Its the 1st anniversary of Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances. Here's a statistical look at what all of the dedicated players have achieved after one year.
The global administrator of GameReplays.org, Jon "AGMLaucher" LeMaitre, joined Victory Games earlier today and will be filling a role in the design team. There is an interview on the official forums, and here's an excerpt:
Jon, could you please introduce yourselves to our Community? My name is Jon LeMaitre, and I may be better known within the community as AgmLauncher. I’m originally from the east coast of the US, and recently moved here to California for this amazing opportunity. While my background is in web design/development, I have a borderline unhealthy passion for the Command & Conquer franchise. I play C&C games almost exclusively, but I’m a rabid fan of the RTS genre as a whole.
(...)
What are your key responsibilities working with the design team? My primary responsibility on the design team is to reinforce the Command and Conquer culture, and to pay attention to the little things. Details matter, and as such I will be helping to make sure the details are true to Command and Conquer’s unique combination of fun, accessible, rich, and rewarding gameplay. This involves playing the game, discussing the direction and implementation details with the team, brainstorming and problem solving, and providing general creative input. As I become more familiar with the development tools used to make the game, I hope to assist the engineering team in the implementation of new ideas.
Bluehell Productions has released a new Tiberian Sun Reborn trailer, showing off most of the units and announcing that as the release date comes closer, more trailers like this one will arrive. Judging by the looks of the mod and their slogan "2030 Starts 2013", we can expect that to finally happen this year! The team states that all remaining issues will not take long to repair (except for the Juggernaut, which will be excluded in the first public release).
Bluehell Productions also wishes to create a launch event with various community members and site owners when the time comes. Click here to see more information in the TS Reborn blog.
The second round of the Ask a Developer interviews has begun. This is your chance to submit your questions to the Command & Conquer development team. Each Ask a Developer round focuses on a person that represents one of the key development team departments, with the next one being with Producer Bryan Farina. Here's some information about him:
Name: Bryan Farina Role at Victory Games: Producer Key Responsibilities: Herding cats, a.k.a aligning the team to the product vision, prioritizing tasks in the backlog, risk assessment and mitigation, competitive analysis, and whole lot of other great business buzzwords. How long in the industry: 18 years Other Games Worked On: Might and Magic (series), Heroes of Might and Magic (series), multiple unannounced MMO-style games. Favorite C&C all time: This one is difficult to answer. Tiberian Dawn was spectacular and really set the hook in my mouth for the franchise, but I’ve probably spent more time playing Generals than any other single game in the series. However, I enjoyed the campaign in Tiberium Wars the most. It’s one of those three! Favorite Game all time: How do you even answer this? I’ll go with M.U.L.E. because it was the first game I played that really made me appreciate great game design. M.U.L.E. was a space colonization game based on actual economic theories with a number of different specialized alien races playable by four players with the best theme song ever, all written in under 48K. Something no one knows about you: No one knows that there is nothing about me that someone doesn’t already know about. GDI or Nod: Generally prefer GDI, but in Tiberian Dawn I was *much* better with Nod. Vanilla or Chocolate: Chocolate ice cream, frosting, and malts; Vanilla cake, soda, and frozen yogurt.
This is a follow-up to the news from last week announcing the Tiberium Alliances Anniversary Contest. Tiberium Alliances celebrates one year with an exciting contest where you can win a closed beta key for the new Command & Conquer - Free to Play! And for all the other dedicated Commanders out there, the Tiberium Alliances team will be giving away some birthday gifts on their social channels as well. There are actually two challenges for this contest...
CHALLENGE 1: Anniversary Contest Server On May 24th at 7pm UTC, we will open the gates to a completely new server and game experience. To win one of the Beta Keys, you simply need to start on this special new server and show us that you are one of the best. The members of the Top 3 Alliances in the Score Leaderboard and the Top 15 Players on the Distance Leaderboard will receive a Closed Beta Key.
CHALLENGE 2: Are you the ultimate C&C fan? Submit a personal Video Response to our contest video here and convince us that you are a super C&C fan who deserves a Command & Conquer Closed Beta Key. The greatest, funniest and most impressive fan videos will get rewarded. Submit your video between May 24th and June 9th.
Remember, this content ends on June 9th at 7 PM UTC. More information can be found here.
After a 6 month hiatus, C&C Legos: Brotherhood is back! We've returned with Eric Gooch, who has reprised as role as Seth, Plokite_Wolf, who has done quite a bit of voice work especially in season 4, and we've recently added the voice of Sybert, known around the community for some of his Community Battlecast Primetime, commentary and game streaming work.
In this episode of C&C Legos, Kane wants to develop his time machine further, but the only man capable of helping is Einstein. Can they grab him before he goes back in time and erases his own progress, or will they get stuck in an infinite loop?
And of course: click here to view all the past C&C Lego episodes or check out the newest updates and future changes right here.
Stable version 20130514 of OpenRA has been released, featuring over 1,100 individual changes by 26 authors since the last stable release. Some of the new features are:
Significantly improved AI
UI improvements to the menus and lobby
New UI for replays, spectators and defeated players
New construction radius limits for C&C and D2K
Repairable bridges
Desert theater for RA
Left-click mouse controls (beta)
5 new missions for RA
20 new multiplayer maps across all three mods
Significant balance improvements across all three mods
EA Phenomic has informed us that Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances is set to go mobile in selected countries from Thursday 23rd of May. The mobile version will be available via the App Store in the following countries:
Update: Due to some miss understandings the first roll out has been pushed back to Thursday 23rd of May. EA Phenomic apologises for the short notice and for the delay.
CnCSaga.de has posted a new interview with Tim Morton, the Development Director at Victory Games working on the new Command & Conquer - Free to Play. A lot of the questions cover most of what we have learnt from other interviews in recent months, but there are still some interesting questions in this one, with some samples below.
Why did you decide to make Generals 2 a Free2Play title? The free to play aspect, while notable, is really a by-product of the new underlying philosophy for this game. Where past titles focused on releasing one version, this new C&C will be a continuous live service that never stops improving based on feedback from players. A lot of my answers below are driven by this: we will start with the essential core and then build from there. The approach is markedly different from past products (tightly focused feature-set in the beginning), but I am convinced the long-term outcome will be higher quality.
Will EA be releasing another full price C&C title? There are not currently any plans for another full-price C&C title, but past C&C titles remain available in “C&C: The Ultimate Collection”.
By when can we expect a beta-phase? Select community members are already providing feedback to an “Alpha Preview” in a closed environment, but the constantly evolving nature of a live service makes the terms “Alpha” and “Beta” less germane. More players will gain access over time until we’ve reached a point where we believe the game is ready to be completely open. Our hope is to be fully open before the end of 2013, but we’re not yet ready to commit to a specific date.
