The Command & Conquer cancellation this week was a bit of a shock for gamers looking forward to a new instalment in the classic RTS franchise. We’re still not entirely clear why EA canned the game but it sounds like it was a rather odd decision based on comments made yesterday by a Victory Games employee.
Today the Command & Conquer community manager Eric Krause chipped in on the forums expressing disappointment at the outcome and passed on his thoughts on the decision.
“I am actually very sad to see my favorite franchise being put to rest, especially that sudden and a game close to launching. Did we do everything right – Hell no! But we were a talented team that made a lot out of what we had. But with your help and those die-hard gamers within the studio, we were trying to influence and challenge more and more of those “given” mechanics – the status quo – to make a game that could wear the C&C badge with pride. The game wasn’t there yet and it would have taken a few more month to get the basics to where they needed to be. Our future roadmap looked also much more promising – Crushing would have been added with the patch this monday together with the first part of our movement/pathfinding overhaul and we had announced Campaign Missions at GamesCom 🙁
But well, EA decided that they don’t want to continue the project and there are many sides to the story of why exactly they decided to do so. I will not go into the details because i don’t know all the pieces and the ones i know are not necessarily meant to be discussed on a public forum.
As most of you know, the whole team has been let go, including long-term C&C Veterans. Unfortunately I don’t know what will happen to Command & Conquer. While i hope that the franchise will finally get a worthy new installment to positively overshadow C&C4 and the cancellation of this attempt, I don’t think that it will happen any time soon.”
It doesn’t sound good for the franchise at this point and perhaps even I was being a little too optimistic in my “What now for the franchise?” article which I posted yesterday.
If you want to know what it looked like, then check out my latest video where I take the now defunct alpha for a spin.
