C&C: The Ultimate Collection – Now on Steam
A few years ago, EA started publishing their old titles on Steam again, after they were able to put their EA Play subscription on the store. Since it had a much narrower range of games on Steam than it did on EA App (ex-Origin), EA decided to put a selection of their old games on Steam for the first time. Among them… was finally Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection. The caveat is that as of now, C&C games older than the Remastered Collection are no longer available separately. However, if you owned C&C 3, Red Alert 3 or C&C 4 (expansions included), you will not get a duplicate in your library and you can even get a discount. The 2D C&C games, which were the toughest to get running on modern PCs, have been packaged with DDrawCompat to simplify installation, as well as their respective map editors, which is a welcome addition. While servers like CnCNet and C&C:Online have been around for many, many years now, they have not been natively implemented, but
This comes after days of speculation fueled by changes that were going on on the previously existing games on Steam – cloud saves support was added, Worldbuilders (although glitched) were added as part of the default installation, and users noticed Steam app IDs that were simultaneously affected, that belonged to the other C&C games and were there for a while, only dormant. Fast forward to today – classic EA games like the Command & Conquer series, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and The Saboteur (2009) are now available on Steam both as full purchases and as part of the EA Play subscription.
While he has been silent for a good minute, Jim Vessella a.k.a. Jimtern reached out to the community on Reddit with the post shown below:
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
Head on over to Steam to grab The Ultimate Collection – with a launch discount of 60%.
EDIT – 8 March 2024: Our guides for installing games have been overhauled, but especially the one for The Ultimate Collection.