Command and Conquer

Behold, the beginning!

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

"He who controls the past commands the future, He who commands the future, conquers the past." -Kane.

Long ago, back before vanilla Dawn of War, back when Starcraft wasn't even a sketch in the minds of Blizzard, one franchise ruled above all others in the RTS genre, Westwood's Command and Conquer.

While some scholars argue Dune 2 was the first prototype of the real-time strategy genre, most fans and critics recognize Command and Conquer is where everything truly started, thus what we may now call Tiberian Dawn (and very appropriately) implemented what would became the hallmarks of any awesome and self-respecting RTS game:

• Well defined factions with their own quirks, ideologies and agendas.
• Mission-driven campaigns for all factions with a rich geopolitical and economic narrative.
• Skirmish games for good compstomp.
• Multiplayer capabilities to spend whole nights fighting with your bros.
• Patch support and an online community capable to produce new material as well as bringing impartial feedback.
• Awesome media including cool cinematics with LARGE HAMS and kick-ass OST.

In time the franchise split in three branches, all of them awesome in their own right and capable to compete alone with any other game setting while bringing their own unique features, their tale is also a cautionary one for any franchise for C&C, despite its many achievements and strong fanbase fell from grace and got cancelled.

Tiberian Universe

Those were awesome days, example of fanart photoshop.

Follows the struggle of The God-Emperor of Mankind Kane, widely considered the greatest Magnificent Bastard of the whole videogame industry (no kidding here, TV Tropes declared him god of Magnificent Bastards after competing with the likes of Tzeentch and Eldrad). Originating from the Biblical Genesis as Cain, the first murderer who was cursed by God with immortality to wander the "Land of Nod" for all eternity, he, after the crash of the element Tiberium into the Tiber River in Italy, became leader of the shadowy non-national superpower known as the Brotherhood of Nod, against the Global Defense Initiative, a military coalition formed by the United Nations, spanning nearly a century of warfare, both factions fight for the control of Tiberium, an alien substance which is slowly xenoforming the Earth, destroying the ecosystem but also giving mankind unique industrial and scientific possibilities.

By the third game, a new alien faction arrives - the Scrin, after Kane sends a false signal making them believe Earth has finally completed its transformation into a Tiberium world. It is soon revealed the terrible alien force which is threatening mankind with extinction are just a minor mining expedition with no real backup, a fact Kane takes advantage of to steal their technology in order to achieve his master plan, which by the fourth game allows him to clean Earth of Tiberium, even while he was trying the opposite during the previous games (EA trademark for you), and ascend to another plane of existence along with his followers.

The games of the series:

• Tiberian Dawn: where it all started, Earth is still widely similar to our own, this game features what may become the standard for the industry, including some of the best scenes ever.
  • The Covert Operations: more missions! And hard as fuck.
  • Sole Survivor: Just don't, I mean, seriously?! You control only one unit?! If i wanted to play a MOBA I would, well I would dig my eyes out with a melon baller but you get the point!
• Renegade: a FPS/TPS featuring Nick "Havoc" Parker, a trigger happy GDI commando, it seems this setting runs parallel with the main story of Tiberian Dawn, if you like your Halo-like shooter, by all means, feel obliged to play this game.
• Tiberian Sun: KANE LIVES! Cyberpunk heavy setting, with mutants, hints of the Scrin, cyborgs and futuristic weapons such as mechs, lasers and hover technology, it has arguably some of the best cutscenes and scenarios of the game, Uniquely, for Command and Conquer over all, it has the commanders of GDI and Nod as characters, not the player in front of his computer screen. Oh ya and the Mammoth Mk2 is awesome!
  • Firestorm: CABAL, the supercomputer of the Brotherhood of Nod, goes rogue, attempting to turn everyone into cyborgs to accomplish Kane's master plan. Included new scenarios, more options and units.
• Tiberium Wars: combining the the cyberpunk style with 20-minutes-in-the future of your Dale Brown novels, it introduces the Scrin, which are what if the Tyranids and the Eldar joined forces, the mammoth tank is back after some corporate nut tried to remove it from GDI's arsenal, did we mention you can upgrade your tanks with railguns?
  • Kane's Wrath: KANE IS BACK! This expansion centers on everyone's favourite dark messiah, with every mission showing large amounts of HAMtastic dialogues and Just as planned taken to the eleven, also, awesome new units and subfactions including each major power getting its Lord of War styled superunit. Steel Talons mechs! Cyborgs again! And Black Hand infantry! There is one downside; the sole campaign focuses on Nod. Even though it had the most support from EA, this still disappointed fans who wanted campaigns for GDI and the Scrin.
• Tiberian Twilight: And here is where everything ended, including C&C's reputation, while the game wouldn't have been quite bad as a spin-off, the brutal change in the gameplay mechanics, the cartoonish graphics (particularly cruel after the masterful grimdark style of Tiberian Sun and Tiberium Wars) and the awful plot inconsistencies and over-exhaustion of the brand made this a huge disappointment, it was later revealed that what the fans bought was originally going to be a free-to-play MMO real tactical game for the weaboo market... Well at least Kane managed to save the world from tiberian infestation and ascend, still, Tiberian Twilight was to C&C what Soulstorm was to Dawn of War, minus its funny spots.
• Tiberium Alliances: browser RTS, make what you want about it, although when compared with the competition it's actually quite nice.

Red Alert series

Red Alert 3 featured so much fanservice that it ended in its logical conclusion.

Originally considered a prequel but ultimately earning its own continuity it starts with Albert Einsten creating a time machine to go back to the 1920s and erase Hitler from history, this ends not as planned. Red Alert follows the battle between the Soviet Union and the Allies during a series of World Wars where every faction seems to deploy increasingly crazytastic units which includes tesla weaponry, chrono-machines, mind-controlled animals and some other batshit insane wacky technology. The franchise consists on three games and its expansions, the two later add a new faction, first Yuri, a rogue soviet psyker who attempts to mind-control the entire planet and has a badass army of flying saucers, hulk-like soldiers, virus snipers, grinders that recycle mind-controlled people into natural resources, and some other nasty grimdark stuff, and the second features the Empire of the Rising Sun, a God-Emperor-worshipping Technology Cult which adds transforming mechas, a psionics schoolgirl and beam-katanas, yes, Red Alert is that weird what you may expect from an elegan/tg/entlenman production.

The games of the series

• Red Alert: After messing up with time, Einstein leaves the stage open for Iosif Stalin to try to conquer Europe, awesome intro is awesome, the rest is history.
  • Counter-Strike: more missions!(yeah, back in that time that was the best thing you could expect from an expansion).
  • Aftermath: What is this, new units and campaigns?! Bring it on!
• Red Alert 2: The soviets come back and invade the United States (yes that doesn't make a lot of sense given America was barely mentioned in the original), did we mention the russians are backed up by the cubans, the libyans and the iraqis? Prism technology, desolator troops to irradiate whole areas with nuclear power, tesla tanks, chronospheres, weather control devices and iron curtain shields are used in this war as standard weaponry, what's that Adeptus Mechanicus, you can't keep with Old Earth technology? On a side note, this is where C&C started to feature some blatant fanservice, namely lieutenants Eva and Sofia and special agent Tanya and this is where Red Alert started to be stop being "Serious" and start getting campy.
  • Yuri's Revenge: creepy former adviser of soviet premier Romanov (yes, we know that was the Tsar surname), Yuri has been using the soviet invasion onslaught as a distraction to build a network of psychic dominator devices to mind-control the whole planet (what's up eldar, you can't keep up with Old Earth technology?), unfortunately for him and thankfully for everyone else the Allies travel back in time in order to topple him (and you though Orikan the Diviner was cheating hard), ensuring during the process a temporal alliance between the soviets and the allies to crush him. By the way there is a mission in the moon featured in the soviet campaign, sadly up to Red Alert 2 most bad guys campaigns weren't considered canon. Sadly Yuri's army, which is one giant insect away from being a B movie come to life, doesn't have a campaign, it may be broken but people still thought it was fun to play.
• Red Alert 3: The soviets attempted to pull the time travel trick by themselves, they succeeded at killing Einstein, with the unforeseen consequence of turning Japan into the Empire of the Rising Sun, by this point and with the inclusion of Japan you know this has gone completely bonkers, and just for good measure EA brought Tim Curry, George Takei and J.K. Simons as bosses of each major faction, along with some other celebs to ensure this release can go hand-to-hand with Dawn of War in terms of LARGE HAMS, seriously they even got David Hasselhoff as the new president of United States, amusingly and yet sadly it seems like Red Alert 3 didn't sell as well or fast as Tiberium Wars, still, an awful lot of people liked the narmy catoonish graphics, new balance and the cast-overload, grimdark is overrated! Sadly it didn't keep Yuri.
  • Uprising: singleplayer only, but with awesome new units, a campaign featuring the background of Yuriko Omega, the above mentioned psionic schoolgirl and a complete disregard for balance in the form of units such as the Empire's gigafortress and the allied harbinger gunship, what's up Tau, you can't keep with our firepower? It has a very cool Challenge system which allows you to fight against the commanders of each faction Dark Crusade style. The main campaigns were pretty boring though, way too short, bare bones story with very little humor and the Soviets getting favoritism with two missions over the Allies and Empire (one extra one in their campaign, one of the Empire's three missions is spent using Soviet units) and they lack any of the silliness that made them fun in the last two games.

Generals series

Unrealistic scifi? You mad?

With Tiberium becoming Science Fiction, and Red Alert grouned in the anachronism of the Soviet Union (1991 break up, generals release, 2003) that EA could only save by embracing the camp of it's setting there was a hole in the Command and Conquer line up for something more grounded and serious. So they came up with Command and Conquer generals, a 20 minutes in the future spin-off with no relation with the two previous settings, instead based on present-day news about the War on Terror and the spread of radical Islam. It also represents a complete change in the game economy which shows a dangerous amount of Starcraft influence(like buildings are built by conventional worker units instead of giant 3D printers), still, depict some purists arguing this wasn't a real C&C most fans welcomed the fresh air it brought along with the opportunity to play a Present-Day modern-warfare themed game which still had some scifi/tongue-in-check elements. Enter the modern world, where the Islamic State Global Liberation Army ravages the mideast in order to achieve their shadowy agenda, the United States of America and China (soviet replacement in the setting as the commies are no longer around) join forces to show the evil terrorists they can't mess around with the new world order. Expect generous amounts of Chinese nuclear weapons, USA showing off its hightech this-is-the-future drone warfare, and the religiously fanatical GLA bombing Infidels with anthrax weaponry piloted by suicide bombers expecting 72 virgins. Seriously, this was before Al-Qaeda showed up and the Islamic State became a critical Real Life issue, the game became prophetic in a nasty way. EA attempted to make a sequel by 2013, as a multiplayer oriented F2P, naturally it ended bad, in fact, so bad it got cancelled.

The games of series:

• Generals: In the modern world, great leaders solve their conflicts with words like... Awesome trailer aside, you got your three factions, modern USA, communist China will be communist and mideast Islamic State Global Liberation Army, great variety of tactics, fun missions, sadly it lacked the awesome cutscenes of the Tiberian and Red Alert series and barely explains where the GLA came from, still, you can always get your cutscenes by just watching CNN.
  • Zero Hour: New subfactions! More units, and missions! Also cutscenes! Although these were more like CNN news, but that's ok, it also brought a challenge mode where you fights against the generals of each faction (ergo the name of the game).
• Generals 2: Was looking awesome and ready to reignite the franchise, unfortunately EA cancelled it, oh the pain, the pain! T_T , this is how it was supposed to be but no, it could not become real... Anyway, we all hope this is not the end of the franchise :3

The fall of a franchise (|but we know it will come back!)

One may wonder, why is it a franchise which lasted so long faded away into nothingness? The answer, surprising, is not quite as simple as pointing out at EA. As with many other matters related with the industry, there is far more than meets the eye.

Command and Conquer started strong; as in every successful product there was a good balance between investment and sales. By the first Red Alert sales were in millions, and that was in a time when you didn't hear about Call of Duty blockbuster releases. Unfortunately it seems like the original creators at Westwood didn't have the experience to keep with the monetary success of the game. Triple-A game development costs are high and new technologies were appearing back then - Tiberian Sun proved to be a complete designing challenge as it implemented isometric view and relied heavily in 3D designs, programming a game which represented a massive challenge. As such, Westwood started to delay the release date.

By this point, EA, which have been investing as producers of the game decided it was time to take things in their hands and get something ready for the market. After all, they were expecting to earn back their investment. The end result was a quite nice game, but with a lot of content cut; the possibility of a third faction in the Forgotten was killed in order to meet the release date. Most players didn't notice it, but it was a precedent.

Red Alert 2 seemed to stabilize the situation; 2 factions, an expansion with a third faction and lots of goodies were very welcome, things seemed to be in good order. However, Westwood and EA decided to expand their market, as by this point Starcraft was becoming the dominant RTS and with so much competition around it appeared to be a sound idea. This however was not the case; Renegade was a complete new setting gameplay-wise, which meant more investment in more development, most of which was trial-and-error, while at the same time having to compete with established franchises such as Counter-Strike, MoH, CoD and the likes. While Renegade managed to sell half a million copies, it was quite short for a C&C game, particularly after every previous C&C getting the million mile.

This was the state of affairs when EA decided to make some changes in the way the team worked, they have been trying to get the Las Vegas bureau to grant them permission to build a new campus where they may get Westwood a new home (and probably keep an eye on them). Unfortunately the Las Vegas bureau weren't so cooperative when it came to terrain sales, so EA declared they would open a new campus in Los Angeles so everyone had to pack and go live there. Of course not everyone was happy with this and a lot of people decided to stay and create their own company, which would become Petroglyph Studios of Empire at War glory.

By this point, and with Generals on the market, everyone was wondering what was going to happen with the original Tiberium and Red Alert series. The release of The Lord of the Rings films, which made a lot of neckbeards happy, created a hype which ended in the new Electronic Arts Los Angeles studios (EALA) making a RTS in order to cash the franchise, and if this sounds familiar to you, yes, that's how EA rolls.

Apparently this was the end of C&C, but in 2006 EA announced Tiberium Wars, and the fandom rejoiced. After 3 years Command and Conquer was back, and not just back; Kane was back, the Tiberium was back. The game easily achieved over a million sales and had become the hotspot in a time where there was no real competition in the market (aside from Supreme Commander, but even then, no one beats Kane). Unfortunately, the cracks started appeared; a public used to Starcraft's continuous patches and updates, as well as old-school gamers who haven't learnt or forgotten anything became a recurring presence among the community - constantly complaining about the lack of balance, how things were far better back during previous games or just simply complaining for the sake of it, ruining everyone's day and posting confusing feedback, so yeah, /tg/ is not unique in that sense.

From this point on, there was also a problem with the focus of the franchise. EA wanted badly to turn C&C into an e-Sport RTS, and some opportunist professional gamers quickly took advantage of the situation to promote their own views of how C&C should be (exclusively a multiplayer, Starcraft style game with no real interest for single-player campaigns), hoping to emulate Starcraft success on that field. Of course, this was not going to work as EA does not understand what long-term support means. Furthermore, polls had shown that most people played C&C solely for the singleplayer; Kane's Wrath, which was released with some truly awful imbalances and bugs, managed to sell well even if it wasn't actually made by EALA but a subsidiary studios.

Red Alert 3 promised to be good, it could not fail, or so EA thought, what they didn't understand is that it's not enough to add some celebrities and fanservice along with light-hearted cartoonish graphics into a game to make it successful. Also, by this point, the release rate of the C&C games were one per year, as EA were also trying to emulate Activision's Call of Duty rate of production, in the end they managed to get their million sales, but not without counting the standalone expansion Uprising and a PS3 version of Red Alert 3. Add to this crappy DRM software and the fact they did forget to add a digit in some CD-keys and you may understand why some people were not very happy.

Attempting to save the day, EA announced the production of Tiberium, a FPS (yes, we see a pattern here) which was supposed to be a link between Kane's Wrath and the next C&C, it looked quite nice but a few months later EA announced they had cancelled the project because of its bad quality, even while production was apparently very advanced.

Thus EA decided to play the master card, Tiberian Twilight, the epic conclusion of the tiberian saga, the game to end all games, with Kane and Tiberium and robots and lasers... as a real-time tactics game, with the Scrin removed, a badly written storyline and a complete change in atmosphere from the previous two games. Everyone got very pissed; as previously pointed out by some fans, it could have worked well as a spin-off, but it broke with too many traditional gameplay elements to be considered a classic RTS. Shortly after that, EALA was closed...

John Riccitiello, we really need our old evil corporate overlord back.

It did seem like it was truly the end of the franchise when suddenly EA announced they were making Generals 2. It seemed like a logical choice as it would be a continuation of the spin-off they have created, thus there will be no "it doesn't feel old school". But of course, EA couldn't keep with it and decided to announce the game will be F2P, with no singleplayer elements, even while they themselves had revealed C&C had always been a franchise mostly played due its singleplayer. There was also the matter about the name of the new studios in charge of the game, first named Victory Games, then Bioware Victory, and then Victory Games again. Promises of adding skirmish and campaigns managed to steam-off the community although some nay-sayers keep beating the dead horse and promoting discontent telling everyone the franchise was dead, and then something terrible happened, they got it right, but not for the reason most whiners thought.

John Riccitiello, then the CEO of Electronic Arts, quit, and it was later revealed that he had been the only one keeping the project and the whole franchise afloat and safe from EA hardline corporate suits. The new CEO and his buddies decided enough was enough and cancelled C&C Generals 2 (then renamed Command and Conquer 2013) and closed "Victory" Games, getting most of the people from the studios fired. And just to make sure no one could resurrect the project they broke the Cloud they were using as the main repository of the game data and development.

Thus, a great franchise ended and many tears were dropped. On one hand we can see that neither Westwood nor EA knew exactly how to capitalize their successes; bad executive decisions were evident, with the lack of longterm support and the inability to know when to actually listen to the fans and when to ignore them whenever some exclusivist group became too vocal, which ensured an erratic history. On the other hand, some people simply couldn't keep their mouths shut, while a great deal of the community knew what they wanted and were open to some positive changes, there were too many voices who wished to turn C&C into some other's game rip-off or just stay in the 1995 era with sprites and two factions as the standard of every game - this evolved into fandom wars of such epic proportions even 4chan denizens would have been impressed. Eventually the whole thing fell apart, showing that even the greatest successes do not assure continuity if there isn't unity and clear objectives to achieve.

TL;DR, Don't worry guys, we all know in a couple of years EA or someone else will resurrect the franchise, because C&C cannot stay down!

"You can't kill the Messiah." -Kane.

Tiberian Gallery

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  Democracy is not negotiable!

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  GDI lego fans make it happen!

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  Old school photoshop.

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  You don't get more cyberpunk that Tiberian Sun's Brotherhood of Nod.

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  Reddish and cybernetic, the way the Adeptus Mechanicus like it!

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  Beware Tiberium's mutating power!

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  Tyranids wish their monstrous creatures were half as good as a Scrin Eradicator Hexapod.

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  Skillful fans have been capable to make minis of some of the units.

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  Sadly it seems like EA followed the taurox and centurion designing vibe with C&C4.

Red Alert Gallery

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  Hitler making a cameo.

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  We got comrade Stalin!

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  And professor Einstein!

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  Dem fanservice!

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  THE LEVELS OF WEABOO ARE OVER 9000!

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  More anime...

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  Soviet fans trying to achieve enuff dakka.

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  2000100,000 volts coming up!

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  The Empire of the Rising laughs at silly things such as logic weapon design.

Generals Gallery

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  Campcom style.

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  We love our boxes.

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  It's hard to be GLA in these days...

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  Problem titanicus?

So what next?

While nowadays, the only C&C which still receives support is Tiberium Alliances, making it effectively the only C&C still alive, there have been a few attempts to make C&C-styled games, with one of the most prominent being Petroglyph's End of Nations, which proposed the possibility of up to 50 players fighting in the same map. Sadly, after a complicated development phase, Petroglyph's then publisher Trion Worlds announced the game was going to become into a MOBA, and then all production was put on hold. By 2014 all mentions of the game in Trion's site were removed, with the domain for the game's webpage being abandoned.

Still, Petroplyph didn't give up and made Grey Goo, a very cool RTS which features three factions: the nanomachine-lifeform Goo, the industrial-punk alien Beta and the early Dark Age of Technology Humans; it follows many of the traditions of the 90s despite it being more scifi-ish than C&C what with being hundreds of years in the future. Still, the C&C legacy is there. Even more recently, they released 8-Bit Armies, an indie RTS collection and love-letter to old-school RTS games that's very much the closest Petroglyph's gotten so far to recreating C&C in all but name, right down to the interface and pseudo-pixelated graphics.

Elsewhere, Eugen Systems, the developers of C&C Generals-like Act of War, WW2 themed RUSE and the Cold War-styled Wargame series (yes, these frenchies CV is made of awesome) launched Act of Aggression, a classic RTS with 3 20-minutes-into-the-future factions reminiscent of the C&C Generals and Tiberium universes. While AoA is definitely a tough game for starters, many old-school grizzled veterans will find themselves at home, easily recognizing the possibilities of tank rushes, superweapons, specialist units and overall that turn-of-the-millennium feeling which made life back then so awesome. By the way, their publishers are Focus Home Interactive, the guys behind many recent GeeDubs-IP based games.

Then of course, there are mods. Due to a mix of popularity, age and genre (which add together to mean lower rez models don't look quite as bad), Command and Conquer games are some of the most widely modded games there are, meaning that though official games have ended for some times, mods that are practically full expansion packs worth of content live on. Of course most mods are poor quality or never get anywhere but as a whole there are always diamonds, a few cool examples are:

• C&C3: Tiberium Essence (which revamps the game and especially the units to be much more reminiscent of Tiberian Sun, albeit updated)
• C&C Generals: Shockwave and Rise of the Reds from the same team (the latter having evolved into becoming the closes there is to an actual Generals 2), though of the two Shockwave is better if you don't have friends thanks to it's enhanced General Challenge.
• C&C Renegade X (a complete remake of the original Renegade made in the Unreal Engine, and notably given the green light by EA for an official release)
• C&C Generals Mideast Crisis 1 and C&C 3 Mideast Crisis 2
• C&C Yuri's Revenge Mental Omega (a reimagining of Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge)
• Red Alert 3: Paradox: Officially a dead mod, but not one from a lack of effort as the sheer number of 3d renders they did manage to make attests to it. Paradox died because red alert 3, as a game engine, was just really hard to mod. Still what they did make is interesting, even if it amounts to "fan fiction" and is worth a read on the remade wiki. Special notes goes to there version of China: which is enough to make even a Death Korp trooper go "Woah."

See also

• C&C Wiki, for those of you who want to explore more.
• CnCNZ, longtime fansite with news, updates and goodies.
• Frank Klepacki, composer of many of the C&C tracks.