So I have beta access to CnC 4. I don't think there's a thread for this - though I could just be spelling it wrong knowing me as nothing turned up in search... *double checks*

Anyway, yeah Gamespot are giving out beta invites. The beta is MP only, no single player which is a shame.

I have to say that this does not play like a CnC game at all. Your MCV is now known as a crawler (Not sure if that's referenced anywhere else in the CnC history). Having only played the offensive class, yeah that's right, classess, I can only speak for this particular class.

The classess are Offensive, Defensive and Support. And on the gametype available you have to capture serveral nodes. It's like king of the hill, you get points for every second you hold the node. For each node you get a multiplyer. So for example, each node is worth 1 point per second, but you have 3 nodes and they have 2. After ten seconds you'll have 30 points, they'll have 20.

The classes do seem to fit in rather well, if you play as a team. If you have say a 5 v 5 battle, once you have a node you need a defensive guy to set up camp there to hold it while your offensive and support guys go after the next one. But I digress from my original point.

Your MCV doesn't build bases or structures like in old CnC's. It only deploys units, and some defensive structures from what I've seen. You can store so many [Aprx 4-5] units inside it so that when it crawls to its location it automatically deploys them - which prevents you from being completely defensless if you lose all of your existing units and decide to move camp. If you lose your MCV, after a short while you can call for another one which you can chose deploy in one of several captured drop zones.

This does not play like CnC at all.

The biggest two lets downs though, so far seem to be matchmaking - it just doesn't work, it's better to manually choose a game or have friends online. And more importantly, the ranking system.

The ranking system is simular the PEC from RSV or the ranking system from CoD; it persistantly updates and is stored on [sigh] EA's servers. (P.S. The demo specifications say 'requires internet connection at all times' though this could just be because it's an MP demo). However this is a large downfall to new players. The Ranking system litterally gives you access to units unavailble to new players. When I battled against a NOD guy who had access to units the used a prism technology, I was destroyed in moments. When I later had that same tech, I destroyed the new guys in moments too. I'm affraid that part of this game is going be having a bigger brother on your side to help you battle. Though I guess that's what they're going for.

That being said, it's not that hard to gain Xp - all you have to do is kill a unit and you get at least 3 points.

To win most fights, it doesn't seem to be about what you're attacking with what and why - although obviously that's a large factor, it seems to be about your engineer game.

Engineers have been ... steroid injected. They can repair any unit on the field, and they are fast moving little so and so's. The easy way to over come a strong opponent would be to have an engineer team constantly boosting your main attack force, and letting your attack force do whatever it wants. If you can manage both at the same time, you're gonna own. I guess this helps to counter the enemy having more powerful units, to some extent - but one of the NOD units was some giant mech sort of thing that owned me day in day out. Plus, powerful units + engineers = sad face for me.

You can place engineers in to near by towers too, and they'll repair things from the tower which is cool.

As you fight on in the fight, you earn upgrade points like in most games these days which enable you to do things like increase accuracy or improve your crawler etc etc. But these terminate at the end of the battle and must be re-obtained every time. They seem somewhat essential to the fight - the first one on the offensive team is an accuracy upgrade, which means that units no longer miss whilst moving a shooting.

The game is fun, though even on a fairly decent machine I got mega frame rate problems when it got to a large fight. The game will kick you out if your frame rate suffers too much - and you will lose all your XP for that fight. The problem here, is I do not know if it sends a message saying "player was kicked for frame rate issues" to everyone else. Because if it kicks you out in the middle of large fights, it's just gonna look like you're rage quiting. Which obviously, you aren't.

Overall though, it no longer looks, feels, acts or even sounds like command and conquer. Sure, there are a few audio clips ripped right out of CnC 3 etc and the units still give out nice over-americanised "hell yeah" shouts when you select them or tell them to do something, but unfortunately the game plays more like a star wars game. Right down to the sound track.

Check it out here: http://www.commandandconquer.com/news/g ... ublic-beta

fyi on the search thing... it doesn't work. I have to rebuild the search index, and I'm pretty sure it'll run me out of queries (I only get so many per hour). Once I'm out of queries, everything that has to do with a database (ie, these forums) stops working. The amount of queries needed to rebuild the search index would probably run me out of queries for days, and that would require me figuring out how to pick up the index rebuild where it let out and running it exactly on the hour every hour.

So, anyway, search for new stuff will work, but I think search for all the old posts is just gonna be broken. Sorry guys.

As for CNC, sounds interesting. Did you ever play the CNC FPS? It wasn't so great, but some of what you talked about kinda reminded me of it.

It sounds like shit, to be very honest (and Derf will likely agree as the resident jademaster). I mean it may still be a decent game, I'm not contesting that, but this isn't what people want. There is a reason why C&C had such a following...it's fun, fast-paced traditional base-building RTS in a cool universe with some campy FMV. We liked that shit. Why on earth EA would change direction as dramatically as they did is beyond me, it truly is. This game is clearly in no way a singleplayer game anymore and completely geared towards MP e-peen madness (which only interests me when I'm doing it with friends, not when playing random strangers while I'm alone in my dank basement).

I just wanted to see Kane, build my Tiberium refineries, maybe a Temple of Nod or an Ion Cannon, and watch my harvester gather blue tiberium as I built SAM sites around my Construction Yard. Not this bull. What a way to end the saga.

Renegade (the C&C shooter) was pretty fun at the time. Going into a Hand of Nod and blowing that shit up was pretty awesome!

P.S. I don't have a basement, let alone a dank one

Totally agree with Ox here. For me, C&C has always been about the single-player campaign. Why doesn't EA do gameplay experiments on a new franchise? And Renegade was great. It was a mediocre shooter, but running around in C&C's world made it all worthwhile.

Well, Kane is in it - if you look on the beta website he's featured on the main page. But yeah, they should have just called it a new name, I feel the same should have been done with Resident evil 4 and 5. Great games in their own right, but they are not resident evil games.

I played again for a couple of games this morning, gotten to rank 4. More units slowly becoming available, which means I'm able to hold my own a bit more now. At one point I had 2 nod crawlers agro'ing my base and to be sure they took out my crawler but it took them a while as I had engineers repairing it whilst in the meantime producing anti-air units.

I didn't win the fight but I got loads of XP.

Oh I know Kane is in it, I was just using it as a hyperbole for my argument.

heh, you guys are typical jade-meisters

1. Omg, I can't believe they keep releasing sequels that are exactly the same as the previous games. Why can't they mix things up and innovate?
2. Omg, they changed the formula. Why can't they just leave it the way it was?



At any rate, I'm not a big RTS guy, so I'm not especially interested. However, I won't judge it without at least getting to play a demo or something. And I'm a single person kinda guy 90% of the time... competitive multiplayer is not my thing.

For someone who spent 1.5 year taking orders you sure are bent on your personal freedom! Hehehe.

And yeah, innovation is cool and all, but not when you're ending the saga after using the same formula for 15 years. It's like if you have a girlfriend who's quasi frigid for 2 years, and when you decide to break up she gets all girls gone wild freaky on your goodbye fuck. Worst metaphor ever, but you catch my drift.

Silly crazies. btw, just because I had to take order for 2+ years didn't mean I liked taking orders.