16th of March, 2010, the official release date of Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight (C&C4). It's already been over a year after the release of C&C4, the last and probably the worst Command and Conquer Tiberium series ever made by Electronic Arts Los Angeles (EALA). Sad to say, the original EALA team was disbanded before the release of C&C4. Thus, there won't be any patch for the rest of the Command and Conquer series published before the release of C&C4.
I saw this coming after playing the close-beta of C&C4. I was so disgusted by the gameplay. It was completely different from Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium War and I will not classify it under Real-Time Strategy (RTS) like Electronic Arts (EA) does. What EA did is just making use of a famous title to sell their new idea, a cheap marketing strategy that betray the trust of the fans and possibly even violate the true purpose of game designing as the only thing that EA is thinking about is making more money instead of making games that are enjoyable.
Once again, EA had betrayed the trust of Command and Conquer fans around the world and made billions out of them and I sympathizes those loyal fans that trusted EA blindly without seeing a clear picture of what’s going on. There were two major features of a RTS that were removed in C&C4, resource gathering and the need of building a base. Even in old RTS like Dune II and Warcraft, they have implemented resource gathering as a need to build up an army to overwhelm your opponent and building and organizing your base formation is an important asset of a RTS. The focal point of a RTS should be build up your base, collect resources, build up an army and decimate your opponent’s base. Not having a ‘crawler’ unit going around spamming units that doesn’t need resources and capturing checkpoints to build up a counter in order to win. These are the golden rules made by the first generation of RTS but yet they are broken by C&C4.
Probably some fans might argue that it shouldn't be about the genre that makes a game 'Command and Conquer'. They are right. At times, it's not really about the genre of the game that makes a game worthy of a title. It is also about the story. Command and Conquer: Renegade is a First-Person Shooter developed by Westwood Studio, like other Command and Conquer Series, it holds the title 'Command and Conquer' but it is definitely not a RTS as I already said that it is a First-Person Shooter. However, it features an in depth side-story of the First Tiberium War that is concluded with GDI manage to stop Nod's Project ReGenesis. The ending is simple, but at least we get a sense of what happen in the end. Unfortunately in C&C4, EA has rushed the game so much that they screw up the ending. Most of the fans were expecting an epic ending on GDI finally being able to destroy Nod for good or Nod having an epic scene of 'ascension'. However, both GDI and Nod ending feature a white screen with Kane getting into a pencil-drawn Scrin portal that has a poor portal animation. The difference between the 2 endings is minimal and hardly classified as epic. Both ending just conclude Kane has 'ascended', so what's the point of playing through the campaigns of GDI and Nod when they get the same conclusion.
Whenever EA released a new 'Command and Conquer', they will ditch the previous one. A very good example I can use here is Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3. Even before Command and Conquer 4 is release, EA have stop patching the game. It's already been 2 years and Red Alert 3 is still at 1.12. Remember, Red Alert 3 is just one Command and Conquer Series before C&C4. This just simply shows that they don't care about their fans and all they wanted is to proceed to publish the next money-making game. They don't care if the game they made is a good game.
A great series was killed by the tyranny of EA due to the lack of understanding what the fans truly want but just uses the reputation of the series to earn more money and disappoint their fans again and again. Unfortunately EA is always successful in using this cheap marketing strategy and kept making its profit from that. A game designer should not make use of the game purely to make money but use the game to bring entertainment for people. This should have been the culture of the game industry that gaming film should uphold. They might not be able to make too much profit from doing so but they should not succumb to greed. I hope Blizzard do not become another EA.
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