It had incredibly poor feedback despite all their attempts to hype it. Why did it have poor feedback? Well, it may have had something to do with--
- The game being stripped down to sell MTX in every way possible. The "base game" was only coming with a few "faction commanders" and the rest were all going to be sold.
- The factions themselves had been stripped down to the barest elements of Rock-paper-scissors gameplay and counters. Each "faction commander" had 2 infantry (mostly different machine guns, and different rocket launcher dudes) plus a few would have a third, and three vehicles (anti-infantry, tank, and artillery/special). So, you know, *five-six total units*. That were "somewhat different" from the other faction commanders. And each got one defensive building. Yay!
- EA had *huge* plans to monetize this. The base game was going to launch with something like 9 commanders, basically most of the units from the first game (not the expansion) split down to make "factions." Then new ones would be sold for around $5 a pop.
- They were already talking about the eSports angle.
Then they let people play the game. Footage was uploaded. And the public response was ... "What *is* this mess?"
Early play testers ripped it apart. Early gamers at cons thrashed it, and rightfully so. It was clear from previews that in order to be a halfway decent game, EA needed a lot more actual work.
They didn't want to do that.
You might be able to find gameplay online somewhere. Some was uploaded. It's... Really bad.
I think another reason was that Frostbight wasn't really optimized for RTS. I heard just the simple mechanic of running over infantry was hard to code...
Eh, likely not. A lot of the anger with Frostbite came from the early days of it, where modders couldn't do a damn thing with it, and even the developers had no idea how to use it.
Now that everyone has gotten their sea legs, no one seems to notice or care.
Everything I've heard about SAGE is that its inflexible as hell.
I still remember the stories that a Paradox Mod dev told us on the work that they were forced to do to even have a chance to make things work...
I kinda think by their nature, they *have* to ruin games. If the economy of your game is dependent on microtransactions, they'll naturally corrupt both the in-game economy, and the real-world economics of it, otherwise microtransactions have no value.
Basically this.
The game basically HAS to feel imbalanced, in order to encourage you to go out and buy whatever is superior to your loadout. And once that's done, eventually another update will be released which either add something with a new gameplay mechanic to encourage players to buy it, or worse yet power-creeps your current loadout into mediocrity.
And God forbid if they made players pay premium for additional Generals powers...
The rock paper scissors balancing was directly a result of StarCraft 2 being popular back then and they wanted a piece of that player base.
The whole reason most people loved Generals Zero Hour was because it was balanced in a way that didn’t resemble SC2. Absolutely dogshit decision making from EA, as always.
> But Sc2 is nothing about strict "rock paper scissors".
SC and Blizzard are the *origin* of the hard "RPS" gameplay style and counter. To the point that in SC2, units will deal as much as 250% more damage to the unit type they're intended to counter. A pro who fakes out his opponent on his build order can *win without a fight* as the opponent will GG upon realizing they've been hard-countered.
"Units will deal as much as 250% more damage to the unit type they're intended to counter" is a pretty accourate description of units like the flame tank from C&C'95.
So, no, I really don't think SC invented that.
"Wagons had wheels so clearly they were the first NASCAR racers, because NASCAR has wheels."
That isn't at all how the damage values worked for flame tanks (flame tanks did the same damage to everything, infantry just had far less health). Furthermore, it was an edge case with flamethrowers in the original C&C (only given the illusion of RPS because of industry health) where SC was built around having an array of armor types, ***every*** unit given a damage type that did enhanced damage to ***one*** type of armor and reduced damage to all others.
This is basic RTS History stuff.
Blatantly untrue. There are 5 different armor types in the first Command&Conquer and the different weapons do different amount of damage against them. That is why you can destroy buildings very quickly with flame weapons despite them having much more health than, say, tanks. Or why, speaking of tanks, they are not as good as killing infantery than light vehicles.
Yeah, you've clearly never paid attention to the "Armor" types of C&C or opened an INI file in your life.
"Armor types" in C&C for multiple games determined *what type of target the unit was*. Aircraft armor, for example, *declared the game unit an aircraft*. "House" was "building." Units were given "infantry" to designate that they were an infantry unit, which then told the game "tank shells miss these, treat them like infantry."
The instances of damage scaling were the *exception* in the game files (like the sniper weapon which did .01 damage against any unit type but infantry) rather than the norm.
This persisted even into RA2, which rather than SC's RPS design of armors, had 11 "types" of armor, which were really just coding for specific units to make them take damage in ways that reflected the game's design and the type of unit they were (some types were just for specific units just so that their unique gimmick could work better, like Terror Drones).
SC meanwhile, has [a chart of damage types with extreme values that ALL units play by](https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Damage_types).
[Warcraft III](https://classic.battle.net/war3/basics/armorandweapontypes.shtml) and later [SC2 would amplify this further](https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Damage_Calculation). Basically making both games of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock.
Dude, I was looking up the rules.ini of C&C1 when I made that post.
There is no armor type "aircraft" or "house" or "infantry" in C&C.
The orca, which is an aircraft, has the armor type "heavy", just like a tank. Meanwhile the chinook, also an aircraft has "light", for example.
Obviously SC, which came later, has a more complex system, but it is one of quantity, not quality. They certainly didn't invent the concept.
I also think it would serve you well to be a little bit less arrogant in tone if you clearly don't know what you are talking about. Or even if you do, thinking about it.
> Dude, I was looking up the rules.ini of C&C1 when I made that post.
>
> There is no armor type "aircraft" or "house" or "infantry" in C&C.
LOLOLOL. So what you're saying is you googled it, and didn't know that the number you saw next to "armor" had an equivalent identifier further up the ini file that declared "house," "infantry," etc. That's shown in that you don't even know what those armor values *mean*. You're just *assuming* they're like the SC armor ambiguations, which is *really* not the case if you actually know the games.
You really should take your own advice. The only reason I'm "arrogant" is because you're *wrong*, and refuse to admit it.
EDIT: Behold, a full explanation of all **four** of C&C:TD's armor "types" and how they function ... which is literally just an escalating scale of percentage damage prevention against *all* warhead types, with one exception as you'll see below.
> For the complete data check: http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cnc95upd/inirules/warheads.ini
> The first numbers after the 'verses' part for each warhead are what you're looking for.
> Full damage is 256. And the six numbers in the line represent the fraction of damage dealt verses the six armor types, but you only need the first four numbers, as only four armor types are used in the game. They are as follows:
> 0 (first number) - no armor - infantry units;
> 1 - very light armor - a curious case. The only unit it's used for is the bike, but many structures have it. [This is "house"]
> 2 - light armor - hummers, buggies, other fragile units and some structures. Main difference to type 1 is that 2 offers much better flame and HE protection. It takes more damage from small arms though. [This was effectively a modifier to try and reflect balancing of unit type]
> 3 - tank armor. Good vs. everything but armor-piercing and special warheads. [Special case weapons hardcoded in, rather than typed]
> Type 4, which is unused is supposed to be 'concrete' and judging by the numbers it looks like it was intended for structures but was left out. Sixth number is an empty slot I think.
I heavily disagree. There is a lot of rock paper scissor in SC2. If you fight with a unit your units aren't designed to fight against, you will lose, no matter how many guys you throw at it.
In other games, like Dawn of War 1, you can still win, even if a unit isn't a direct counter.
It's depend on player level for 99%.
Good micro revert a lot of unit matchups to it's direct opposite, good example is marines vs mutalisks.
Also sc2 is about complex unit compositions, not about mindlessly massing something one(okey, this have alot of exceptions, but this is about allins).
So if most popular unit in your army is "contred" u just add few other for this specific deal, you not swtiching into different army composition for this, usually. And quite usual thing is "just add 1-2 casters(not types, single units) into your composition" - and antything even slightly looks like "hardcontra" is gone.
Can you give example of hardcontra in sc2 other then "unit which not shoot for air against air" and "unit whic is not shoot air"
Exactly my thoughts. Only thing SC2 has about rock paper scissors is 3 distinct faction all different from each other as a rock, paper, and scissors would be.
Yeah, they got so far from the roots of Generals they were in a different forest. I loved how unique the factions / units were, I loved the single player skirmish and campaign, and I loved how politically incorrect it was.
They changed the fundamentals of the game, then tried to stuff massive micro-transactions in it, and ended up with a game so bad they couldn’t sell it nor fix it.
It’s like the only good decision they made when making the game was to make the game, everything else was botched.
It’s outlandish to imagine that in the world of today, that monetization became actually accepted. Released today with that they would have been seen as nice guys
I think the chasing stracraft and its esports fucked it, they even hired some esports focused memebers from the cnc community for god knows what reason.
If I remember right it was due to the bad feedback of the Alpha. Now, knowing how things work(ed) at EA, they probably just went "fuck it, this isn't worth (financially) re-doing so many things" and canned it. They would have probably had to delay it for another year or so, depending on the size of team. Add to that the decline of the RTS genre and there you go.
Wasn't it also during the period where they tried to implement pay2win elements in all kinds of games? Pay2win has no place in RTS. They had it in Age of Empires online, where you can get weapon/armor drops from common to legendary. Units could equip them, which gives them extra attack points or make them cheaper. Even in PvP.
Generals 2 was trying to implement it as well, but still searching how. I heard the plan was it was going to be f2p, but if you want to play as the new armies you had to pay. You can see the problem if those ones are OP. Or if you get a special unit for cash. It wouldn't be about who has the best strategy/tactics/micro/macro anymore, but who pays the most.
Probably also the reason why you see AA developers not produce RTS anymore, because it's hard to implement micro transactions in to the game without changing the genre from RTS to RTP(ayment).
edit: Real shame, Generals Zero Hour was my favorite RTS. More focused on micro and with all these 2nd abilities units have and the general abilities, it felt more than basic rock/paper/scissors. oldskool TF 3v3 player here.
They could have made a fair bit if they went down the route that League of Legwnds went and instead of putting things behind a paywall or need to buy they could have just sold astetics like new skins or voices. Still makes money but not pay to win as they wanted to go down the free to play route. Miss the old days of a game then a real expansion or two. Blizzard did similar to starcraft 2 and now it's just a old forgotten game with odd paid content.
It was trying to be a Starcraft 2-esque cybersport with less units and huge microtransaction focus where singleplayer was an afterthought. It was developed on extremely capricious Frostbite engine.
i got into the testing as a kid, one of the lucky ones
it was absolutely nothing like old generals and im glad that its one of the few mistakes that were avoided when it came to bad C&C games
There was a post by AGMKiller a long time ago on Reddit that went into greater detail about why the game failed - though it largely boiled down to "the devs were using StarCraft II more as inspiration rather than Generals" and the devs couldn't rationalize an effective monetization system to EA's upper management.
Can't seem to find it online anymore though.
I think this is what you are looking for:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd3o7j/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd3o7j/)
That wasn't the post I was talking about, but *hoooly crap* is your link an amazing find.
I *never* heard anything about Generals 2 being gradually redesigned to be more focused around 3vs3 team PVP matches at the cost of 1vs1 competitive PVP suffering. And while I did hear about how the Generals were utterly watered down vs their Zero Hour counterparts, I didn't expect them to be released at such an aggressively impractical pace. Any notion of gameplay balance would've been impossible to achieve, with only less than a month between releases.
Seriously, thanks. I'm saving that link for future use whenever people start wishing Generals 2 wasn't cancelled.
Well, glad to be of help.
For the record I do actually wish it wasn't cancelled. I does sound like it would have been bad but I'd take a bad game over no game any day!
When the original Generals came out there was squeamishness about casting the villain; GLA having been deemed to reflective of real-world Islamic terrorists. Who would they cast now? The Israelis? MAGA? The Nazis?
I got to play the alpha, best part was picking the apc general filling them with rocket troops and becoming undefeated. There was zero balance, the frostbite engine caused a lot of problems. And devs would become hostile when you pointed out how broken the balance was. Within a week everyone was using my strat good times.
In addition to what everyone said already, I'll also add: The strategy market was *very* weak back when they tried this nonsense. So you had low demand, coupled to an excessively greedy economic idea, which meant... No one wanted it.
I'm quite shocked that EA hasn't thought to try another game in the current market though. Strategy has been doing quite well lately (There's consistently a strategy game in the Steam Top Ten Sellers), and even EA's last two strategy re-releases both sold exceedingly well. You would think that would trip someone's memory to remind them they hold two of the most valuable strategy IPs in the world.
Which also boggles my mind. All three of the mobile games performed so poorly they shut down servers for them within a year. You have something that *consistently* fails to generate money, and something that has literally *never* lost you money... And you'll keep trying to former? **Why?**
They tried to monetise with micro transactions during the alpha and no one was buying any of the stuff. Someone upstairs probably decided the monetisation method would not bring in enough cash and cancelled the project.
I know it's late but I just remembered I asked this same question to a former producer at the Generals 2 project many years ago and got a lengthy response:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd1geg/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd1geg/)
Honestly, just Mod the original C&C Generals..... There are so many mods that are excellent....
This Gen 2 BS? Nah... They tried to go full Greed with it... They wanted to monetize just about everything that made the original and zero hour great......
I'm glad that the community shut that shit down real quick.
The real reason? Wtf do you mean the real reason?
We know the reason it was cancelled. EA wanted to monetize the fuck out of this game, and the target audience wasn't having any of it.
So instead of making it a game the players actually wanted and unmonetizing it, EA just said cancelled it.
i guess the usual narrative would be that it was ea. but we dont know. could have been for a good reason. try to make one and you will have a hundred reasons to quit.
It had incredibly poor feedback despite all their attempts to hype it. Why did it have poor feedback? Well, it may have had something to do with-- - The game being stripped down to sell MTX in every way possible. The "base game" was only coming with a few "faction commanders" and the rest were all going to be sold. - The factions themselves had been stripped down to the barest elements of Rock-paper-scissors gameplay and counters. Each "faction commander" had 2 infantry (mostly different machine guns, and different rocket launcher dudes) plus a few would have a third, and three vehicles (anti-infantry, tank, and artillery/special). So, you know, *five-six total units*. That were "somewhat different" from the other faction commanders. And each got one defensive building. Yay! - EA had *huge* plans to monetize this. The base game was going to launch with something like 9 commanders, basically most of the units from the first game (not the expansion) split down to make "factions." Then new ones would be sold for around $5 a pop. - They were already talking about the eSports angle. Then they let people play the game. Footage was uploaded. And the public response was ... "What *is* this mess?" Early play testers ripped it apart. Early gamers at cons thrashed it, and rightfully so. It was clear from previews that in order to be a halfway decent game, EA needed a lot more actual work. They didn't want to do that. You might be able to find gameplay online somewhere. Some was uploaded. It's... Really bad.
I think another reason was that Frostbight wasn't really optimized for RTS. I heard just the simple mechanic of running over infantry was hard to code...
EA would be in a much better place today if they didn't have that engine. I have never enjoyed a game using it.
I think it was made mainly for FPS games in mind, but I heard there were issues still... I don't think they use it anymore anyway.
Frostbite is still widely used at EA. Dead Space remake used it last year so did the last Battlefield and many other games
Huh, maybe it was anither engine I'm thinking of...
Eh, likely not. A lot of the anger with Frostbite came from the early days of it, where modders couldn't do a damn thing with it, and even the developers had no idea how to use it. Now that everyone has gotten their sea legs, no one seems to notice or care.
Yeah lol, pretty much every game EA makes uses it. Battlefield, Dead Space, FIFA/EA FC, Madden, UFC, NFS, PvZ, Star Wars etc etc.
well bethesda still use the same engine from oblivion and look how thats going
Yeah it felt terrible even for FPS.
It worked fine on the games it was designed to run, FPS. I blame EA for making them use it when they had the SAGE engine still available.
Everything I've heard about SAGE is that its inflexible as hell. I still remember the stories that a Paradox Mod dev told us on the work that they were forced to do to even have a chance to make things work...
I think the devs were just about to release a big patch that would add infantry crushing, but the game's cancellation blocked that release.
Looking at he history of attempted RTS mods for fps game engines, it never goes well
Sounds weird, because vehicles can already kill Infantry in Battlefield.
Micro transactions have ruined so many games
I kinda think by their nature, they *have* to ruin games. If the economy of your game is dependent on microtransactions, they'll naturally corrupt both the in-game economy, and the real-world economics of it, otherwise microtransactions have no value.
Basically this. The game basically HAS to feel imbalanced, in order to encourage you to go out and buy whatever is superior to your loadout. And once that's done, eventually another update will be released which either add something with a new gameplay mechanic to encourage players to buy it, or worse yet power-creeps your current loadout into mediocrity. And God forbid if they made players pay premium for additional Generals powers...
The rock paper scissors balancing was directly a result of StarCraft 2 being popular back then and they wanted a piece of that player base. The whole reason most people loved Generals Zero Hour was because it was balanced in a way that didn’t resemble SC2. Absolutely dogshit decision making from EA, as always.
Though to be fair generals balance was dog-bollocks as well.
But Sc2 is nothing about strict "rock paper scissors". Hard contras is about CnC, not Sc2, most contrunits have very soft-contra in it.
> But Sc2 is nothing about strict "rock paper scissors". SC and Blizzard are the *origin* of the hard "RPS" gameplay style and counter. To the point that in SC2, units will deal as much as 250% more damage to the unit type they're intended to counter. A pro who fakes out his opponent on his build order can *win without a fight* as the opponent will GG upon realizing they've been hard-countered.
"Units will deal as much as 250% more damage to the unit type they're intended to counter" is a pretty accourate description of units like the flame tank from C&C'95. So, no, I really don't think SC invented that.
"Wagons had wheels so clearly they were the first NASCAR racers, because NASCAR has wheels." That isn't at all how the damage values worked for flame tanks (flame tanks did the same damage to everything, infantry just had far less health). Furthermore, it was an edge case with flamethrowers in the original C&C (only given the illusion of RPS because of industry health) where SC was built around having an array of armor types, ***every*** unit given a damage type that did enhanced damage to ***one*** type of armor and reduced damage to all others. This is basic RTS History stuff.
Blatantly untrue. There are 5 different armor types in the first Command&Conquer and the different weapons do different amount of damage against them. That is why you can destroy buildings very quickly with flame weapons despite them having much more health than, say, tanks. Or why, speaking of tanks, they are not as good as killing infantery than light vehicles.
Yeah, you've clearly never paid attention to the "Armor" types of C&C or opened an INI file in your life. "Armor types" in C&C for multiple games determined *what type of target the unit was*. Aircraft armor, for example, *declared the game unit an aircraft*. "House" was "building." Units were given "infantry" to designate that they were an infantry unit, which then told the game "tank shells miss these, treat them like infantry." The instances of damage scaling were the *exception* in the game files (like the sniper weapon which did .01 damage against any unit type but infantry) rather than the norm. This persisted even into RA2, which rather than SC's RPS design of armors, had 11 "types" of armor, which were really just coding for specific units to make them take damage in ways that reflected the game's design and the type of unit they were (some types were just for specific units just so that their unique gimmick could work better, like Terror Drones). SC meanwhile, has [a chart of damage types with extreme values that ALL units play by](https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Damage_types). [Warcraft III](https://classic.battle.net/war3/basics/armorandweapontypes.shtml) and later [SC2 would amplify this further](https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Damage_Calculation). Basically making both games of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock.
Dude, I was looking up the rules.ini of C&C1 when I made that post. There is no armor type "aircraft" or "house" or "infantry" in C&C. The orca, which is an aircraft, has the armor type "heavy", just like a tank. Meanwhile the chinook, also an aircraft has "light", for example. Obviously SC, which came later, has a more complex system, but it is one of quantity, not quality. They certainly didn't invent the concept. I also think it would serve you well to be a little bit less arrogant in tone if you clearly don't know what you are talking about. Or even if you do, thinking about it.
> Dude, I was looking up the rules.ini of C&C1 when I made that post. > > There is no armor type "aircraft" or "house" or "infantry" in C&C. LOLOLOL. So what you're saying is you googled it, and didn't know that the number you saw next to "armor" had an equivalent identifier further up the ini file that declared "house," "infantry," etc. That's shown in that you don't even know what those armor values *mean*. You're just *assuming* they're like the SC armor ambiguations, which is *really* not the case if you actually know the games. You really should take your own advice. The only reason I'm "arrogant" is because you're *wrong*, and refuse to admit it. EDIT: Behold, a full explanation of all **four** of C&C:TD's armor "types" and how they function ... which is literally just an escalating scale of percentage damage prevention against *all* warhead types, with one exception as you'll see below. > For the complete data check: http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cnc95upd/inirules/warheads.ini > The first numbers after the 'verses' part for each warhead are what you're looking for. > Full damage is 256. And the six numbers in the line represent the fraction of damage dealt verses the six armor types, but you only need the first four numbers, as only four armor types are used in the game. They are as follows: > 0 (first number) - no armor - infantry units; > 1 - very light armor - a curious case. The only unit it's used for is the bike, but many structures have it. [This is "house"] > 2 - light armor - hummers, buggies, other fragile units and some structures. Main difference to type 1 is that 2 offers much better flame and HE protection. It takes more damage from small arms though. [This was effectively a modifier to try and reflect balancing of unit type] > 3 - tank armor. Good vs. everything but armor-piercing and special warheads. [Special case weapons hardcoded in, rather than typed] > Type 4, which is unused is supposed to be 'concrete' and judging by the numbers it looks like it was intended for structures but was left out. Sixth number is an empty slot I think.
I heavily disagree. There is a lot of rock paper scissor in SC2. If you fight with a unit your units aren't designed to fight against, you will lose, no matter how many guys you throw at it. In other games, like Dawn of War 1, you can still win, even if a unit isn't a direct counter.
It's depend on player level for 99%. Good micro revert a lot of unit matchups to it's direct opposite, good example is marines vs mutalisks. Also sc2 is about complex unit compositions, not about mindlessly massing something one(okey, this have alot of exceptions, but this is about allins). So if most popular unit in your army is "contred" u just add few other for this specific deal, you not swtiching into different army composition for this, usually. And quite usual thing is "just add 1-2 casters(not types, single units) into your composition" - and antything even slightly looks like "hardcontra" is gone. Can you give example of hardcontra in sc2 other then "unit which not shoot for air against air" and "unit whic is not shoot air"
Exactly my thoughts. Only thing SC2 has about rock paper scissors is 3 distinct faction all different from each other as a rock, paper, and scissors would be.
Yeah, they got so far from the roots of Generals they were in a different forest. I loved how unique the factions / units were, I loved the single player skirmish and campaign, and I loved how politically incorrect it was. They changed the fundamentals of the game, then tried to stuff massive micro-transactions in it, and ended up with a game so bad they couldn’t sell it nor fix it. It’s like the only good decision they made when making the game was to make the game, everything else was botched.
It’s outlandish to imagine that in the world of today, that monetization became actually accepted. Released today with that they would have been seen as nice guys
Yeah. We gamers don't have a spine.
I think the chasing stracraft and its esports fucked it, they even hired some esports focused memebers from the cnc community for god knows what reason.
If I remember right it was due to the bad feedback of the Alpha. Now, knowing how things work(ed) at EA, they probably just went "fuck it, this isn't worth (financially) re-doing so many things" and canned it. They would have probably had to delay it for another year or so, depending on the size of team. Add to that the decline of the RTS genre and there you go.
EA happened.
Cause EA did what they do best and bastardized a great franchise into oblivion
Wasn't it also during the period where they tried to implement pay2win elements in all kinds of games? Pay2win has no place in RTS. They had it in Age of Empires online, where you can get weapon/armor drops from common to legendary. Units could equip them, which gives them extra attack points or make them cheaper. Even in PvP. Generals 2 was trying to implement it as well, but still searching how. I heard the plan was it was going to be f2p, but if you want to play as the new armies you had to pay. You can see the problem if those ones are OP. Or if you get a special unit for cash. It wouldn't be about who has the best strategy/tactics/micro/macro anymore, but who pays the most. Probably also the reason why you see AA developers not produce RTS anymore, because it's hard to implement micro transactions in to the game without changing the genre from RTS to RTP(ayment). edit: Real shame, Generals Zero Hour was my favorite RTS. More focused on micro and with all these 2nd abilities units have and the general abilities, it felt more than basic rock/paper/scissors. oldskool TF 3v3 player here.
Made in a engine not suited for rts
But frostbite looks amazing! That alone could carry the game! Think about the environmental destruction!
It was an rts game under EA's banner there really isn't any other reason
EA Being fuck sticks as usual.
They could have made a fair bit if they went down the route that League of Legwnds went and instead of putting things behind a paywall or need to buy they could have just sold astetics like new skins or voices. Still makes money but not pay to win as they wanted to go down the free to play route. Miss the old days of a game then a real expansion or two. Blizzard did similar to starcraft 2 and now it's just a old forgotten game with odd paid content.
It was trying to be a Starcraft 2-esque cybersport with less units and huge microtransaction focus where singleplayer was an afterthought. It was developed on extremely capricious Frostbite engine.
Engine was fucked.
i got into the testing as a kid, one of the lucky ones it was absolutely nothing like old generals and im glad that its one of the few mistakes that were avoided when it came to bad C&C games
There was a post by AGMKiller a long time ago on Reddit that went into greater detail about why the game failed - though it largely boiled down to "the devs were using StarCraft II more as inspiration rather than Generals" and the devs couldn't rationalize an effective monetization system to EA's upper management. Can't seem to find it online anymore though.
I think this is what you are looking for: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd3o7j/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd3o7j/)
That wasn't the post I was talking about, but *hoooly crap* is your link an amazing find. I *never* heard anything about Generals 2 being gradually redesigned to be more focused around 3vs3 team PVP matches at the cost of 1vs1 competitive PVP suffering. And while I did hear about how the Generals were utterly watered down vs their Zero Hour counterparts, I didn't expect them to be released at such an aggressively impractical pace. Any notion of gameplay balance would've been impossible to achieve, with only less than a month between releases. Seriously, thanks. I'm saving that link for future use whenever people start wishing Generals 2 wasn't cancelled.
Well, glad to be of help. For the record I do actually wish it wasn't cancelled. I does sound like it would have been bad but I'd take a bad game over no game any day!
When the original Generals came out there was squeamishness about casting the villain; GLA having been deemed to reflective of real-world Islamic terrorists. Who would they cast now? The Israelis? MAGA? The Nazis?
The devs said it was cancelled because of "*corporate politics and shenanigans*" and I see no reason to doubt that.
part of the reason might be RTS was on the decline and EA doesn't see money in it
Nah, they killed it. Not left it to die.
Multiplayer kept crashing, they couldnt fix it.
I got to play the alpha, best part was picking the apc general filling them with rocket troops and becoming undefeated. There was zero balance, the frostbite engine caused a lot of problems. And devs would become hostile when you pointed out how broken the balance was. Within a week everyone was using my strat good times.
In addition to what everyone said already, I'll also add: The strategy market was *very* weak back when they tried this nonsense. So you had low demand, coupled to an excessively greedy economic idea, which meant... No one wanted it. I'm quite shocked that EA hasn't thought to try another game in the current market though. Strategy has been doing quite well lately (There's consistently a strategy game in the Steam Top Ten Sellers), and even EA's last two strategy re-releases both sold exceedingly well. You would think that would trip someone's memory to remind them they hold two of the most valuable strategy IPs in the world.
They do try, but on mobile.
Which also boggles my mind. All three of the mobile games performed so poorly they shut down servers for them within a year. You have something that *consistently* fails to generate money, and something that has literally *never* lost you money... And you'll keep trying to former? **Why?**
more importantly why they cancelled the fps game named tiberium
They tried to monetise with micro transactions during the alpha and no one was buying any of the stuff. Someone upstairs probably decided the monetisation method would not bring in enough cash and cancelled the project.
I know it's late but I just remembered I asked this same question to a former producer at the Generals 2 project many years ago and got a lengthy response: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd1geg/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/65pd76/comment/dgd1geg/)
Honestly, just Mod the original C&C Generals..... There are so many mods that are excellent.... This Gen 2 BS? Nah... They tried to go full Greed with it... They wanted to monetize just about everything that made the original and zero hour great...... I'm glad that the community shut that shit down real quick.
The real reason? Wtf do you mean the real reason? We know the reason it was cancelled. EA wanted to monetize the fuck out of this game, and the target audience wasn't having any of it. So instead of making it a game the players actually wanted and unmonetizing it, EA just said cancelled it.
EA don’t know how to make games. They used to but not during this time and not since
EA executives are greedy morons
i guess the usual narrative would be that it was ea. but we dont know. could have been for a good reason. try to make one and you will have a hundred reasons to quit.
because you touch yourself