COMMAND AND CONQUER 3: TIBERIUM WARS (PC)
Ah Command and Conquer. The old mainstay of Real Time Strategy gaming, and the very workhorse of the genre. Just reading the title gives me a feeling of nostalgia. So how has this once vaunted title, akin to RTS gaming what Final Fantasy is to RPG's, fared with the passage of almost 13 years? Let's find out.
LOADING AND INSTALLATION
(For references' sake, I will detail the computer with which I played this:
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 8600, 256 MB
Processor: AMD 3000, dual-core
RAM: 2GB
Played on Windows XP, Service Pack 2)
Installation of the game was quick and easy, taking no more than a single serial number and a few clicks of the mouse. As with Call of Duty 4, there were no bug fixes, activation requirements, or online patches that needed to be downloaded and applied before the game could be played. I consider this an important aspect of any computer game, so it will always be the first thing I cover. If the developers or publishers insist on making customers jump through hoops, or violating their computers with onerous DRM software (Bioshock) just to play the game, then this added "price to play" deserves to be the first thing gamers know about, well before any of the actual gaming.
But fortunately that wasn't a problem here. It was quick, easy, wham, bam, thank you ma'am, now let's get to the killin'. There's only one introductory screen with the EA logo on it, and while you can't skip it, it only takes maybe five or ten seconds to sit through. Hardly more than a mild annoyance.
For the game itself, the only load times occur at the beginning of each mission, and afterwards it's smooth sailing, so load times are less of an issue here than they would be with other games. For me, the longest I had to wait for a single mission was 1 minute, and depending on your system settings this may vary a little, but its unlikely to ever be a real problem.
I was actually impressed by the lengths to which EA went to minimize system requirements, and mitigate load times. Since this is not a graphically demanding game it was probably easier to get more bang for their buck, but just as an aside, C&C 3 takes only a 2.0 Ghz, single core processor, a half gig of RAM, and a GeForce 4 Ti video card. For those of you not familiar with Nvidia's classification schemes, this is a game that was released in March of 2007, and will run on a video card that is five years older than it. In the world of computer gaming, where five years is time enough to be obsolete, and where video cards are generally the single most expensive component in a PC, this was a generous move on the part of EA's developers not to force more of a hardware demand than was required. Well done.
LEVEL DESIGN
Being that it's an RTS game, level aesthetics typically take a back seat to the actual gameplay, and while the developers obviously kept this in mind, they still tried to make the game world an interesting and enjoyable one to play in. There are well-detailed arid wastelands where wastelands should be, and sprawling modern metropolises where civilization thrives. On the whole though, the areas you'll be fighting in are there to look pretty rather than serve any practical purpose, and that's just a necessity of the genre. Shiny, desolate wastelands make the player go "Ooh", but then they remember they have a game to win, and those wastelands aren't helping.
This isn't to say that the world in which you're playing should be ignored completely. By all means stop, take in the sights, go "Ooh" and "Ahh". But looks are 95% of it, and practicality is the other 5%. As a result, many of the levels tend to look very similar after a while, and soon it becomes pretty easy for the player to push those appearances (or lack thereof) to the backs of their minds, and focus on the gameplay.
GAMEPLAY
(This section is a bit long, so you may want to take it in pieces)
As a Real Time Strategy game, gameplay is all it has, and even moreso than a first person shooter this is an area in which in which it absolutely cannot fail. So does it?
In a way, yes.
Before the lot of you light torches and hack my home address, let me explain, and I'll start by mentioning the good. I went in to C&C 3 as I would if I'd never touched an RTS game before. I wanted to see how it would handle someone unfamiliar with the style, and especially the particular nuances of the Command and Conquer series. What I discovered is that the game is very user-friendly, and is perfectly willing to guide the unfamiliar player by the hand for a few missions until they're comfortable with basic actions.
The tutorial was especially informative without overstaying its length, and went over the most important basics to be used in the game. Moving, attacking, garrisoning buildings, constructing units, etc. I would have liked the tutorial to go into a bit more detail, specifically when it came to the menu commands located at the bottom of the screen. While a player can simply mouse over them for a moment and get a short but clear blurb about what the icons do, it's not very clear on how to use them, and the only solution for new players is to simply try them out. This isn't so bad, as I mentioned there are several "Beginner" missions in which the player has the opportunity to experiment with controls, but the sheer volume of options will likely intimidate new players.
I was satisfied to see the inclusion of mouse-over explanations on just about every menu and production option. It shows that EA realizes not everyone has played C&C since 1995, and even the ones who have don't want to waste time playing the guessing game. Each mouse-over brings up a small tab which explains what the unit or structure is, what it does, and what upgrades and abilities it has. This is such a common sense idea it's amazing I even have to compliment them on it, except that most games have a tendency of shooting right past common sense solutions.
The individual factions are all well balanced against one another, and each have their own unique advantages and disadvantages. It's a good example of the Rock, Paper, Scissors idea, in which no one faction beats them all. Since I'm not writing a walkthrough I won't go into a huge amount of detail, but I do want to expand a little on each faction.
GLOBAL DEFENSE INITIATIVE
The GDI are a ground pounder faction. They have the most options to wage a war on the ground and are pretty much known for being the "brute force" option. Playing with GDI will be the easiest in the single player campaign, and in my opinion, the most fun. Beginners will probably want to start here, as GDI lends itself well to a turtle strategy, and even inexperienced players can have fun without feeling like they have to be Sun Tzu to win.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF NOD
Nod on the other hand are meant for use by more experienced players. As the "Zerg" faction, the units are cheap, lightly armed/armored, and disposable. They have to rely on stealth, speed, and sabotage to achieve their objectives, and in my experience, Nod only wins head to head against GDI when outnumbering them at least 3 to 1. This is the faction players interested in problem solving and unorthodox solutions should play.
THE SCRIN
The Scrin "campaign" is barely four missions long, and hardly worth mentioning. This faction is another brute force option, only instead of ground units, their strength lies in their air support, of which they have more and better options than either Nod or GDI. Their ground units only have one or two decent options, but just like GDI, they don't have to build much of a force to dominate the battlefield. Being that their campaign is so short, the Scrin are more of a multiplayer option, and lend themselves to a strategy of offense rather than defense.
DIFFICULTY
So if the gameplay is so phenomenal, what gives? Why call it a failure?
Command and Conquer 3 is a real time strategy game, but once you've played it you'll quickly realize you can knock the "strategy" portion of that label right the hell off. I played the game through with all three factions on all three difficulties, Easy, Normal, and Hard, and the conclusion they all brought me to is that single player is largely piss fucking easy. This is due to the fact that you're playing against stupid A.I., A.I. that is just smart enough not to get stuck on the terrain.
With nearly every mission in which you control an armed force, (90% of them) that mission can be completed so long as you have a fast mouse hand, and you know which key defensive points to seize. These locations don't change from difficulty to difficulty, and the computer A.I. will single-mindedly approach or swarm you from these points with no regard to how well you have them defended. This in turn gives you carte blanche to sit back, build supplies, then turn those supplies into a gargantuan army of units. All you have to do is check on your defenses now and then. I literally made lunch once while doing this, and still finished the mission.
Veteran players will recognize this as an age old problem. I understand programming A.I. is a complex, difficult task, fraught with unseen complications. I try not to demand too much from developers in that respect, and I accept that playing a computer will get predictable sooner or later, no matter how difficult the computer is supposed to be. But after playing 30+ boring hours on the Easy and Normal difficulties, I was ready for something challenging. I flipped the difficulty up to Hard, expecting the computer to start making new and unexpected decisions that would force me to create a solution on the spot. I was expecting the A.I. to start using some of the hitherto ignored abilities on its units, to maybe even make distractions and ambush me while I dealt with them.
Instead I got the exact same game I had just played, doing the exact same things, faster and more accurately. The same key points were still to be seized, and the A.I. kept making the same stupid decisions, like not rebuilding its refineries, and letting its war effort go broke. Sigh.
This was a problem with earlier incarnations of Command and Conquer, but I always just attributed that to old technology and infant A.I. engines. Yet here we are 13 years later, and I'm still beating the A.I. with the same half-assed effort and junior high "tactics" I was using back then. For a game that embodies a genre with the word "strategy" in its description, it's disappointing to realize it can be beaten with less effort and thought than I put in to my weekly grocery list.
The idea of sending more enemies at you faster is an ages old, lazy, and frustrating solution to the problem of creating challenging gameplay. To top it off, the developer's ideas of adding legitimate strategy to the mix is to include that thrice-damned, cancerous bane of game design, the escort mission.
I'm still at a loss to explain why some game developers keep thinking this is a good idea, or that it adds any kind of value to a game. What it actually does is completely negate the effort you've put into your character, or the game as a whole thus far. It takes control of the game AWAY from the player, and puts it in the fiendish hands of the game developers, who will then use it to make the player dance like puppets. Utterly irrelevant to how knowledgeable, advanced, or powerful you may be in the game, your future progress will now fall at the whimsy of a weak, ill-armed NPC that you must protect through a battery of horrors, often with only a minimal amount of force to do so.
In one particularly galling and imbecilic mission, you have to manage a base's defenses while under siege. There's not enough power to turn on every cannon and gatling gun, so you have to prioritize defenses while coming under constant attack on all sides, and hold out long enough for reinforcements to arrive. At first this had the desired effect; I felt like a real commander, under pressure to make quick, smart decisions, and refusing to let my base fall without at least making them work for it.
A few harrowing minutes later, my reinforcements finally showed up, and I thought, "All right, I made it!" only to be given a cutscene informing me they were now pinned down, and needed me to come rescue them pronto, then escort them back to the base. This one moment ruined the entire mission for me from then on. Leaving aside how immersion-breaking it is, (I'm under seige, you fucks. You're supposed to rescue me) it seems like the developers did their jolly best to make this moment as irritatingly difficult as possible. While you're arranging and moving a force to the other side of the map, your base continues to be fall constant attack. This end effect of this is that you're darting from one view of the map to the other every second, trying to keep tabs on both forces, and keep both from being overrun. It's not fun, it's not strategic, it's annoying, and on Hard, is an outright nightmare to beat.
The way most players beat these missions is as ludicrous as the missions themselves. Play for a bit, then watch your charge die and considerately fail the mission for you. Restart, get over that particular hump, save, then move on to the next, where you fail again. It's trial and error of the most punishing sort, and I had kinda hoped RTS games no longer found this sort of game filler necessary.
In short, the A.I. simply never pushes the envelope with the gameplay, it never takes takes full advantage of its capabilities, and never utilizes the many unique abilities the units possess, preferring instead to simply rely on Zerg tactics for the duration of each and every mission.
This doesn't mean the game isn't fun. What it is is easy. Simple. Unchallenging to the frontal lobes. This is a game that will provide you at least 30+ hours of fun and adventure, but one in which you can breeze right through if you apply the same tricks over and over, tricks and tactics that any competent player will pick up within the first half of the game. It's disappointing to see a game that by its very nature is supposed to encourage creative solutions to tactical problems, render those solutions moot with such predictable gameplay.
I can't say for certain if an optimal A.I. engine was traded in lieu of a good graphics engine. It doesn't seem like it, this is not an FPS running soft shadows and anti-aliasing, (incidentally in which, I've also encountered better A.I.) but I guess I just don't want to believe they would make the game stupid on purpose.
Of course you could always skirt around this problem just by playing the multiplayer.
CONCLUSION
Let me reiterate: This game is not bad. I've played through it at least 5 or 6 times just for the sheer fun of having 40 unstoppable Mammoth tanks at my disposal. It's a decent way to spend an afternoon if you otherwise don't have a life. But with its predictable A.I., and lack of replayability value, (you can unlock the Scrin campaign. Woo.) it's hard for me to recommend this as anything but a rental unless you engage in multiplayer. It's something to kill some time with, and beat for the sake of saying that you did.
As a game, I give Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, 3 out of 5 stars for being a fun experience, but wasted potential.
Or as the Escapist might say: Head down to Blockbuster one lonely Saturday and rent it for the single player, but go ahead and buy it for the multi.
Ah Command and Conquer. The old mainstay of Real Time Strategy gaming, and the very workhorse of the genre. Just reading the title gives me a feeling of nostalgia. So how has this once vaunted title, akin to RTS gaming what Final Fantasy is to RPG's, fared with the passage of almost 13 years? Let's find out.
LOADING AND INSTALLATION
(For references' sake, I will detail the computer with which I played this:
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 8600, 256 MB
Processor: AMD 3000, dual-core
RAM: 2GB
Played on Windows XP, Service Pack 2)
Installation of the game was quick and easy, taking no more than a single serial number and a few clicks of the mouse. As with Call of Duty 4, there were no bug fixes, activation requirements, or online patches that needed to be downloaded and applied before the game could be played. I consider this an important aspect of any computer game, so it will always be the first thing I cover. If the developers or publishers insist on making customers jump through hoops, or violating their computers with onerous DRM software (Bioshock) just to play the game, then this added "price to play" deserves to be the first thing gamers know about, well before any of the actual gaming.
But fortunately that wasn't a problem here. It was quick, easy, wham, bam, thank you ma'am, now let's get to the killin'. There's only one introductory screen with the EA logo on it, and while you can't skip it, it only takes maybe five or ten seconds to sit through. Hardly more than a mild annoyance.
For the game itself, the only load times occur at the beginning of each mission, and afterwards it's smooth sailing, so load times are less of an issue here than they would be with other games. For me, the longest I had to wait for a single mission was 1 minute, and depending on your system settings this may vary a little, but its unlikely to ever be a real problem.
I was actually impressed by the lengths to which EA went to minimize system requirements, and mitigate load times. Since this is not a graphically demanding game it was probably easier to get more bang for their buck, but just as an aside, C&C 3 takes only a 2.0 Ghz, single core processor, a half gig of RAM, and a GeForce 4 Ti video card. For those of you not familiar with Nvidia's classification schemes, this is a game that was released in March of 2007, and will run on a video card that is five years older than it. In the world of computer gaming, where five years is time enough to be obsolete, and where video cards are generally the single most expensive component in a PC, this was a generous move on the part of EA's developers not to force more of a hardware demand than was required. Well done.
LEVEL DESIGN
Being that it's an RTS game, level aesthetics typically take a back seat to the actual gameplay, and while the developers obviously kept this in mind, they still tried to make the game world an interesting and enjoyable one to play in. There are well-detailed arid wastelands where wastelands should be, and sprawling modern metropolises where civilization thrives. On the whole though, the areas you'll be fighting in are there to look pretty rather than serve any practical purpose, and that's just a necessity of the genre. Shiny, desolate wastelands make the player go "Ooh", but then they remember they have a game to win, and those wastelands aren't helping.
This isn't to say that the world in which you're playing should be ignored completely. By all means stop, take in the sights, go "Ooh" and "Ahh". But looks are 95% of it, and practicality is the other 5%. As a result, many of the levels tend to look very similar after a while, and soon it becomes pretty easy for the player to push those appearances (or lack thereof) to the backs of their minds, and focus on the gameplay.
GAMEPLAY
(This section is a bit long, so you may want to take it in pieces)
As a Real Time Strategy game, gameplay is all it has, and even moreso than a first person shooter this is an area in which in which it absolutely cannot fail. So does it?
In a way, yes.
Before the lot of you light torches and hack my home address, let me explain, and I'll start by mentioning the good. I went in to C&C 3 as I would if I'd never touched an RTS game before. I wanted to see how it would handle someone unfamiliar with the style, and especially the particular nuances of the Command and Conquer series. What I discovered is that the game is very user-friendly, and is perfectly willing to guide the unfamiliar player by the hand for a few missions until they're comfortable with basic actions.
The tutorial was especially informative without overstaying its length, and went over the most important basics to be used in the game. Moving, attacking, garrisoning buildings, constructing units, etc. I would have liked the tutorial to go into a bit more detail, specifically when it came to the menu commands located at the bottom of the screen. While a player can simply mouse over them for a moment and get a short but clear blurb about what the icons do, it's not very clear on how to use them, and the only solution for new players is to simply try them out. This isn't so bad, as I mentioned there are several "Beginner" missions in which the player has the opportunity to experiment with controls, but the sheer volume of options will likely intimidate new players.
I was satisfied to see the inclusion of mouse-over explanations on just about every menu and production option. It shows that EA realizes not everyone has played C&C since 1995, and even the ones who have don't want to waste time playing the guessing game. Each mouse-over brings up a small tab which explains what the unit or structure is, what it does, and what upgrades and abilities it has. This is such a common sense idea it's amazing I even have to compliment them on it, except that most games have a tendency of shooting right past common sense solutions.
The individual factions are all well balanced against one another, and each have their own unique advantages and disadvantages. It's a good example of the Rock, Paper, Scissors idea, in which no one faction beats them all. Since I'm not writing a walkthrough I won't go into a huge amount of detail, but I do want to expand a little on each faction.
GLOBAL DEFENSE INITIATIVE
The GDI are a ground pounder faction. They have the most options to wage a war on the ground and are pretty much known for being the "brute force" option. Playing with GDI will be the easiest in the single player campaign, and in my opinion, the most fun. Beginners will probably want to start here, as GDI lends itself well to a turtle strategy, and even inexperienced players can have fun without feeling like they have to be Sun Tzu to win.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF NOD
Nod on the other hand are meant for use by more experienced players. As the "Zerg" faction, the units are cheap, lightly armed/armored, and disposable. They have to rely on stealth, speed, and sabotage to achieve their objectives, and in my experience, Nod only wins head to head against GDI when outnumbering them at least 3 to 1. This is the faction players interested in problem solving and unorthodox solutions should play.
THE SCRIN
The Scrin "campaign" is barely four missions long, and hardly worth mentioning. This faction is another brute force option, only instead of ground units, their strength lies in their air support, of which they have more and better options than either Nod or GDI. Their ground units only have one or two decent options, but just like GDI, they don't have to build much of a force to dominate the battlefield. Being that their campaign is so short, the Scrin are more of a multiplayer option, and lend themselves to a strategy of offense rather than defense.
DIFFICULTY
So if the gameplay is so phenomenal, what gives? Why call it a failure?
Command and Conquer 3 is a real time strategy game, but once you've played it you'll quickly realize you can knock the "strategy" portion of that label right the hell off. I played the game through with all three factions on all three difficulties, Easy, Normal, and Hard, and the conclusion they all brought me to is that single player is largely piss fucking easy. This is due to the fact that you're playing against stupid A.I., A.I. that is just smart enough not to get stuck on the terrain.
With nearly every mission in which you control an armed force, (90% of them) that mission can be completed so long as you have a fast mouse hand, and you know which key defensive points to seize. These locations don't change from difficulty to difficulty, and the computer A.I. will single-mindedly approach or swarm you from these points with no regard to how well you have them defended. This in turn gives you carte blanche to sit back, build supplies, then turn those supplies into a gargantuan army of units. All you have to do is check on your defenses now and then. I literally made lunch once while doing this, and still finished the mission.
Veteran players will recognize this as an age old problem. I understand programming A.I. is a complex, difficult task, fraught with unseen complications. I try not to demand too much from developers in that respect, and I accept that playing a computer will get predictable sooner or later, no matter how difficult the computer is supposed to be. But after playing 30+ boring hours on the Easy and Normal difficulties, I was ready for something challenging. I flipped the difficulty up to Hard, expecting the computer to start making new and unexpected decisions that would force me to create a solution on the spot. I was expecting the A.I. to start using some of the hitherto ignored abilities on its units, to maybe even make distractions and ambush me while I dealt with them.
Instead I got the exact same game I had just played, doing the exact same things, faster and more accurately. The same key points were still to be seized, and the A.I. kept making the same stupid decisions, like not rebuilding its refineries, and letting its war effort go broke. Sigh.
This was a problem with earlier incarnations of Command and Conquer, but I always just attributed that to old technology and infant A.I. engines. Yet here we are 13 years later, and I'm still beating the A.I. with the same half-assed effort and junior high "tactics" I was using back then. For a game that embodies a genre with the word "strategy" in its description, it's disappointing to realize it can be beaten with less effort and thought than I put in to my weekly grocery list.
The idea of sending more enemies at you faster is an ages old, lazy, and frustrating solution to the problem of creating challenging gameplay. To top it off, the developer's ideas of adding legitimate strategy to the mix is to include that thrice-damned, cancerous bane of game design, the escort mission.
I'm still at a loss to explain why some game developers keep thinking this is a good idea, or that it adds any kind of value to a game. What it actually does is completely negate the effort you've put into your character, or the game as a whole thus far. It takes control of the game AWAY from the player, and puts it in the fiendish hands of the game developers, who will then use it to make the player dance like puppets. Utterly irrelevant to how knowledgeable, advanced, or powerful you may be in the game, your future progress will now fall at the whimsy of a weak, ill-armed NPC that you must protect through a battery of horrors, often with only a minimal amount of force to do so.
In one particularly galling and imbecilic mission, you have to manage a base's defenses while under siege. There's not enough power to turn on every cannon and gatling gun, so you have to prioritize defenses while coming under constant attack on all sides, and hold out long enough for reinforcements to arrive. At first this had the desired effect; I felt like a real commander, under pressure to make quick, smart decisions, and refusing to let my base fall without at least making them work for it.
A few harrowing minutes later, my reinforcements finally showed up, and I thought, "All right, I made it!" only to be given a cutscene informing me they were now pinned down, and needed me to come rescue them pronto, then escort them back to the base. This one moment ruined the entire mission for me from then on. Leaving aside how immersion-breaking it is, (I'm under seige, you fucks. You're supposed to rescue me) it seems like the developers did their jolly best to make this moment as irritatingly difficult as possible. While you're arranging and moving a force to the other side of the map, your base continues to be fall constant attack. This end effect of this is that you're darting from one view of the map to the other every second, trying to keep tabs on both forces, and keep both from being overrun. It's not fun, it's not strategic, it's annoying, and on Hard, is an outright nightmare to beat.
The way most players beat these missions is as ludicrous as the missions themselves. Play for a bit, then watch your charge die and considerately fail the mission for you. Restart, get over that particular hump, save, then move on to the next, where you fail again. It's trial and error of the most punishing sort, and I had kinda hoped RTS games no longer found this sort of game filler necessary.
In short, the A.I. simply never pushes the envelope with the gameplay, it never takes takes full advantage of its capabilities, and never utilizes the many unique abilities the units possess, preferring instead to simply rely on Zerg tactics for the duration of each and every mission.
This doesn't mean the game isn't fun. What it is is easy. Simple. Unchallenging to the frontal lobes. This is a game that will provide you at least 30+ hours of fun and adventure, but one in which you can breeze right through if you apply the same tricks over and over, tricks and tactics that any competent player will pick up within the first half of the game. It's disappointing to see a game that by its very nature is supposed to encourage creative solutions to tactical problems, render those solutions moot with such predictable gameplay.
I can't say for certain if an optimal A.I. engine was traded in lieu of a good graphics engine. It doesn't seem like it, this is not an FPS running soft shadows and anti-aliasing, (incidentally in which, I've also encountered better A.I.) but I guess I just don't want to believe they would make the game stupid on purpose.
Of course you could always skirt around this problem just by playing the multiplayer.
CONCLUSION
Let me reiterate: This game is not bad. I've played through it at least 5 or 6 times just for the sheer fun of having 40 unstoppable Mammoth tanks at my disposal. It's a decent way to spend an afternoon if you otherwise don't have a life. But with its predictable A.I., and lack of replayability value, (you can unlock the Scrin campaign. Woo.) it's hard for me to recommend this as anything but a rental unless you engage in multiplayer. It's something to kill some time with, and beat for the sake of saying that you did.
As a game, I give Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, 3 out of 5 stars for being a fun experience, but wasted potential.
Or as the Escapist might say: Head down to Blockbuster one lonely Saturday and rent it for the single player, but go ahead and buy it for the multi.
