LOVED this game, the soundtrack was awesome and Zero Hours 1v1 AI general gauntlet was so fun. Is this still playable on modern PCs? I had the Mac port ten years ago but that's aged out of existence.
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C&C Generals was dope
- Thread starter g23
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Same here, although I also enjoyed the Red Alert series, and my friends were C&C fans.
We played the hell out of this at sleepovers and LAN parties. So fun!
There was always one person (the weirdo) who was really good with GLA and made everyone else mad lol. (Similar story with Zerg in SC.)
Yeah it was a great RTS game. It was so fun laying waste to ... everything with a bunch of Overlord tanks.
Yeah, this wouldn't go well. Neither would be the ultra-nationalist China faction.
Mark Skaggs, the executive producer of Generals/RA2 recently had an AMA on Reddit with interesting things to share.
Perhaps most prominently is the confirmation that it was not initially meant to be a C&C game. This has always been a divisive point among the fans of the franchise because of how much it deviates from the formula, but personally it always felt to me like the fundamentals in the gameplay which really mattered were still there, like the distinct unit balance by weapon/armor type where missiles and tank shells do negligible damage on infantry.
I remember people mistaking BioWare Victory for the actual BioWare right back when the branding change was announced. I don't blame people for being confused. That whole period just seems like such a mess wracked by flipflopping and indecision from EA's leadership. Apart from them changing the names of studios to Bioware subsidiaries and then back again, the name of the game itself changed between Generals 2 and just Command & Conquer, also changing from a single game to the idea of it being more of a platform with more "modules" being added later down the line, and also changing between a full priced retail product to a F2P model. And this was all hot on the heels of the previous C&C4 having initially been a F2P side project meant for the Asian market, but then being mandated to change it into a mainline entry in the series sold as a retail product. Looking back at that whole chain of events just feels so bizarre. The best rationalization I can come up with is that the F2P business model was still a relatively nascent one at the time with EA not being quite sure what to make of it, and C&C simply got caught in the crossfire.
Perhaps most prominently is the confirmation that it was not initially meant to be a C&C game. This has always been a divisive point among the fans of the franchise because of how much it deviates from the formula, but personally it always felt to me like the fundamentals in the gameplay which really mattered were still there, like the distinct unit balance by weapon/armor type where missiles and tank shells do negligible damage on infantry.
I remember people mistaking BioWare Victory for the actual BioWare right back when the branding change was announced. I don't blame people for being confused. That whole period just seems like such a mess wracked by flipflopping and indecision from EA's leadership. Apart from them changing the names of studios to Bioware subsidiaries and then back again, the name of the game itself changed between Generals 2 and just Command & Conquer, also changing from a single game to the idea of it being more of a platform with more "modules" being added later down the line, and also changing between a full priced retail product to a F2P model. And this was all hot on the heels of the previous C&C4 having initially been a F2P side project meant for the Asian market, but then being mandated to change it into a mainline entry in the series sold as a retail product. Looking back at that whole chain of events just feels so bizarre. The best rationalization I can come up with is that the F2P business model was still a relatively nascent one at the time with EA not being quite sure what to make of it, and C&C simply got caught in the crossfire.
Ah yes, that was around the time they were trying to leverage the Bioware brand name with additional studios, right? I remember a lot of people being confused at Bioware making an RTS.
It's a shame this never saw the light of day. Thanks for the info and hard work anyway.
Probably my favourite C&C. I'm still sad about the follow-up getting canceled.
I loved the crazy terrorist faction with toxic tractors, mad-max buses, and shoes!
I loved the crazy terrorist faction with toxic tractors, mad-max buses, and shoes!
Generals is probably my favorite C&C, and I really loved most of them. Such great personality, I loved the campaigns and even had a ton of fun with skirmishes and the "Mortal Kombat" commander vs commander mode. I still have some screenshots of a fun game I had where I just had a bunch of the hacker guys giving me free money while I built something like 30 nukes to launch all at once. This gif completely destroys the quality of it, but it still a reminder of the dumb fun skirmishes were:
loved generals, definitely my fave of the c&c games, red alert is close but generals is top. Was never a massive fan of the tiberium saga though.
Not sure what you mean by cracking the code, but there have been a few really good RTS games this gen that have been ported (read: re-made almost entirely from the ground up) specifically to cater to console players.
Examples: Cities: Skylines, Surviving Mars, Frostpunk
Ok I guess its possible then. I always associated RTS with PC.
I just can't image enjoying playing a hypotethical new Command and conquer with a controller, but maybe I'm close minded.
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You knew it was epic when the frame rate tanked .... and you would just watch in awe.
As someone who was a big fan of mostly the whole series up to that point, I didn't like Generals that much when it launched, but it really grew into it's own with Zero Hour. The gameplay was pretty fantastic and I played it a lot and remember playing with someone online and we would build up massive armies and when they finally clashed the game would crash more often than not.
Given the choice, I probably still have rather had C&C3 Tiberian Twilight that Westwood was working on at the time though. Would have been great to get the conclusion of the story and the integration of red alert 2 into the storyline.
Given the choice, I probably still have rather had C&C3 Tiberian Twilight that Westwood was working on at the time though. Would have been great to get the conclusion of the story and the integration of red alert 2 into the storyline.
Ha, did anyone else ever cripple an enemy just to the point where they couldn't retaliate, spend a bunch of time building as many nukes as possible then launch them all at once in at attempt to win the game in the most brutal way possible?
It was great watching the framerate die a slow death as each nuke landed, with each one taking longer and longer as the game crawled to a halt :D
Then 10 minutes later the dust would settle, the game would return to normal and there would always be that one guy who --somehow-- managed to survive no matter how many nukes landed where he was standing.
My favourite C&C game.
The different generals you could choose in Zero Hour were so cool.
I haven't bothered with the series after Tiberium Wars.
BTW: OpenRA is pretty cool. For anyone who doesn't know it, it's an open source port of Red Alert:
The different generals you could choose in Zero Hour were so cool.
I haven't bothered with the series after Tiberium Wars.
BTW: OpenRA is pretty cool. For anyone who doesn't know it, it's an open source port of Red Alert:
Haha! I remember doing this exact thing. That's what Skirmish mode was made for, wasn't it?!