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OWA

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Everything posted by OWA

  1. This is good news! CNCNZ has always been a cornerstone of the community for C&C fans everywhere, so it's great to hear that there are some plans for shaping it further!
  2. This channel is awesome! Great for quick reference when we're looking at balancing intentions for Apocalypse Rising!
  3. That's quite a big assumption and generalisation of the mobile market and there's not really a way of proving whether it's true or false. EA must know something that we don't if they are wading into the Mobile Strategy market at this stage with C&C, however trends do come and trends do go.
  4. EA's metrics probably say something different. Despite there not being much of an audience within the core fanbase of the franchise, it will probably (and unfortunately) find an audience with casual mobile gamers who play games like Clash of Clans and Mobile Strike. that's the audience I bet they are wanting to poach and C&C seems (to EA) a big enough name to throw into the mobile scene to get those players. Data does lie sometimes, but unfortunately I think EA might make bank on this despite the core community's dissent.
  5. I never said that. I just pointed out that it's more balanced than Tiberian Sun. My point to ask the people still playing it competitively was an answer to the question "Where's the fun in Generals/Zero Hour when bugs and balancing are at their worst?"
  6. Ask the community of players that are still playing it competitively over at https://www.gamereplays.org/cnczerohour/ It's a lot more balanced than Tiberian Sun, for example.
  7. OWA

    The Ultimate Free-to-Play PC Games List

    I still don't get why there needs to be a separate list for game that are multiplayer only w/skirmish. Renegade X, Unreal Tournament 4, World of Padman and others in your list are multiplayer only w/skirmish as well, so it's pretty inconsistently categorised.
  8. OWA

    The Ultimate Free-to-Play PC Games List

    That's not stated in the criteria on the first post of this thread. Both APB and TSR feature a Skirmish mode, just as Renegade has MP Practise. What's your definition of a "complete" game? Renegade X is on the list, but has near enough the same feature set that APB and TSR have. (The Black Dawn singleplayer shouldn't count because it's not part of the main game build and you need to download an entirely different client to play it). TI and DTA deserve to be on the list for sure, especially when games like Envirobear are on there. :v
  9. OWA

    The Ultimate Free-to-Play PC Games List

    Red Alert: A Path Beyond and Tiberian Sun: Reborn aren't on the list. Figured I'd put them here since Renegade X is on the list. You can get them here: https://w3dhub.com/ I'm interested to know why standalone projects such as DTA and TI aren't allowed to be on the list and have their own thread just because they are mods. Why is that any different to being a "game"? They are standalone and people can play them without the original game, so that should be merit enough right? Not all the games in the other thread are free either. :s I'm also happy to argue that APB and TSR aren't mods, because they technically aren't anymore.
  10. OWA

    Board/card games

    Catan and Scythe are my jam. I also like games like Evolution (a game about creating creatures and getting food) and Kolejka (a game about queuing). The Battlestar Galactica board game is also fantastic. Trying to find out who the Cylons are and then attempting to stop them is brilliant and nail bitingly fun! xD
  11. If this open SAGE engine becomes viable in the future, I would totally design a non-C&C game for it. It would be good to actually have a semi-decent RTS-centric engine to develop on. A lot of modern engines are designed around making games with limited amounts of actors (FPS, RPS etc) which isn't too great when making an RTS. Basically, creating an RTS without a unit cap on a modern game engine is fairly tricky to do without having big performance hits. So there are more applications for a project like this rather than just remaking the original games. Just sayin'.
  12. OWA

    Forged Battalion

    That's fair I guess. I had a lot of fun playing Reloaded on the sofa with friends and customising hilarious armies to fight each other with. It was quite enjoyable. Northgard is definitely worth a look in that case then. It's a pretty good looking game and plays pretty well whilst taking inspiration from it's contemporaries. That's fair. It seems like we haven't had one of those in a while (apart from Halo Wars 2 and a load of indie projects that consistently miss the mark). I wouldn't consider Total War a hybrid of RTS and TBS, but rather a hybrid of RTT and TBS. Because you're given a set amount of units with no base building or resource gathering, I feel that Total War's battle mode is a Real Time tactics game rather than a clear-cut RTS. TW is a PC juggernaut of strategy in general these days and the large audience it commands does give me hope that there's still some killer games left to come along within the genre and blow our minds. The question is who will be making them.
  13. OWA

    Forged Battalion

    That's totally your opinion. Personally I think that Reloaded is better than Armageddon (basically because Armageddon hasn't aged as well as it could of and Reloaded has a ton more options and customisation to play around with). I personally found the game quite fun. I mean the campaign wasn't great, the movement was a bit janky, expanding across the map was painful and the units didn't have much depth to them as the could have, but they did fairly well to command my attention for as long as they did and I think that it's a good game to introduce people to the RTS genre with. The C&C references in the names of the enemy generals were a nice touch too. I mean again you're entitled to your opinion, but I think that they did ok, just not great. I depends what you define as a "proper RTS" I suppose. Have you tried Halo Wars 2? It's actually a good attempt at an old skool RTS (even if it is exclusively on Windows Store). Also, if you liked "The Settlers" try Northgard. It's fantastic. Personally though, my hopes are hinged on Iron Harvest for the title of "next great RTS". I'd love to round up a band of the C&C community old guard and make something cool in unity, but at the end of the day I don't have the time. I'd love it if someone else could get it right though. there's definitely a market for a fun RTS to slot into the C&C shaped hole that's currently present in the RTS genre.
  14. OWA

    Forged Battalion

    Team 17 has actually been doing alright these past few years and have begun to publish games as well as develop in-house (they still make Worms ). They recently published Yooka-Laylee, which was a cool platformer by some of the guys who made Banjo Kazooie. The long and the sort of it is that they aren't the worst company to team up with. They are also one of the longest surviving indie studios around, which speaks volumes. Whilst Petroglyph haven't made a GOOD RTS since Grey Goo (yes that game was good), 8-Bit Armies wasn't necessarily a BAD game. It missed the mark by subtly promising C&C-style gameplay and not delivering; but despite it's flaws it was still a fairly fun game with good intentions (even if base expansion was horrific and unit micromanagement was a pain). The console version of that game is interesting though. The unit build and selection controls are quite unique to the genre. I'm really eager to see what Petroglyph do with this new game. There's less than a handful of veteran strategy studios around that are willing to make a C&C-styled RTS these days, so I'm just glad that Petroglyph still backs the sub-genre with games. Let's not be hasty and rule the game out for it's bad trailer until we've played it. Early access is next year, so you never know, it might actually be good.
  15. Just threw in a little bit of cash. CNCNZ occupies an important place in my browser's start page, so I'm more than happy to help out.
  16. The point you quoted was more aimed at the people who were saying that they didn't really like Discord as a platform. What I have observed is that as the online world has evolved, conventional forums are used for much more permanent discussion. Our W3D Hub General Discussion forum, for example, is mainly full of player feedback these days. This is great because we can go back and look at that whenever for reference. However if users are having a discussion about which C&C game is the best, most of the time it happens in some sort of chat app, like Discord, because the conversation being had is far less important and easier to discuss instantly. I'm not saying move CNCNZ to discord, because forums are still very useful for permanent discussion. I am saying, lets get the Command & Conquer community (as a whole) a Discord, so that all remaining C&C communities have a platform to enjoy and discuss C&C as well as collaborate and promote everyone's sites. Ultimately it should serve to bring us closer together, because EA is no longer a central point for C&C.
  17. Maybe I should reiterate. What I meant was an additional Discord for the C&C community. Individual communities would keep their discords and use the new one to promote their community and guide fans where they need to go. Think of it as a neutral bridge between all of the modding communities where we can all meet up and talk regularly about C&C community topics and combine our efforts when anyone is in need of help. Kind of like the old modding networks that you used to see around 10ish years ago, but brought forward to use more accessible infrastructure. The main reason that I want to push this is that I feel isolated in my own community and want to share stuff they we are making with the rest of the community on a regular basis. At the end of the day, whether you like discord or not, it's one of the easiest ways to engage with a community of fans directly these days.
  18. I heard the news after leaving home to go on holiday, so I've been trying to keep up to date with what's been happening. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Sonic for all of the awesome work that he's done to keep CNCNZ flying over the years. CNCNZ has been my source for news around the community for some years now and it's always had it's finger on the pulse of C&C. Good luck to Zee with taking this place on! Long live CNCNZ! I also wanted to apologise for the lack of help that we (W3D Hub) were able to muster when we were asked to help out with fixing the frontpage a couple of months back. We dropped the ball there and should have responded to help. We're all on the same team after all. Something that I wanted to raise, with this in mind, is that with official C&C at an all time low we should try and bring our fractured community together a bit more. What I mean by that is pulling together an official (to us) C&C Community Discord & Steam Group (and any other services that we can think of) that is run by all of the major C&C communities (CNCNZ, PPM, CNC Saga, W3D Hub, CNC Net, C&C Online, C&C Reddit, Ren X etc.). This way we can meet and discuss all things C&C together as a whole community and keep in touch with what we're all up to, as well as provide fans with a single place to gather and discover all of the communities that are still supporting C&C. What do you guys think?
  19. OWA

    Halo Wars 2

    Hey guys. I don't really post here that often, but I figured I'd share a video of what I'm working on currently. Professionally, I work for Creative Assembly; the creators of the Total War series. However, I'm now working on Halo Wars 2 and I've gotta say, it's the closest I've ever been to making a C&C game and it's feeling pretty good! Here's our latest video on the multiplayer side of things. Hope you guys enjoy!
  20. I disagree. Any engine can be refactored and made ready for the current generation of games if it is fit for purpose. the SAGe engine does RTS very well, so upgrading it wouldn't be a problem for a team at EA if they had a couple of years to bring it up to date. The SAGE engine a powerful AAA classic RTS engine for modders which is evident by the amount of great total-conversion and gameplay mods out there for games such as Generals, C&C3 and RA3. Starcraft II's editor is powerful, but it is limited because players cannot import their own content. The original Dawn of War had a wide array of modding tools, but both DoW2 and CoH are heavily lacking in any kind of mod support. This is why great mods like Rise of the Reds and Shockwave win moddb awards, because C&C is one of the only franchises that has truly embraced modding. Tiberium Wars was a fantastic game in my opinion, but everything after Kane's Wrath seem to slip downhill very quickly. Also, your point about Civilization is wrong. Civ is a turn-based strategy game (TBS) not a real-time strategy game (RTS). Comparing C&C to Civ is like comparing Fifa to Football Manger. The games are similar in what they do, but the execution is completely different. I totally agree. In the current state of gaming, we see a season of FPS games that oversaturate the market. Battleifled 1, CoD: Infinite Warfare and TitanFall 2 are all AAA shooters that have been released this year, with two of them being made by EA. With that, I'd say that another C&C FPS is highly unlikely, but we can dream!
  21. OWA

    Halo Wars 2

    The game is coming to PC as well with mouse and keyboard controls. So it's not just the Xbox folks who get it this time. The original game is getting a PC port as well! The MS store integration is due to Microsoft's play-anywhere strategy and DX12. Play anywhere is basically a way of giving players who have both platforms the game by allowing them to only buy it once. I.E. I bought the PC version, but I also now own the Xbox version free of charge. DX12 is pretty explanatory, since it's a Win10 only API. Blitz is a mode that's designed to bring new players into the RTS genre without all of the overhead learning that's required with core mechanics like base building and resource management. It's the mode for the casual gamer who doesn't have 30mins+ to sink into a standard game.
  22. OWA

    Halo Wars 2

    Hey there, glad to know that you're interested! We're actually building off of the original Halo Wars game engine, which in turn is based off of the Age of Mythology engine. So the tech is pretty old, but our guys have really done an awesome job in upgrading it to look nice and modern.
  23. This has got to be one of my personal favourites. Such an awesome and brutal riff. lml
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