Weekend Reading: Why I Do Not Play Command & Conquer 4

I'm sad to see Command & Conquer go out with a whimper. I have loved the series since I first saw a video of Kane dealing in some double crossing with Stalin. Quite a bit of time after I saw the video on a friend's computer, I did not even get to play the Red Alert branch. I did not have a PC that could actually run any of the games. Since then, I have managed to play them all, I watched those exquisite if campy Full Motion Videos and churned through quite a bit of warfare hardware. And now I can’t even bring myself to fire up Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. I cannot even get myself to search the vast expanses of the Internet in order to find out how the overall story ends.

And the demise of C&C comes just as other series, like Dawn of War from Relic and THQ, managed to actually reinvent themselves from the ground up, going more tactics-based in the sequel and adding a role playing layer. This as Supreme Commander showed how big scale strategy could be done.

As StarCraft II is ready for a huge launch and seems to look much the same kind of strategy it was ten years ago, how could a series that had the camp element of Command & Conquer complete with high paced gameplay and two very different sides lose its audience in the space between Tiberium Wars in 2007 and Tiberian Twilight in 2010?

I guess the answer and the lesson to be learned here is that if change is needed for a major franchise, it should only target one aspect of its appeal. Dawn of War II might have gone tactical and multiplayer segregated but the over the top combat feats of the Space Marines were still there.

Command & Conquer 4 dropped the camp in favor of a serious, even melodramatic score, while also shifting the gameplay significantly, from frantic base building and rushes to walker-based unit production and tiered units. If only one of them had been left intact, I might have bothered to at least search the Internet to see the story of the game or at engage in some skirmishes. With big changes coming to both, I will probably never touch the game again.