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[NE]Fobby[GEN]

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Everything posted by [NE]Fobby[GEN]

  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.
  16. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    C&C Renovatio - Cutting Edge Technology

    The #1 mod I'm looking forward to. Keep up the good work!
  17. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    Victory Games Drop BioWare Label

    Unfortunately, marketing teams control too much in game development, even though much of the time they'll make big game design mistakes. Maybe EA is trying to protect the Bioware name from dilution. Giving a bunch of studios the Bioware name would be digging the label's grave, because not all studios, especially under a corporate direction, will live up to Bioware's reputation. It makes sense to me that they'd withdraw the name from some studios. At first I was happy that Generals 2 was a "Bioware" game, because I thought it would guarantee a triple-A status and a good singleplayer campaign. But after the Generals 2 idea was scrapped and the game was given a new F2P multiplayer direction, having a Bioware label would not be good in the long-run.
  18. I don't understand why he acts like a good singleplayer game cannot have a good multiplayer. He makes it seem like it's a tradeoff; that teams who make a good singleplayer do not spend enough resources to make a good multiplayer. It does happen in some cases, but there are plenty of examples of games with both. I mentioned SC2 in the other thread, which has both a high quality single and multiplayer. C&C3 was relatively good in both besides some issues. The original Red Alert had both too. Lots of FPS with good single and multiplayers as well. I personally play RTS more for their singleplayer and backstory. I understand that they need to please the multiplayer audience because they're what keeps the game alive long after release, but not at the expense where they ditch the singleplayer for a game series (C&C) and label (Bioware) that are famous for their stories. As for the points on F2P, maybe I'm stuck in my ways, but I prefer spending the 50 or 60 bucks upfront (or much cheaper on sale) and getting the full game, rather than having to constantly make small transactions online and end up spending 100 bucks over a period of a few months. Anyway, it's still early to be judgmental; the quality of the game looks good and I'd be interested to see what exactly you need to pay for.
  19. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    EA_CIRE Discusses the New Command & Conquer

    I was hoping they'd just do a high-quality singleplayer and multiplayer game, maybe with some extra content and expansion packs after release. Not sure if the F2P change is a good thing. I personally play RTS for their singleplayer campaign, which is why I liked Starcraft 2 (long development, high production value, high budget, lengthy campaign, lots of cinematic and story value). Even with multiplayer, the game is still being supported frequently and there is a very lively online community. When SC2 blew C&C4 out of the water, it showed that there is a very high demand for classical style high-quality RTS game. So when they first showed of Generals 2 with the Bioware label, that's what I expected. Bioware is famous for its triple A campaigns - if this goes through, they'll lose that reputation they worked so hard to build and their label will become diluted. This looks like a complete change in direction and I really thought they'd get things right with Generals 2. If there's no singleplayer and you need to pay for units or factions, then I don't know if I'll be trying the game.
  20. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    Renegade X: Community Q&A Season 2 Begins

    We were thinking of including Black Dawn with the multiplayer release to make it more of a full SP&MP build of Renegade X. Presumably the file wouldn't be much bigger than Black Dawn (just a few MB of code and maybe a gig of maps) and that way people could uninstall Black Dawn and just have all of Renegade X on the full client version. Either way, it's a possibility we are still investigating, and it will depend on what people want.
  21. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    Renegade X: Black Dawn Released

    Hey guys, thanks for giving Black Dawn a try. In this post I'll be addressing a few positive and negative reactions from the team's perpsective. To the positive feedback, we appreciate your support and you follow our updates for more news on multiplayer soon. As for mirrors, we launched Black Dawn with 8 mirrors and 2 torrents. We didn't think this wouldn't be enough, since we expected many more mirrors to pop up. The amount of traffic and attention forced us to take down some of the official mirrors. You can check all available mirrors here - renxgame.com/ - we've gotten more than 50,000 hits in the past couple days, so be patient as we are trying our best to make the file more available. If you're getting any technical difficulties, please visit our forums and we'll try to help you from there. There were a few consistent negative comments that I'll talk about. First I'd like to make clear that the purpose of Black Dawn was to put out a preview of the game before the multiplayer. This is the first time Renegade X goes standalone, and thus it's the first time we make rounds on the internet outside of the C&C and UT communities, and the only real way a free game can advertise itself on big sites is through a demo release. Renegade X is free, but that does not make it immune to constructive criticism. We are constantly looking for ways to improve the experience, and this demo release was important to that process. Though keep in mind that we do have reasonable limits. Black Dawn has its bugs, but I don't think you can find another indie high quality C&C FPS singleplayer game like us. I would however like to focus on critiques that effect Renegade X in the long term, because that is what we are after, as a multiplayer game, just as we should not judge Battlefield 3 for its singleplayer. The main downfall of Black Dawn us was the AI. Epic released a standard AI with the UDK when it was originally released, and this is what we're using at the moment. The AI has some minimal functions and is able to follow simple directives, but we had our fingers crossed that Epic would improve AI with one of their monthly UDK releases. Our AI does not take cover, does not work as a team, and overall functions simplisticly, and to have intelligent enemies would require a few full-time AI programmers doing a year of work, and unfortunately we don't have those resources. Part of the reason why we didn't focus on AI is because on the long-term, the only AI we'll be seeing in multiplayer is the harvester, which has a simple function that the current AI should be able to handle with a few tweaks. Otherwise, most of our work on the bots was done in kismet, to at least make the campaign more enjoyable. Something else we've heard about was the voice acting. Most of what we used came straight out of Renegade. We agree that the flow at some parts is awkward, but we thought it would still be good to re-introduce the characters before throwing them into multiplayer. Getting a new person to play Havoc for example would probably get some flak as well, so we think reusing clips from Renegade's always.dat was a better idea. Though, the fact that we were able to make a 1-2 non-remake custom campaign and still find plenty of dialogue for the game and 15 minutes of cinematics is impressive to us and took a lot of work and rummaging, even if it was lacking in some places. We probably did 30% of the voice acting ourselves, and as most of you are probably aware, we are developers and not actors. Either way, this again is not something that effects the project on a long-term, because voice acting and character development is not a big theme in multiplayer as well. This also applies to cinematics. What we'd like to hear more of are comments about the long-term features as a whole - the HUD, the way weapons handle, the animations, the art and lighting, the vehicles, recoil, cameras, the effects, etc. And on all these fronts, we believe we're already on a much better ground than we were for multiplayer. These are all things that will effect us on the long term, and while not perfect and in need of tweaking, all of these things compared side-by-side to the UT3 version is a huge improvement. For those who haven't finished BD, we advice you to at least play levels 7, 8, and 9 as we feel that these were the most well done I hope you all enjoy the campaign and keep your eyes and hearts open to the multiplayer. Sincerely, Fobby
  22. [NE]Fobby[GEN]

    Renegade X: Black Dawn - Pre-Release Trailer

    It's a demo[nstration] of Renegade X on the Unreal Development Kit. It's singleplayer only, and features 1-2 hours of gameplay and cinematics. We would love to do a full 10-hour campaign, but we simply don't have the manpower to do that, and we'd like to go back to multiplayer soon.
  23. ^ This is probably one of the major reasons why people don't like EA developing C&C games. I've had great experiences with employees of EALA over the past few years, and there's no doubt that they were a friendly, talented bunch that cared for what they were making, but there's still a higher level of suits in the multinational corporation that call the shots. The higher ups didn't have a problem laying off lots of workers from the U.S and outsource their work to "low budget countries" (Mexico, China). There's a lot of examples of contention between the developers and the business heads. When Red Alert 3 was originally announced years before it went into development, EA had given the original team 11 months to develop it, and they simply decided that it couldn't be done. Likewise, Tiberium was cancelled because of contentions between employees and people higher in the hierarchy that had less to do with the development of the game. With C&C4, EA forced a skunkswork RTS model onto EALA. C&C4 also only had a 1 year development time, and several months before release, the EA corporate heads announced that most of the C&C team would be laid off. For reasons and others you mentioned, the "epic conclusion" to the Tiberian saga was the series' biggest flop. I don't blame the workers of course - if you gave them a bigger workforce, another 2 years of development time, and free reign in what RTS model they could use, then we could have potentially had an excellent game. But unlike quality developers like Blizzard and Bioware (we'll see what happens with Bioware now that it's a label), the business model between C&C3 and C&C4 was to pop out as many games as possible in a short amount of time, rather than take time to develop quality games that break the ice and please the fans. Now I'm not at all "anti-EA", I think there's a lot of good things they did for the community (C&C3 was pretty good, Battlecast Primetime, Community Summits, Battlecast Primetime, good PR). My point is that the workers at EALA have always been ernest people trying to do their best for the community and make a living. But the suits in charge of EA as a corporation just saw everything in quarterly cost-benefit numbers, which has hurt the C&C name over the long run. In 1998, Westwood owned 6% of the PC market, and by the millenium, it was clear that they wanted to expand C&C to multiple genres and platforms. A lot of that initial distaste for EA came after they cancelled what looked like promising games (or concepts) like Tiberian Incursion, Renegade 2, and Continuum. I believe they're already heading in a better direction though. Generals 2 was a good move, because its like starting fresh, with a fresh new engine as well. It's a good time to put away the Tiberian and Red Alert saga for now and see something that is totally unique to Bioware Victory. It also looks like they're going back to traditional base building. Starcraft 2 came out shortly after C&C4, and we were able to see the huge difference between the two games - SC2 was in development for several years, it was story driven, high quality, very balanced competitive, used what worked in the late 90s, and modernized. I think EA has learned. It looks like Generals 2 has been in development for some time, and won't be released until 2013, which means its development time has already been longer than the last few C&C games we've had. I think there's an effort now to live up to the Bioware name. How long will this effort last, I don't know, but I think Generals 2 will be the best game we've seen since Generals 1 at the very least.
  24. Woah, that's pretty cool. I wonder if it'll be multiplayer only, or if it'll have singleplayer and storyline. I also hope it takes place somewhere within the existing timeline, preferrably not C&C4 though.
  25. Not my favourite universe, but I can live with this - Generals is mostly EA's universe and I'm glad they have moved away from the Tiberian and Red Alert stories for now. And Frostbite 2 is a good move as well. C&C is back!
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