26 Years And Counting
Posting anniversary posts is bittersweet these days. On one hand, I’ve received some feedback in the past few months from game researchers who are glad that a center of information for the Command & Conquer franchise still exists, but on the other… the community is just not there anymore. A few long-standing mods get updated, a few memes circulate here and there, but the days of Command & Conquer’s peak community activity seem to be long gone, so there is little to follow in terms of news. However, the multiplayer charts on the cnc.community website still show a blip of life, meaning people continue to play the more popular titles with their friends at the very least, so it’s nice to see the series itself is not forgotten – it’s just not spoken about as much.
The only “””official””” activity we got in the past year was EA licensing the franchise out to an yet another mobile game studio, with the punching bag du jur being called Command & Conquer: Legions by Yorha Studios and Level Infinite, shown at this year’s Gamescom. Except it would have been a punching bag if the community at large wasn’t so used to being offered proverbial poison that is presented as a delicious cake, so hardly anyone could even bother with an angry reaction, just a quiet but firmly cold shoulder.
As eyes of RTS fans turn to upcoming titles like Tempest Rising, Stormgate, Homeworld 3, ZeroSpace, DORF, Dust Front and others, and while the current RTS torch is firmly held by the resurrected Age of Empires franchise, I suppose I can’t blame people for wanting to move on.
I’d just like to take the opportunity to shout out all the people in the community who are still, despite the aforementioned lull, maintaining the graphics renderers, multiplayer servers, modding communities and toolsets, tournaments and the other surviving websites, as well as all of you who keep streaming, posting let’s plays and making fan art/animations. The very fact you still support this very franchise instead of a more active one shows that you do it out of love for the series. I may not have shared the space with you as long as this site has, but I’m glad that I have done so regardless, and will continue to do so.