I know, I know “why do they keep remastering games just make new ones” and I’ll say what I said in the Warcraft Reforged thread - it’s usually just a small team, mostly art people that are done with other projects, working on this stuff and old-school fans (which is most of this board, us old guard that love our old games and want to replay them again but on modern tech) should be pretty pleased by this news.
I know I am!
C&C and Red Alert wouldn’t be the same without them, so all three expansion packs will be bundled with the base games into one remastered collection - without microtransactions.
Coming “not any time soon” so we have plenty of time to turn this thread into a commentary on objective reviews, choose your own adventure style stories, and discussions on the best garbage sacks in the meanwhile!
C&C: Red Alert is my third-favorite RTS series of all time (after Starcraft and Warcraft). I could never get into the mainline C&Cs as much–the kitsch factor of the ludicrous Soviet shenanigans was a big part of RA’s appeal for me–so I’m less pumped about that, but any chance for more RA goodness is a good thing in my book :)
I loved CnC but I admit Red Alert captured my imagination more. But CnC was the first, and also the first real online multiplayer I did - my friends and I played over modem and got into a lot of 1v1 games and I have nothing but fond memories of that. How many times did someone in my friend circle attack me across the table in Magic with a wink and a “I’ve got a present for ya!” to remind me how they kicked my ass in CnC just earlier that week? To many. Not enough.
Oh cool, a rare crate! And at least two types of currency! Check it out, there are 3 new items and 5 new character customizations available for purchase in the gem shop!
Oh the C&C mobile backlash already happened. People are not overjoyed.
This remaster, on the other hand, appears to be legit. They say no microtransactions. As development hasn’t even started yet, it feels to me like this is a response to the Warcraft 3 remaster.
It’s already absolutely possible to play either C&C or Red Alert in any resolution you want thanks to fan patches, and there’s even a remake of the original games (sans campaign) in Tiberian Sun which has all manner of quality-of-life improvements. And is free, since C&C, RA and TS have all been made freeware at some point in time.
The only upside of Petroglyph’s involvement is that Frank Klepacki is directly involved. I’m reasonably confident in saying that nobody else at PG had any meaningful part in making those early C&C games as impactful as they were, given that the last handful of C&C clones they’ve churned out have been disappointing at best (and outright insulting at worst).
The only thing more insulting than Forged Battalion is a garbage bag that does not have some variant of ForceFlex technology.
For a counter-example, here’s an amazing set of slides about supporting user-made maps in StarCraft: Remastered. The tricky bit is that those maps took advantage of bugs in the original engine to run arbitrary code as part of the map.
That must have taken at least a person-year of about the most expensive kind of software engineering time there is (security / reverse engineering people are very hard to come by). It’s a ton of staggeringly complicated work. And that’s just for one feature.
