No Single Player for Command and Conquer: Generals 2

[redisforever]

Well, fuck you then, EA. I play the games for the campaigns. What is C&C known for? Cheesy FMV cutscenes, and entertaining story missions. Also:

"We decided to choose Generals as the first set of games we build under the universe, but we'll be expanding after that, like Tiberium and Red Alert as well as some others as well."

DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH MY TIBERIUMS AND RED ALERTS! I'll come down to your offices and eat all your hard drives.

 

[One Shot wonder]

Well, fuck you then, EA. I play the games for the campaigns. What is C&C known for? Cheesy FMV cutscenes, and entertaining story missions. Also:

"We decided to choose Generals as the first set of games we build under the universe, but we'll be expanding after that, like Tiberium and Red Alert as well as some others as well."

DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH MY TIBERIUMS AND RED ALERTS! I'll come down to your offices and eat all your hard drives.

Generals isn't in the universe, it's some stupid 'near future' setting they made up and put on the C&C IP to sell more. It's literally as related to the others as it is to starcraft, and at least they share build mechanics. Generals shares the fact it is an RTS with Tanks, and that's about it.

 

[The Critic]

This is a real disappointment for me. I've always considered C&C: Generals (and the Zero Hour expansion for it) to be the pinnicle of the C&C franchise (I know saying that is bound to upset people...). It wasn't just the fun skirmish mode (which I have logged countless hours in), or the multiplayer (which I never touched).

The Generals franchise had probably the least ham and cheese of the three C&C sub-series (Red Alert takes top honors there, obviously, and was even before they threw in Tim Curry), and the story has always been the most low-key, but that didn't make the singleplayer of it any less important. The original Generals campaigns had some absolutely awesome scenarios to play, and the expansion improved things even further (and was actually the only time the Generals games included FMV cutscenes). Sure, the setting and story had absolutely no ties to the Tiberium or Red Alert games; it had more in common with Counter-Strike and Battlefield, but the story still worked as a non-intrusive framing device, and actually could get fairly engrossing when you started to piece together everything by playing it from 3 unique angles.

*Sigh*

I don't know. I'm sad that this has happened. I don't mind a game that has a following in e-sports, and I have nothing againts e-sports in general, but ripping out the things that made a game great, putting the focus of the game elsewhere, and the rest really have me worried. does anyone know whether Generals 2 will have singleplayer skirmish, at least? Or has that been axed too?

 

[Scarim Coral]

Well it's official, the game franchise is dead and mean nothing to me anymore (except for the god olde class).

 

[Kordie]

Well, then I won't be buying Generals 2, simple as that.

Such a shame EA also wants to fuck over their other two franchises. I greatly enjoyed the C&C series and the Red Alert offshoot, but EA just came in and fucked it.

Well that was an easy purchase decision, straight to the "no thanks" pile.

It's going to be Free to Play btw, just adding that.

huh... I don't know how I skipped that sentence, thanks. Still not likely I will play it though, but being free I may try it out eventually.

 

[Stryc9]

I miss Westwood.

This a million times. They were awful coders (so many bits of broken code in Red Alert 2 that don't crash it because the bad outputs go to another bit of bad code that just drops it) but much better game designers.

Red Alert 3 was awful though, it had no real bearing on the other two games and took the campy aspects of the series to 11 without taking the dark aspects too. In the original it was only funny how hammy the soviet commander's address to the Player before mission 1 is because the actor was talking casually about nerve gas results the second before, commenting that it took children 30 seconds to die and adults 45. Now this darkness isn't constant, there are a lot of things are just funny (Stalin's mistress is also his chief of intelligence) but it's not just all crazy, there is a pinch or two of reality in the Red alert soup, not just six pints of kooky and a few pairs of silicone tits.

Also, the unit design was stupid, the options were limited and the whole thing felt streamlined into this stupid "e-sports" mentality. Games become e-sports because they have gameplay that is high quality and requires skill, not because you cut down the unit roster to the bare bones and put out videos with some guys you hired acting like sports announcers to game replays.

You left out the bit about how you were forced into co-op during single player missions with shitty incompetent AI that couldn't stumble it's way out of a wet paper bag full of holes and kept fucking up your plans at every turn. The only thing that was even remotely good about Red Alert 3 was the half-assed multiplayer and even that was questionable.

At the rate things are going right now EA will be lucky if they can salvage the C&C franchise in a way that would make me want to buy one of them again. At least they were kind enough to release that First Decade pack that had all the previous good C&C games in it so we still have those to play with.

 

[zidine100]

Bioware general manager John Van Caneghem says that this is part of an overall strategy intended to "get back to the roots of what made Command & Conquer great."

... so your strategy is take away one of the main parts of command and conquer, to bring it back to its roots.

well how Quent

 

[WickedFire]

I think I just heard Westwood studios turn its its grave.

Turn? By this point I think Westwood is positively spinning.

 

[Old Father Eternity]

Establishing battlefield control ... battlefield control established.
Inferior tactics detected. You make this easy fleshbag
Prepare for decimation, for you are not worthy of assimilation.
Termination protocols initiated, proceeding with final sweep.
Oh, by the way, missile launch detected.

 

[Rad Party God]

So... they're trying, pretty much, to copy Starcraft 2's insane popularity on eSports and not even bother with singleplayer...

As long as I can play offline skirmishes with the AI, I really don't care about a proper SP campaign, because I really don't like it when they slam into my face that there's a multiplayer mode and I hate multiplayer in strategy games (I bought Starcraft 2 in day 1 and since then, I haven't touched MP even once.)

 

[wooty]

Well thats me not getting this thing. Which is a shame because I was quite looking forward to it.

Fuck this.

 

[loa]

This is NOT "EA's popular modern warfare RTS franchise", it's Westwood who made it big, made the name mean something.
The buffoons at EA (and somehow bioware is now involved in c&c too...) just shit all over it.

 

[Ickabod]

The video game industry is seriously a bunch of billion dollar corporations trying to determine what their customers will like, rather than doing some research to find out what in fact they do like.

And it's a surprise to them when one AAA game after another fails after another.

EA needs to drop the A from their name, they are no longer "Artists"

 

[Mr. Hooves]

What I loved about most of the C&C games I played is that the campaign didn't only have a compelling story, it actually taught you how to play the game in a steady pace that was also able to keep the game interesting.

The pacing that they introduced new units and new strategies was actually very well done in the games I played. It's a shame that they won't have the same campaign experience in this new title.

 

[carpathic]

Hang on a second, I need to step out for a moment.

*steps outside. Cue incoherent and inaudible screaming and swearing*

Too true...if I wanted multiplayer all the time I would buy this. Since I most clearly DO NOT, I'll pass on a series I once really enjoyed.

Just like that new stupid simcity. I play games to play by myself.

 

[halobolola]

Seeing how i still play c&c 3 skirmishes against ai, and have never taken it online, it means i wont see a point in even thinking about this. ( i also didnt pay for it )

 

[antipunt]

Of course everyone knows this is because ALL PC GAMERS are PIRATES so to sell more copies, we will sell a la Diablo-framework.

Hrm. Well, good luck >_>

 

[BoogieManFL]

That's acceptable to me if there is an AI and it's worth playing against.

Although it seems odd to hear BioWare say that the story is unimportant, even in a game like this.. But I do have to admit of all the many strategy games like this, very few did I finish the campaigns for. Most of them weren't terribly interesting to me. But it's more about how they were done than the game type.

WarCraft III+expansion is a game like this and has an excellent story, better than most. Really, all the WarCraft games. Except WoW.

 

[Dr. Thrax]

As long as I can play offline skirmishes with the AI,... because I really don't like it when they slam into my face that there's a multiplayer mode

Pretty much this.
I was, at first, looking forward to Generals 2 (Oh wait, I'm sorry. "Command and Conquer", as they're pretentiously naming it.), I had seen a few screenshots of it and since it was made by Bioware it looked pretty. After the ME3 debacle I was worried about just how the story would go, and now there is no story because EA wants to take the game back to its roots by taking out its roots.

Wait, what.

I can never play multiplayer in RTS games, I get wiped out in about a minute, or I get cornered into a position I can't work my way out of. I can play against Medium AI and that's pretty much it. In my opinion, this whole "e-sport" thing is a load of BS.

 

[Dark Prophet]

Generals was great fun different from other C&C games but still fun, Tib Wars and Kane's Wrath were even better, Red 3 stubled here and there, but Uprising somewhat made up for the miss steps, C&C 4 was a fucking disaster and now this. Its like EA is a plague that kills games.