I love how faithful this is to the original games but at the same time they've modernised the gameplay so that it doesn't feel it's age.
When you go back and play the originals (even Red Alert remastered) the modernised gameplay added by Open RA becomes very apparent. I can't go back to the originals now.
I'm like that for Doom. I grew up playing id Software games (Wolfenstein 3D, Catacomb Abyss, Doom, etc). The Brutal Doom mod completely ruined the vanilla experience for me. It's just scatalogically absurd and dialed up the shock value to eleven. Great fun.
Feel the same way with OpenRCT2. I could have sworn the original games had controls for speeding up and slowing down park time but nope. Going back to Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 I just can't play it at 1x speed anymore. OpenRCT2 just has some nice little fixed.
That was so nice about the og though, you have to wait so you just spend the time building some technically useless but nice looking stuff. Fast forward kind of ruins that.
To be honest, I always found Westwood strategy games to be very one dimensional compared to other strategy games even in its own era.
I never understood why people loved them so much. Perhaps it was because of their simplicity thus allowing for more mainstream appeal?
Im sure I’ll get downvoted by the Red Alert fans with their rose tinted glasses for saying this because a lot of people forget just how basic those games were. But I played a hell of a lot of strategy games back then (it was my favourite genre) and Westwood did some of the most simplistic games in the genre.
Where Westwood excelled at was the presentation more than the game play. Great music, FMV in the later games, etc.
Anyhow, I might check out this OpenRA project if they’ve tweaked the mechanics.
I only played a little bit of Red Alert 2. And quite a bit of StarCraft, although non-competitively.
The complexity difference was sort of interesting I think. I recall there was a lot more… stuff the units could do. Basic infantry for one side could lay down, take cover behind sand bags (maybe?), garrison in NPC buildings. Gain experience and level up. And these are just the most basic dudes.
It is neat stuff that makes the game feel good to pick up and play. But designed in complexity in a game can get in the way of developing emergent complexity. I think this is particularly noticeable in an RTS, where there’s already a lot going on.
StarCraft Marines only really have like one thing they can do (stim), otherwise it’s just positioning. This promotes the whole emergent “micro” gameplay skill. Which isn’t to say micro doesn’t exist in C&C (I have no idea what competitive play looks like there), but there are a lot of alternatives (Deploy them? Let them go prone?).
I knew a guy who was high level RA player and he said that the high level game mostly revolved around 2 types of units: tanks and dogs - where you would send the dogs to bait out first shot and then your tanks to finish the job.
What Starcraft 1 does very well and what many other games cannot really emulate is the dynamics of units - that the battles can happen across the whole map - because few units are often still significant enough. There is obviously the whole "death ball" concept too - but Starcraft Brood War is full of mechanics that actually go against the death ball - for example siege tanks, or psionic storm that just annihilate clumped units. This never existed in Westwood games, what meant that most games were mostly just sitting in one place and building 50 tanks.
The whole "you can garrison marines in a building" thing in RA2 was nice.. but at the end again it was static defense.
It seems like it worked OK for campaign mode. It still is a perfectly reasonable choice but especially at the time, to prioritize the single player mode over the competitive scene.
I think this is the same reason why people preferred a "Call of Duty" over "Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" when playing a multiplayer FPS. You do not necessarily want to invest a lot of time to enjoy something.
On a personal note, I really enjoyed "Dune 2000" and "Emperor: Battle for Dune" but I have never really been a huge fan of the "Age of Empire" series. Recently I tried "Impossible Creatures" and it was frustrating. I suppose for I am a very casual RTS player. Each to their own.
As someone who loved both C&C games and Impossible Creatures growing up and has played them recently, it mostly boils down to the flavour and soul of the game for me personally.
It feels really cool to escape into these worlds, each unit and building feels alive and unique.
They're mechanically not the best games, but that's never gotten in the way of the fun factor for me :)
C&C Generals is up there with StarCraft in terms of gameplay. And yes the RA music is some of the best ever game music. I still blast Hell March from time to time.
That’s from 2003 though. It is one of the last games in the series and was made after Westwood Studios had been disbanded and staff finally merged fully into EA LA. Westwood didn’t even exist as a subsidiary of EA by that point.
Whereas StarCraft was released in 1998. Which, if we are to use your examples, would make C&C 5 years behind StarCraft in terms of game play. Which is a hell of a long time given how games were evolving in the 90s and early 00s
I felt that Westwood's strategy games were built around their single-player campaign experience. As a result, their story, FMV, and gameplay were designed to support that focus. The simplity meant that players could get into the game easily.
However, this also meant that the gameplay wasn't well-suited for deep strategy or multiplayer, which was what RTS ended up being about down the road.
What timeframe are you looking at? Dune II was more or less considered the game that established the modern RTS format. C&C is mostly a refinement on the same gameplay loop (down to the spice/tiberium/ore harvesters).
What I remember is a bigger scale for the fights, C&C let you control dozens of units at a time, Warcraft I and II let you control maybe 4 or 6 at a time. The unit cap was larger and you didn't have to spend half of it on resource gathering.
The games did suck (somewhat) arguably but I loved them because I was young enough that I wouldn't have even known what you were talking about if you said the game was "1D" and the lore and world building was cool. I really liked/like the Tiberium stuff, especially the ultra grim TS. Shame C&C3 kind of undid all the grimness. I first played Command and Conquer on the Sega Saturn aged 6 that I had just got for my birthday, so there is huge nostalgia for me.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, they were like Quake but as RTS. Easy to get into, fairly hard to master, extremely intense once initial contact with the enemy has been established.
Yes, they're simple, factions don't differ as much as in Starcraft where they demand very different strategies and tactics, and there isn't as much power in 'microing'. One element that matters quite a bit is there's a hurdle to establishing a new base, it's not just to send away a cheap, fast unit, instead you need to spend a chunk on a slow special unit. This means that rushing a base has more impact in the early to mid game, and sometimes that's how you can stop an enemy attacking your base.
No, they are. RA2 and AoE2 came out within a year of each other, and it isn’t even a contest. RA2 is fun, but it’s so much simpler, and games are so much shorter.
I still like RA2 quite a bit, but it’s not in the same league as others.
(Not the previous poster but) for me wth RA2 there's a slickness to the gameplay, the mechanics, the controls, and the graphics. I've tried to get on with RA several times (via OpenRA) but it never quite clicks for me - it feels old and clunky in comparison.
Have you tried Beyond All Reason? It's a modern take on Total Annihilation, known for having a lot of "player comforts" that reduce the need for micro.
YR or original both. There’s a fluency to the animations, sounds and gameplay that I haven’t seen anywhere before or after. It just feels like everythibg comes together perfectly.
The units are all unique. The few differentiators between nations are actually very relevant.
Well the best thing to come out of the RTS engines were the custom maps in SC1, SC2, WC3 anyway.
Which is to say that so much money has been spent on those designers, whether at Blizzard or Westwood, or later in the near billion dollars that has been handed out to former Blizzard people starting their own thing. And then, some guy Tya in his bedroom in China designed better games.
They should be credited for building communities first and foremost. It wasn't ever really about the games.
What differences do you notice? The remastered has some terrible code behind its UI, you can just feel it.
Menu hangs on start for up to 10 seconds for no apparent reason, people leaving the game during the “connecting to server” stage seems to make everyone else wait indefinitely usually forcing them to quit.
On the multiplayer screen, tab between “Join” and all the other tab buttons and notice how each one moves a few pixels.
Then the obscene inefficiencies overall. Sitting at the main menu not even moving my mouse gets the CPU hot enough to make the fans loud. During gameplay a 4v4 multiplayer match turns into one big lag fest about 15 minutes in.
The "connecting to server" player drop bug has been fixed for a while now.
Never noticed any pixels moving.
Yes, OpenRA is, unfortunately, ridiculously inefficient. You're right in that you just sit in the main menu, even with the moving background set to disabled, and your computer will slowly get hot with excessive CPU/GPU usage. It seems like there is no dynamic use of computer resources at all.
When you go back and play the originals (even Red Alert remastered) the modernised gameplay added by Open RA becomes very apparent. I can't go back to the originals now.