C&C Remastered Collection – Release and Comments

 

To say that yesterday’s release of C&C Remastered Collection has been a success would be an understatement. Don’t take it from me – SteamDB’s charts alone (no data on Origin numbers) showed a peak of 42,587 concurrent players about an hour after launch, and the lowest point still being over 16,000 – something even StarCraft II can wish it has. The demand is so high that the multiplayer server keeps crashing, and the package has topped Steam’s top seller page (sorted by relevance) days before release and is not letting go.

The game’s size turns out largely to be due to the fact that the original MIX files are distributed in their entirety in the game’s directory. The source code is also within the directory, so you don’t need to bother pulling it from Github. There have been issues with stuttering as well, but the team is aware of this and has proceeded to investigate.

As a nice little tribute, the icons of the Tiberian Dawn engineer and the Red Alert grenadier appear to have been modeled after the late John “Totalbiscuit” Bain, who was a big fan of the Command & Conquer franchise.

And now, time for subjectivity – I’ve played it for several hours on launch day, and even though I expected a lot given Jim Vessella’s transparency and the very positive vibes from some of my friends who were in the community council, I was still pleasantly surprised at the overall quality of the project. It did exactly what it set out to do – not only did it faithfully recreate all the visuals, clean up the audio, and bring all the content from the expansions and console variants, but it also built an unprecedented level of trust that the series is back and there is hope that any future project will follow the same thread of thought.

 

Dear Electronic Arts, as you can see, we have voted with our wallets. As you can see, we bought this not for the games that we have already had for free for over a decade – we bought it to support a kickass team who took their time and effort to make a release as good as it can be. If this were an entirely new title instead of a remaster, I guarantee you the sentiment would have been the same. Unlike the utter trash (and here I am insulting actual trash) that you have tried to give us from 2010 to 2018 and convince us to like it with zero merit, this is what we want – good gameplay, no microtransactions, no nickle-and-diming, and giving a well-suited team the necessary time and freedom to do things right.

Was this so hard???