Jump to content

Matthias

Members
  • Content count

    31
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Matthias


  1. Tried to fix things up, but the German Wikipedia articles are way better as it has more high quality and recent sources. There is an interview http://www.gamestar.de/artikel/wie-schlimm-ist-electronic-arts-wirklich-im-reich-des-boesen,3059248,seite2.html (sadly only in German) where Louis Castle described how the creative freedom and unlimited budgets EA granted them, actually let to hiring too much inexperienced staff as well as feature creep and waste of developer resources in their games as all ideas, even the mediocre ones, were implemented. I always thought the opposite was the case: reducing workforce and cutting budgets. I am not sure if he ever made such statements in an English language article.


  2. Quote

    “EA killed Westwood”

    I agree that this seems to be a common misconception. However many publicly available sources with high impact all repeat that claim. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westwood_Studios#Acquisition_by_EA_and_liquidation is full of gaps, very one sided in that regard and contains a lot of unverified claims

    Quote

    In response to EA's buyout, many long-time Westwood employees quit and left Westwood Studios. [citation needed] 

    At the time of its liquidation, Westwood employed a third of the original Westwood Studios personnel [citation needed]

    Also these community run social media sites like https://www.facebook.com/westwoodstudios and https://twitter.com/westwoodstudios spread a one sided view making people only remember the positive elements. This nostalgic "what if" dream also reinforces the perception that something fully functional was taken from the community by evil corporate overlords.


  3. I was never disappointed Tiberium was canned, and this new footage has done nothing to change my mind.

     

    Yep, I have to agree on this. It reminds me of this terrible XCOM 3rd person shooter where you can "control" your AI combatants and blow up a lot of generic alien enemies. It might sound great, but become really trashy.


  4. I have no idea why they started C&C: Arena in the first place after Sole Survivor was so unsuccessful.

     

    EALA was forced to create a full game out of it in mere months by higher-ups at EA, leading to the Tiberian Twilight title we all know.

     

    Good marketing as they pretty much marketed those quick uninformed turn-ups into brave new design decisions in their "game designer interview" clips.


  5. Our September release is another huge jump, with over 1,100 changes and improvements by 17 authors.

     

    The headline changes in this build are:

    • Refined Fog of War behavior (buildings and ore/tiberium/spice are now frozen as they were last seen).
    • Added game options for starting units, starting cash, team construction, shroud, fog of war.
    • Reworked engineer behavior - C&C again uses the classic behavior, and RA/D2K external (C&C Generals style) capturing.
    • Overhauled firing, projectile, and explosion effects for all mods.
    • Native support for the D2K game files, significantly improving the artwork and sound quality.
    • Fixed windows installer problems.
    • A lot more bug, crash, and performance fixes.
    Please note that that OpenRA now requires GPU support for framebuffer objects. This should not be a problem for most computers manufactured in the last 5-7 years, but some older high-end GPUs may not work from this release onward.

     

    The full list of changes is far too large to include here, so we recommend clicking through to the human-optimized changelog or full list of commits. If youd like to get involved, the best point of contact is our IRC channel #openra (webchat).

     

    This release also adds beta support for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 assets. Work has started on an official Tiberian Sun mod, but we dont expect this to be ready for several more months. In the meantime, modders can take advantage of the new voxel and shp(ts) support in their own projects.

     

    20130915-explosions.png

    D2K now uses the original translucent explosion effects.

     

    20130915-lobby.png

    The overhauled lobby interface offers several new game options.

     

    20130915-ra2voxels.png

    An early test showing voxel units in OpenRA (we have no plans on shipping this!).

     

    7d1bce50-1ad0-11e3-9785-695dc29d1fdb.png

     

    We have also taken this time to overhaul our website. Its hot off the virtual press, so please let us know if you spot any typos or rendering glitches.


  6. OpenRASlogan.png

    Today we're announcing our long-overdue "Mammoth May Madness" release.
    In the last 7 months, 26 authors have contributed more than 1,100 individual changes and improvements.

    Some of the highlights in this release include:

    • Significantly improved AI.
    • UI improvements to the menus and lobby.
    • New UI for replays, spectators and defeated players.
    • New construction radius limits for C&C and D2K.
    • Repairable bridges.
    • Desert theater for RA.
    • Left-click mouse controls (beta).
    • 5 new missions for RA.
    • 20 new multiplayer maps across all three mods.
    • Significant balance improvements across all three mods.
    • More bugfixes than you can shake a tesla coil at.

    Screenshots

    resizedimage600215-lobby.png

    A Composite screenshot showing the new lobby tooltips and player color selector in the Dune 2000 mod

    resizedimage600338-shellmap.png

    The Red Alert mod includes a new main menu and desert-themed shellmap.

    67742daa-bbc5-11e2-8f6b-1a264c6116e3.png

    The C&C and D2K mods now require buildings to be constructed near a construction yard, reducing the effectiveness of multiple-building-queue base-walking strategies.

    bridges.png

    Bridges can now be repaired by sending an engineer into the rubble.

    Head to the Official Website or Desura to download.

    • Upvote 1

    1. Black Mesa Source
    2. OpenRA
    3. Urban Terror
    4. DOTA 2
    5. Settler 2.5 Return to the Roots
    6. OpenTTD
    7. Warsow
    8. 0.AD
    9. Hedgewars
    10. Dune Legacy

    In fact Black Mesa: Source is a mod and mostly everything on this list is Free/Libre Open Source Software except game files and not "Freeware" or "Free-2-Play" how they call it nowadays.

×