Command & Conquer™ The Ultimate Collection now available on Steam
Command & Conquer™ The Ultimate Collection now available on Steam
Master 17 Strategy Warfare Classics. Are you ready for the ultimate real-time strategy experience? Gather resources, build your base, and create the most powerful armies in the world before engaging the enemy in all-out war.
I guess this is nice for nostalgic value, but where is new, modern real time strategy games like this? It's been a very long time since anything new existed.
There's still some stuff going on, but it's quite dead yeah. In the broader scope of RTS games you still have stuff like Age of Empires 4 and Beyond all Reason, both of which I find a lot of fun. But neither are really much like C&C. What is like C&C is Tempest Rising, which is currently under development. I played the demo and it did feel very C&C like, which is good, but time will tell how polished it will be on release.
Worth noting: Beyond All Reason is FOSS and a really good Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander type of game.
You can also try Zero-K for something with less flashy graphics and more unit customization, also FOSS.
Oh, and before I forget, 0 A.D. if you're more into an Age of Empires type of RTS, another great FOSS RTS.
Not OP, but I hadn't heard of Tempest Rising before! I'll have to keep an eye on that, thanks for mentioning it!
The RTS genre got drowned by cellphone apps doing the same thing.
The games don't have high technical requirements, so it's a perfect match for phone/tablet apps.
However they're also quite easy to program, and easy to make graphics for, so the market is swamped with clones of clones of stock code and stock graphics, so no developer can approach it seriously anymore.
The best games in the genre are good because they have carefully balanced gameplay, but that takes time to discover for the players, so even if someone made the perfect game, it'd never be discovered amongst the shovel-ware.
Well it's not the same theme, but I've been having a ton of fun with Age of Empires 4 lately.
Company of Heroes 3?
I wanted to but the reviews show it's a train wreck.
I'd recommend checking out Planetary Annihilation, Planetary Annihilation:Titans, Supreme Commander 1/2 and their mods
While they remain mostly unchanged from the Origin version, it does include some updates to the map editors to make them work in 2024.
See here for some comments from the producer that made it happen:
https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/1b92iqv/comment/ktt0qyk/
Copied below to save you the trouble of visiting reddit:
Dear C&C Community,
It’s been a few years since I had the opportunity to reach out and engage with you directly. I’ve truly missed that. I hope you have all stayed safe, healthy, and positive since my last post in September of 2020.
I realize many of you have been wondering about the status of Command & Conquer over the past several years. After the launch of the first C&C Remastered Collection, I told our Community Council I would continue to try and find opportunities to support the C&C community and franchise wherever possible. With that in mind, I do have an announcement we think the entire C&C Community can get excited about. The C&C Ultimate Collection is now live on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39394/Command__Conquer_The_Ultimate_Collection/
How did this come to happen? Well, a while back I heard some team members at EA had the desire to launch some of our classic titles on Steam. After hearing about this initiative, several of us proposed we include the C&C Ultimate Collection. We knew this has been a request of the C&C community for over a decade, and has been an equal goal of us passionate C&C folks around the company. As such, a dedicated strike team here at EA has been pushing to make this a reality - but we knew we couldn't do it alone. So in the spirit of our community collaboration from the Remastered Collection, we reached out to a small group of the C&C Community to understand how we could best deliver the Ultimate Collection on Steam.
The feedback and collaboration has once again been invaluable. With improvements like better compatibility for modern operating systems and additional supported languages for both the Steam and EA App versions, we believe this is the best release of the Ultimate Collection to date.
Alongside the launch of the Ultimate Collection on Steam, we are also excited to announce the release of the beloved map editors FinalSun and FinalAlert 2 under the GPL version 3.0 license, which can also be launched directly from the Steam version of Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. Now over 20 years since their initial release, original creator Matthias Wagner has generously repackaged these classic editors into a more compatible version for 2024. This was achievable thanks to the technical collaboration with Luke "CCHyper" Feenan,>!!< and the kindness of Olaf van der Spek, who has graciously released his XCC Library under the GPL 3.0 license as part of this effort. We cannot thank Matthias, Luke, and Olaf enough for making this a reality for the C&C community, and are eager to see where the tools and content creation go from here.
A huge thank you to the community playtesters who helped provide feedback on this version of the Ultimate Collection, and the organizations of CnCNet, W3DHub, and C&C Online for continuing to support these classic titles. We hope you all enjoy these improvements to the C&C Ultimate Collection - available today on Steam.
Until next time.
Cheers,
Jim Vessella
Jimtern
They are all marked as Singleplayer. Is that just a mistake or did they strip out any multiplayer functionality?
Also: will this require Origin?
Seeing as a fair chunk of those games used IPX and GameSpy I am not shocked by the lack of multiplayer.
If online play is your jam then there is always https://cncnet.org/ It shows there are 493 people playing Yuri’s Revenge as I type this.
Not all the games are free to play. Some of them require you to copy some files from a paid version. So this sale is still relevant. Check out the FAQ at the url above.
My brother and I started playing Mental Omega instead. It’s a rewrite based off Yuri. It has new units, structures, abilities, and AI/balancing tweaks. http://mentalomega.com/
Unlike RA2 you can no longer just deploy 100 GI’s and mow down everything that comes at them. That never really made sense when a tank rolls by. In Mental Omega the tank will kill them all. Cause they’re just guys with rifles against a heavy armor tank…
Yuri's Revenge had dolphins with laser beams strapped to them as a commandable unit and you're worried about the logistics of small arms destroying a tank?
Also: will this require Origin?
Caved and got the bundle.
I installed Red Alert 2, it doesn't need Origin. But at least on my Linux install the main menu is just a black screen. :(There are community projects that make those games run like a charm on modern systems. Tiberian sun and red alert 2 run perfectly on my steam deck. Check out pcgamningwiki
Store page does not list Origin as a dependency, but I can't know for certain
Give me a Dune 2000 remake. I love that game.
Emperor: Battle for Dune was also fun.
Edit: And now that I think about it, Dune 2000 is a the remake, of Dune 2, specifically.
Red Alert 2 was the only game where I watched the cutscenes.
Fuck that game was good. I'd argue at the time it was a perfect game.
RA2 definitely had some quality cut scenes, but Kane with the Brotherhood of Nod and whoever that suit from the GDI was were both pretty awesome too. That was my first jump from soley video game graphics to something more immersive. Online play though, RA2 was the best, especially p2p with my friends on nurple maps.
Not to be confused with the Remastered Collection.
OpenRA is better
OpenRA is only 3 games
Custom maps abound! Combined arms is great too.
I don't like a few of the changes they make to gameplay. In particular, I don't like being able to build more than one structure at a time. I know RA2 started it, but I didn't like it in RA2, either. Being able to build a power-hungry defensive structure and the power plant to run it at the same time takes out some of the strategy, in my opinion.
Fair enough, but I believe there may be a toggle for that.
Is better than Red Alert? But is it better than Renegade?
So is this using the newly lowered prices everybody was buzzing about yesterday?
They lowered the prices of the the games already available, but today they added everything before c&c 3 and red alert 3 to steam.
Entire pack is priced under $20, with a 50% discount. So less than $10.
Damn, I might have to pick this up. Had lots of fun with these games as a kid.
I was literally thinking about how I wanted to play something like command and conquer today . Just went I bought this , hopefully it works well on Linux.