[PC] [MAC] [360] Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

[Vnonymous]

[Split off from the C&C4 thread... -- icy]


If it is anything like C&C3, I wouldn't be holding your breath. The multiplayer scene was absolutely atrocious, badly balanced, full of glitches and stupid strategies. The game boiled down to each side having exactly two strategies that worked at all, except for GDI, who had one. NOD and Scrin were reduced to either tankspamming or using an all-or-nothing build like the shadow team rush or the mothership base drop.

It's possible that things changed after the expansion pack, but the original game was a pile of garbage for 3 or 4 patches.

Unless the developers have improved dramatically since then, I wouldn't get any hopes up for this game.

[Otaku^Fetishization]

I disagree, Vnonymous. C&C3 was excellent at release, ignoring a few bad design choices and initial imbalances in Nod's favor; it played just as chaotically and fluidly as we wanted it to, and was totally salvageable.

Whenever complaints were slung throughout the community, the developers (who certainly took their time in releasing these needed patches) came up with the least efficient solutions imaginable, fixing the wrong thing over and over. I can't help but feel they were trying to turn their game into something it just plain WASN'T: a microintensive competition RTS.

So many things were normalized and nerfed over the course of the patching that by 1.09 Tiberium Wars had become lifeless in comparison to the macro wars of 1.04. And the funny part is that Nod remains overpowered pre-expansion. What C&C3 had going for it since the beginning was that it was easy to learn/follow and that it was blindingly fast, the same thing that made the two Dustin Browder C&C games so successful, and the latter part has been left behind. (On a side note, Browder is now the lead designer of StarCraft 2.)

C&C4 is going to be more micro-intensive than the previous three Tiberium-based games, which I like, but I can't help feeling the new systems (crawlers and resource nodes) meant to streamline the macro game, are a bit too much, considering that the sequel is generally supposed to exhibit more complexity than the previous games without removing things the players loved about it... like base building...

[Molloy]

The real time strategy genre is woefully underdeveloped at the moment. Much like we don't have true RPG games, we don't have true RTS games. Most of them are micro focussed and therefore actually real time tactical simulations.

The problems is there doesn't appear to be much appetite on the behalf of the public to play macro focussed games. Starcraft has been successful to an extreme, so everybody feels obliged to copy it. Chris Taylor tried to create something different with Supreme Commander but it somehow ended up being more micro intensive than Total Annihilation. He's promising less of that in the sequel but I think RTS as a genre is incredibly hard to design. It's easy for players undermine the 'designed balance'.

[icycalm]

I don't think it's hard to make true RTSes -- not like true RPGs, at least. It's just that people (including designers) do not realize the difference between an RTT (real-time tactics) and an RTS (real-time strategy) game. So we don't really have many genuine RTSes at the moment, if any, and that's a shame, because the concept sounds like it would be a lot of fun in practice. I have written a very detailed article on the subject that I will publish in my first book. It pretty much resolves everything.

As for C&C3, I know next to nothing about it, but have always wondered about the 360 port. Is that even fucking playable?

[Asterix]

I think Paradox makes some pretty decent RTS games. Not sure if Hearts of Iron counts as that or an RTT though.