A reader laments the death of Command & Conquer and the real-time strategy genre, and hopes for a reboot annoucement for the 30th anniversary.
We’re told that video game companies are always cancelling projects that we never hear about; that we shouldn’t listen to Half-Life 3 or Nintendo rumours because even if they are working on something now, there’s a good chance it’ll never make it to completion or ever be talked about openly. I get that and can believe it happens to everyone, all the time, but I don’t believe any series has had as many cancelled games, that are known about publicly, as Command & Conquer.
There’s a whole Wikipedia page about them, some of which I didn’t know about until I started writing this, with at least two big budget reboots that never happened. There were some remasters on PC relatively recently but despite the hints that these would also lead to new games, that never happened either.
After popularising the whole concept of real-time strategy games, Command & Conquer now seems to be cursed to die with the genre it helped create. It’ll be 30 years old this September and while I’d love to think that there’ll be an annoucement then, at best it’ll just be another rubbish mobile game.
Since the game is so old a lot of younger gamers have probably never heard of Command & Conquer but the problem is there’s a good chance they’ve never heard of real-time strategy games either, despite how big they used to be in the 90s. Nowadays, they practically don’t exist, even though Warcraft started off as one and MOBAs like League Of Legends were originally created from mods of real-time strategy games.
The problem has always been that they don’t work well on consoles, because of low resolutions and the lack of a mouse (the rumours of a mouse feature for the Switch 2 is what initially inspired me to write this article). That’s fair enough, nothing anyone can do about that, but there’s barely been a new example on PC either, in the last 20 years. Not even indie titles.
The genre does suffer from a lot of the games being quite samey, but that’s not a problem for things like fighting games and I’d say that Command & Conquer is far more different from Supreme Commander, Homeworld, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War than any two fighting games.
My favourite has always been Command & Conquer though, for the simple reason that it was my first and I much prefer sci-fi to fantasy. But the remasters proved to me that the games are still great fun, and it’s not just rose-tinted glasses making me think that. But there’s so much more that could be done with a modern version.
The size and detail of the map could be massively different now, with the ability to zoom in and out as much as you want. If it was a big budget affair, I would also love to see you able to take control of units manually, which would allow EA to market it as part action game. Imagine running round a map like you’re in Battlefield, but also being able to zoom out at any time to control any of the units remotely.
That sounds amazing to me but I’m afraid it’d just be too expensive to make nowadays and be deemed too complex for modern gamers to play, which is patronising but seems to be EA’s problem with trying anything out of their usual range. I just don’t see it happening, despite how much I’d love to see it.
I saw there was some vague talk of a new Starcraft, now Microsoft owns Blizzard, but much as I’d take that too I don’t really expect it’ll happen. So please, EA, let there be a new Command & Conquer and I don’t mean a trashy free-to-play app either.
By reader Gorf
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