that are beyond EA's control too - the industry as a whole is giving a lot less attention to retail PC RTS games. The mobile and tablet game markets are taking a chunk of consumers away from PC and consoles. And many PC game developers are losing their jobs in the U.S and Canada. Some of those jobs are gradually being shipped to places where workers are paid less and do not question the tasks given to them.
  15. Unfortunately I'm really not surprised. When they announced Generals 2 I thought they were going in a great direction - Bioware title (even if it's just the label, there are/were certain standards attached to it), triple A singleplayer and multiplayer game, and a long development time. This was after C&C4 failed and SC2 clearly succeeded. It looked like it was starting to become clear to EA that you can't pump out games every 2 years and expect good products and lots of sales. So they started a clean slate by revisiting the Generals universe (so story-geeks like me can't complain about plot holes), which was a great move. They moved to Frostbite, and they planned a longer development time. It was almost too good to be true. What makes SC2 a good game is that Blizzard took its sweet time, revived and revamped the classic RTS formula, focused on balance and competitive gameplay, and put a lot of attention on singleplayer. Then all of a sudden, all of what I liked about Generals 2 was scrapped. When they switched to the F2P model, it seemed like they had no concept for the game. No one knew where it was really heading. They said no singleplayer, then people raged, then they said "ok, fine, singleplayer!" but didn't clarify if it would be part of 1.0 or a paid add-on. No one knew when it was going to be out, nor did we know how much of "Generals" would remain in it, or how much would be scaled back. Victory was refreshingly open with feedback, and CIRE was cool all the way through, but this is exactly what happened with Tiberium and with C&C4. Corporate forced something on the developer and the developer sank. I hope this is not the end of official C&C games. At the very least, it could be a few years before we see another C&C game. There was a 4 year gap between Generals and C&C3, and I think we're entering a similar phase now. The difference is, people were playing C&C games between 2003 and 2007. Renegade had a huge playerbase, and people were still playing Generals, RA2, and TS. Right now, C&C games are barely alive and very few people are playing. Most C&C sites have shut down or have stopped updating. Entire communities and clans have disappeared, and a dozens of mods and indie games have died out.
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