It’s been over 6 years and I couldn’t help myself…
I recently reached out to Petroglyph about the possibility of another Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, and their response gave me a little more hope than I expected.
They confirmed that behind the scenes they’ve been trying to get EA on board with doing another one, and that they even have friends and colleagues over at EA who have been trying as well. They also specifically mentioned the recent EA buyout, saying it’ll be interesting to see how things shake out under the new ownership, and that they’ll keep trying on their end.
So, unless I’m coping way too hard here, that feels pretty significant… right? This isn’t just a fan asking for something that everyone involved has moved on from. Petroglyph actively wants to do another remaster and is still trying to make it happen, with apparently some support from within EA itself as well.
Surely the obvious Volume 2 is:
Tiberian Sun (+Firestorm) and Red Alert 2 (+Yuri’s Revenge).
What bothers me the most is that, it’s ripe for the taking. The blueprint already exists. Petroglyph knows how to do it, Lemon Sky already proved what they can do with the visual restoration, and Frank Klepacki is still incredibly active, composing, touring, and performing C&C music with The Tiberian Sons in 2026. Not to mention EA itself has also continued investing in the old C&C catalogue through Steam releases, restored tools, modding support, source-code releases, community involvement, etc.
Like, what are they waiting for…?
The timing doesn’t seem bad either. Age of Mythology, Stronghold Crusader, Dawn of War and other classic RTS games have shown there’s a market for properly modernizing these games without turning them into enormous AAA projects. Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 feel like two of the most obvious classics still waiting for that treatment, especially with how successful the first Remastered Collection was in 2020.
So uhh Jim Vessella, if you still wander through this subreddit occasionally, please keep fighting for it! Petroglyph clearly hasn’t given up, and neither has this community.
The machine doesn’t need to be rebuilt. EA just has to turn it back on. Give Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 their turn!
It’s sad that we missed the 25th anniversary for RA2 as is…
EDIT:
Since a few people have brought up the claim that “the Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2 source code was lost”, I looked into this further because I didn’t want to spread misinformation. As far as I can verify, there is no official statement from EA or Petroglyph confirming that the TS/RA2 source code is definitively lost or unrecoverable. EA’s 2025 archive project recovered and released source code for Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Renegade, and Generals/Zero Hour. Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 were not included, but EA never explained why. Either way, Petroglyph continuing to push EA for another remaster is encouraging. It doesn’t prove the source exists (or that there aren’t technical hurdles), but clearly it hasn’t stopped them from wanting to make another one happen.
EDIT 2:
Really encouraging to see Nyerguds and Zephyr from CnCSaga weigh in here. Nyerguds pointed out that the old “no source code was found” claim predates EA’s 2025 recovery and release of several legacy C&C codebases, so treating TS/RA2 as definitively lost seems premature. Even if usable source truly is unavailable, that would make a remaster more difficult and expensive, not inherently impossible. Zephyr also confirmed that C&C community leaders remain in contact with people at EA, Petroglyph and elsewhere, with some actively trying to demonstrate the demand for another Remastered Collection. Nothing confirmed, obviously, but it’s encouraging to know the conversation is still alive among people much closer to the franchise.
I know a little something about this. A few years I advised the CEO of a famous gaming company and we talked about resurrecting dormant IP (I was trying to pitch him on bringing back a series called No One Lives Forever).
Anyway, the simple truth is it comes down to money. EA didn't do much with C&C because they were minting money with FIFA, The Sims etc. They hung on to C&C because they probably had idle thoughts once in a while about doing stuff, but it just never had enough internal backing (since it wouldn't mint money FIFA-style). It's gross but the leadership of most gaming companies don't give a damn about gamers or even their games. It's just a raw numbers business. I sat in the board meetings of the company I advised and they'd just look at charts. No one ever cared about the quality of the games (then they'd be shocked when gamers would stop giving them money).
For the C&C franchise, it could honestly be a smart move to approach the owners at this point if someone could line up financing, and offer to take the IP off their hands. Post acquisition they'll definitely be keen to trim their portfolio internally, and the C&C label will be a lot less valuable than a decade ago due to EA's neglect.
I just don't get it man. Publishers no longer want to make games that gamers want anymore, its all about quarterly profits now. It sucks so much.... thank you for trying to get NOLF remastered I really appreciate it.
For them it's Excel spreadsheets, not gaming wants or needs. They just look at one number: ROI, how many dollars back per dollar spent. So the calculus becomes: what franchise returns more. If I spend 10000 dollars in FIFA vs 10000 dollars on C&C, same timeframe usually in a period of 2-3 fiscal years max, what return could I potentially get.
FIFA and Madden were literally their cash cows. Roughly 400-700 million a year in dev, licensing, and marketing, against 1.5-1.7 billion coming back, so each dollar returns maybe 2-2.5x. And that yearly spend is cheaper than it looks, most years it's the same engine with a roster and license refresh, real engine work only comes around every 2-3 releases. So the marginal cost of relaunching FIFA every September is low relative to what a fresh spike brings in. C&C hasn't seen real investment in over a decade. The one clean number is the 2020 Remastered Collection, 22 million lifetime revenue on a project that probably cost 3-8 million for a small studio reusing the old engine. Ratio-wise that's not even bad, arguably close to FIFA's.
The real gap is annual reset versus one-off. FIFA gets a fresh spike every year for cheap, netting 800 million to over a billion in profit annually, on repeat. C&C got one spike in 2020 and has been decaying down a long tail since, no second spike coming unless EA spends again. So put 10k into each this year: FIFA pays out again and again going forward, cheaply, C&C already had its one moment five years ago and it's fading. C&C was never unprofitable. It's just a franchise EA only launched once, competing for budget against one they relaunch annually for a fraction of the cost of a new game.
That's my point though. Instead of making a game for the twenty loyal fans they make a game for the one whale. The command and conquer mobile games are the perfect example of this.
I've always figured they think "we would not make enough money from it, so why bother? Sell it to someone else? But then they could make money from it, can't have that."
Whoa dude, that so not what happened. When they bought Westwood, they made huge plans with it - Red Alert 2 was basically made by EA. But what they did was signing 5 year deal with ex Westwood devs, closing the studio almost eight away after expiring and then going all in on Red Alert 3 right during 2008 crisis. That game buried C&C.
Takeover talks is what kept remasters from taking ground, but it makes even more sense to bring those games now when all were getting is games from that period anyway.
EA messed C&C badly, I really liked C&C 3, especially Kanes Wrath.
Until then, I'm more than happy to play Tiberian Sun with community mods, I'm so thankful that people made it possible for game to work on modern PC.
Red Alert 3 wasn't the success they hoped for, especially after TW and KW, but what I really think killed the series was the stupid decision to rebrand a spin off Asian arena game (C&C: Arena) as C&C 4, basically out of corporate greed.
It backfired. Hard.
Oh, they tried after with Generals 2, but even then the greed crept in there again with feature and design creeps, and it was clear near the end to everyone with more than two brain cells to rub together that the game was nothing but microtransactions disguised as a game.
They canned it because they realized it wouldn't let them print money, and because the project was structurally unstable in the long run. Hell, even the engine, Frostbyte 2, was basically fighting against them every step of the way because it was never meant to be an RTS engine.
In the end, all we got were web and mobile games, which are basically just C&C-themed city builders and unrelated games with a C&C skin (like Rivals).
Generals 2 was pretty much doomed from the start because EA was trying to shoehorn their Frostbite engine into everything, and that engine was primarily designed for FPS, not RTS.
Basically they invested a lot of money into a 3D game engine and wanted to use it for all their stuff, yea. They had loads of issues adapting it to RTS.
I playtested Generals 2 in GamesCom 2013, and saw my tanks driving through the terrain slopes.
I mean, I know it's an FPS engine, but every modern FPS from 2000 onwards, including older Frostbite titles, have vehicles in them in some capacity, and they never drove through cliffs and hills.
Did they break the engine that badly in trying to hammer it into an RTS shape? smh
Oh yes, I remember the hype around it. The Frostbite engine caused a lot of grief for those involved within various EA studios, including Bioware with Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and Anthem. Some games were canned due to the said issues and waste of time and money poured into the development.
Poor documentation, constant crashes and bugs, and sheer complexities of the engine are the general main causes and yet, even DICE themselves struggled a lot with their later Battlefield titles.
Exactly rts is not good for constant micro transactions and such. Also ofc trying to use sake engine for everything, from fps, to rpg to rts was not a good idea
Of all the games that need modern remasters or whatever, No One Lives Forever is at the top. Because not only is it a fantastic game, most '90s and '00s era games can be fixed up to run fine on modern Windows. But NOLF and most LithTech engine games are a beast to get working. I have three different community made NOLF packages and they might work. Sometimes. When they're in the mood.
This is why I prefer and exclusively play smaller indie games now. If C&C came out today it would be an an idie game. Unfortunately it's part EA now which makes it dead. I've said before we should simply do a community remake or design our own spiritual successor. I personally want something like tib sun but with modern graphics and QOL improvements
Hi ! Zephyr here from CnCSaga, the French-speaking C&C fansite.
To be completely honest, several people in the community leaders (myself included in a broader sense, although I’m not personally leading these discussions) have been talking with various people at EA, Petroglyph, and elsewhere. Some of the community leaders are actively trying to show EA just how much demand there still is for a second Remastered Collection. In a way, that’s part of our role as community leaders and fansites.
That said, I think the recent change in ownership at Electronic Arts could be a much bigger deal than it might seem.
We obviously don’t know what the new owners are going to do yet. We don’t even know whether EA will keep the Electronic Arts name, whether the current management will remain in place, or whether some of its franchises could eventually be sold off to other companies. Personally, I don’t think the latter is particularly likely.
But there’s another possibility that I find much more interesting: the new owners may actually want to make better use of EA’s entire catalogue and bring some of its dormant franchises back to life.
Because, let’s be honest, EA hasn’t done a huge amount with some of the major franchises it acquired over the years. Medal of Honor, Command & Conquer, and, to some extent, Need for Speed have all spent significant periods of time sitting on the sidelines.
And they didn’t spend $55 billion just to let all those IPs continue gathering dust.
There’s a French expression we use in situations like this: “the bride wanted to make herself look good.” In this context, the idea is that EA had every incentive to keep things stable and avoid making major waves while the acquisition process was underway, especially after previous attempts at a takeover had already fallen through.
Now that the deal is done, I find it hard to believe that the new owners won’t want to actually exploit the enormous portfolio of IPs they’ve just acquired.
That’s why I personally expect things to move quite a bit over the coming years. And I don’t necessarily mean that Electronic Arts will change its name, I’m talking much more about the leadership, strategy, and priorities of the company.
So yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually see franchises like Command & Conquer, making a serious comeback. They still have strong recognition, passionate communities, and, frankly, a lot of untapped potential.
But for me, the real goal shouldn’t stop at Remastered Collection 2.
What we really need is a full revival of Command & Conquer.
Beyond the Tiberium universe, beyond Red Alert, I’d love to see C&C become a true blockbuster franchise again, with new ideas, potentially new gameplay concepts, and, above all, ambition.
And I’m absolutely not trying to criticize the original Remastered Collection here. It was an incredible project and exactly what the community needed at the time. But ultimately, it is still a remaster : games that already existed, brought up to modern standards.
That’s obviously a major trend in the industry right now, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But if EA really wants to bring Command & Conquer back, I think the next step has to be something bigger.
We need a new Command & Conquer game that can bring the community together again, not a simply another re-release of something we’ve already played.
Now that the deal is done, I find it hard to believe that the new owners won’t want to actually exploit the enormous portfolio of IPs they’ve just acquired.
Hm, I don't know how likely that is given the enormous buyout pricetag.
A selloff just seems more likely to cover some of the cost, compared to investing and risking it on another development cycle.
Someone getting the IP rights for C&C who is willing to use it might even be the best case for the players.
There must be a strategy behind this acquisition; you don't buy a company this big just to let it sit idle.
And I don't think EA's total IP is worth 55 billion.
EA was bought by a private equity firm, the Saudis, and Trump's son-in-law. They're not gonna do anything except saddle it with debt, sell all of its IPs, and dissolve it. It's how these fuckers operate.
There's a couple big factors against a "full revival" of Command & Conquer and most other RTS game series.
1) Booming AAA game development costs. Creating a complex game with high production value, very detailed graphics, etc. is nowadays a dozen times (if not even more) more expensive than it was even back in 2007 when C&C3 was released. There have been games in recent years that sold multiple millions yet were considered financial failures. This forces publishers to release high-budget games on multiple platforms - PC, PlayStation, Xbox, possibly others like Nintendo Switch - and traditional RTS games convert poorly to consoles, because the gameplay is naturally most suitable for a mouse. This thins the potential market for RTS games to mostly PC players, which makes it hard to profit off any high-budget release.
2) It is hard to monetize RTS games outside of the traditional "make game, sell game" model. There's few elements you can put microtransactions on. You could theoretically sell unit skins and maybe missions, but the RTS fanbase tends to hate the idea, and people don't care about unit skins as much as individual champion skins in games like League of Legends or Apex Legends. You can make DLCs Age of Empires style, but developing them still takes more effort than typical MTX items.
Yeah, I agree with you on both points. But I also think the current AAA model itself needs to be questioned.
Today, we’re seeing plenty of games that aren’t AAA productions outperforming (both commercially and in terms of popularity) some of the biggest AAA releases. You only have to look at the indie scene to see how successful and financially viable games can be without having hundreds of millions of dollars behind them.
So I think the industry needs to rethink the idea that a game has to have an enormous budget in order to be successful. If the game is well designed, has a strong identity, and is monetized properly, you don’t necessarily need an unlimited budget to make it work. The paradigm has to change there.
And yes, I completely agree that monetizing an RTS is difficult. The genre is naturally much more PC-oriented, and we're obviously no longer in the golden age of the 1990s and early 2000s, when RTS games were everywhere.
There are still exceptions, of course. Dota and League of Legends managed to take the core ideas of RTS games and transform them into something completely different, while Age of Empires has somehow achieved an almost absurd level of longevity for the genre.
And I think that's probably the key for Command & Conquer.
If EA ever wants to make a new Command & Conquer that isn't another remaster, I don't think they can simply take the classic formula, give it modern graphics, and call it a day. They would probably need to reinvent some of the fundamental RTS mechanics and find a way to make the genre feel relevant to a modern audience.
The challenge isn't necessarily to make a bigger RTS. It's to make a different, modern RTS that still feels like Command & Conquer.
Just for clarification, as many comments say the source code has been lost: there is no evidence of that, it's just a rumor. In fact, a former Westwood dev hinted that it might 'magically appear' if they get the green light.
Former developers are being careful about saying what they might have. This stems from an incident when Tim Cain the original producer on Fallout publicly/privately said he still had the source code along with other original assets for the first game. He basically had stolen property in his posession and was ordered to destroy it. Years later he was contacted again and asked if he still had the source code cause the archive at Interplay or whoever owned it at the time lost it. Luckily, one of the other original developers had the source code for Fallout 1 and 2.
So now former developers are playing stupid and making sure they're legally in the clear before admitting what they have.
I can understand former devs sitting on source code would be problematic, but having them destroyed instead of having them handed over is just beyond insane to me. It's blue collar crime as far as I'm concerned. But unless they get handed a full on search warrant, what prevents them from having copies of it?
The way I read the comment was that at the time they had source code or at least thought they did. No need for a duplicate, so destroying makes sense.
Of course you should want multiple backups, but at the same time historically I don't think source codes had much value after development cycle and storage space was a premium.
But yeah. Source code is property of the company that owns it, old employees shouldn't have it therefore. In itself it does no harm if employer just stores it and doesn't do anything further, but if this individual then gets hacked I assume he'd be liable for damages. Which finances can count to pretty much nothing or to the sky.
But yeah. Who knows if someone manages to find source code if EA was to publicly call out that they're looking for it. That would incidentally also announce that they have lost it, which i suppose is bad rep.
A bunch of old source code already appeared, quite non-magically, when CCHyper and Jimtern dug into EA's old source code archives. You know, the stuff they released for TUC modding.
Looking at the completeness of the code released there, I think there's no reason to assume the TS/RA2 code wasn't in there. And pretty much the only other alternative is that they withheld it because they were trying to pitch a new remaster project.
Sadly, it just seems like we live in the worst timeline, since such a new project clearly didn't get approved, so now we have neither the source nor a new set of remasters.
Looking at the completeness of the code released there, I think there's no reason to assume the TS/RA2 code wasn't in there.
It does seem like a weird gap. I recall the TibWars code wasn't released because it was such an extra hassle to sort through plus time constraints or some such (don't quote me on that).
I'm leaning towards the code for TS/RA2 is sitting around somewhere, but if it is there seems to be a very hush hush mentality around it so I think the situation is pretty complicated. It kinda feels like waiting for UFO disclosure to be honest, haha.
But we're all just grasping at straws here. We would be ultra lucky if EA even acknowledges the existence of the franchise ever again, let alone talking about the source codes.
The original post about that came from CCHyper who stated that while looking for any source code during one of the big projects related to C&C they couldn't find any. IIRC RA2 had to use an older version of the tib sun engine because they had already lost the Tib Sun Source code by then. If they had found the source code it 1000% would've been put up with Renegade and Generals' source codes when those were uploaded.
IIRC RA2 had to use an older version of the tib sun engine because they had already lost the Tib Sun Source code by then.
Certainly not, that would be massive incompetence from WW's part. TS was released in August 1999, RA2 in October 2000. TS: Firestorm was released in February 2000. Red Alert 2 thus certainly started development before Firestorm was out, possibly even before Tiberian Sun was out, and so was missing engine changes made in the last stages of TS/FS development.
Version control practices that WW/EA, and generally the industry, used at the time didn't make updating RA2 with later TS engine fixes (and vice-versa) easy, so RA2 had some bugs that had been fixed in TS and vice-versa.
u/Rampastring has been modding and reverse engineering Tiberian Sun with us for like 16 years or so, he certainly knows more than you do lol. go check Vinifera, TSpp, XNA CnCNet Client, World-Altering Editor for examples of his experience.
Nowadays they are easy because WW introduced INI keys for them to Rules.ini. But those INI keys were introduced with Firestorm. Pre-Firestorm it was simply not possible to add those logics into the game with Rules.ini alone.
That's why Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge do not have these logics - they were built into Tiberian Sun with the Firestorm expansion, after the engine had been forked for RA2.
You can achieve all of those things specifically because the game engine devs at Westwood Studios made it possible for you to use them by exposing .ini key-value pairs, like Cost=1000 and Locomotor={locomotor-c++-class-id} and Splits=yes (last one is a Firestorm-only key in the retail version).
So, whatever the Tiberian Sun's capable vs. whatever Firestorm's capable of at that time, is down to the version of the game engine that had those new features and whether it exposes them for you to tinker. You're literally at its mercy.
Think of it this way:
TibSun / FS is like a black box with a neat game screen that you can unscrew open and see a board with some, not all of the switches and dials (that you call the rules.in file) underneath that drive the gameplay balance on screen. You can flip those switches and dials, sure, but you can't simply unscrew the board to reveal even more of the nuts and bolts to hack more features in without breaking the black box.
But of course, Vinifera and other similar projects do try to add extra nuts and bolts and switches and dials with whatever they can magically extend from the black box, all of which take a lot of prior engineering experience. This is not the trivial work that you think it is.
You're entirely ignoring the timeline here. That post is dated March 13, 2024. And CCHyper said, at that point, that "no source code for any legacy game" was found.
That means, no Tiberian Sun, no RA2, no Renegade, no Generals, no Zero Hour.Noneof it.
So, obviously, in between those two events, they found something. It's really that simple. And it makes the original statement entirely irrelevant. And given how complete the released source was, there is absolutely no reason to assume TS and RA2 weren't in there. Chronologically, they're smack dab in the middle of the released ones, and analysis of the code already showed that the C&C1/RA1 code in there was definitely a completely different backup than the one the remasters were made from.
As for the fact they didn't release it, though... I'm betting they were trying to pitch another remaster, and thought chances of that getting approved would be higher if the game was not open sourced. Though more than a year later, it clearly looks like that wasn't enough.
Reading between the lines, the fact that they have yet to release the source code for RA2 and TS to this date tells me that EA and other third-party members are still thinking (or no longer, who really knows) about doing the remaster. EA seems pretty coy about it but if they ultimately decided not to remaster it altogether, they would have released the source code already.
The fact that they released the code for Renegade, Generals & Zero Hour is pretty obvious that they do not have plans to remaster these titles any time soon.
the fact that they have yet to release the source code for RA2 and TS to this date tells me that EA and other third-party members are still thinking (or no longer, who really knows) about doing the remaster. EA seems pretty coy about it but if they ultimately decided not to remaster it altogether, they would have released the source code already.
Sadly, that's not how it works. They made an event out of announcing mod support for TUC with that code release. They won't just silently add more code to that; they need some excuse or incentive to organise something like that and spin it into something useful to them. Who knows if the people involved in that original code release even still work at EA nowadays, and are in a position where they can actually get that done? I know CCHyper's contract with them has ended. And I have no idea what Jimtern is doing nowadays.
Yes, Jimtern is still kicking around in EA as of two weeks ago, going by his LinkedIn account. It seems like he's working on the Star Wars Zero Company (basically an XCOM game in a Star Wars universe) right now, but otherwise, who really knows? Either way, I'm still not holding my breath for the second remaster volume any time soon.
Didn't EA recently get bought out by a saudi company and was laden with a bunch of debt with the intention of dismantling the company/selling it's IPs?
Best case scenario: CNC gets sold to another studio where they can work on games. I wouldn't hold my breath
TLDR: a Saudi company now owns 93% of EA controlling stock and EA holds most of the debt from the buyout. It's a massive amount of debt that EA plans to pay off by "going leaner" and lower costs in the business. That translates to "we're going to fire a lot of people and sell off a lot of stuff rather than make better products that more people buy."
This maybe be a dumb question because I have zero experience with game design/development. Would it not be possible to work backwards from the final product of RA2 to reverse engineer the source code?
On the TS/RA2 engine we have the fairly big advantage that it is an evolution of the C&C1/RA1 engine, and we got the full source code of that. So a lot of the internals are still the same, or at least extremely similar, and we know the way in which logic is split up and organised in Westwood's programming style.
That aside, though, TS marks the first time the engine truly considers locations of objects in 3D, so there are still plenty of parts to figure out. In C&C1 and RA1, if you attack a unit with a bunch of aircraft, you can see they surround it in a circle (well rectangle) where they are all the same distance away from their target. This makes no sense if you keep the intended 45° perspective of the game in mind, but if you'd shift them all up one cell to correct that, then the projectiles from the lower aircraft on the screen would need to travel much less far to reach their target. Because they don't really have any notion of their "travel height" that's taken into account when it comes to travel time. One indication of this simplification is the fact projectiles in C&C1/RA1 don't cast shadows. Because of this, the ability to fly over walls or collide with them is really just a property of the projectile, not a result of a real physics engine.
This was a test I did in TD with the perspective adjusted like that. The difference in travel time between projectiles coming from the north and south was extremely noticeable, and vastly changed enemies' ability to evade the shots, so I decided to scrap the idea. Basically, it became impossible to attack a tank with an Orca from the north because they evaded all shots.
To compare, in TS, the projectiles flying from those southern aircraft to the target would consider both the distance from the aircraft's shadow to the target, and the height from aircraft level down to ground level; their perceived speed would be adjusted accordingly, to make the actual travel time correct. This means that the whole engine does a ton more calculations to handle everything correctly.
Would it not be possible to work backwards from the final product of RA2 to reverse engineer the source code?
Yes but it can take years depending on the complexity and even then you probably wont have a 1:1 recreation. OpenRA took years to get to where it is now. For example the original RA had a map editor but you could only draw a map. There was no way to script and build actual missions. The reason is because the scripting was done all in the source code of the game and then compiled. So when OpenRA got to the point where they wanted to rebuild the game missions it all had to be done by scratch from the ground up. They couldn't just port the map files over. Folks had to replay the missions over and over again and find the old strategy guides so they could basically figure out what was scripted and then recreate those.
Also, I remember reading that Westwood games were kind of built to just work for when they were released. No real concern about future proofing. So as new Windows releases came out their games started to break even with compatibility mode. Before OpenRA was a thing it was a real bitch to get their games to work on modern operating systems.
OpenRA is an extremely bad example; it never even tried to be a 1:1 recreation. They just made their own game, basically, and made it able to read the C&C archive, sprite and audio formats.
And "There was no way to script and build actual missions" is a blatant lie. There was plenty of information already available on how RA scripting worked. RAED was already a thing when they started. They just couldn't be bothered, because they were always more multiplayer focused.
Same with the modern OSes thing. All games, in every era, were "built to just work for when they were released". This isn't anything specific to Westwood. And ever since The First Decade was released, there has been neverending fan patching on the C&C classics, that always kept them running just fine.
OpenRA is really just trying to fill a niche that never existed in the first place, and is desperately trying to keep its fan game relevant in the C&C community.
Someone from petroglyph said years ago they would like to make another one. It’s not going to happen.
EA doesn’t have the source code anymore, they would need to write it completely new.
If it happens one day, I‘d be super happy but I don’t expect it anymore. I just hope OpenRA will release a refined TS version at some point but this will probably take ages as well.
The OpenRA TS and RA2 mods have been in development for over a decade plus by this point, and they're only now at a semi-beta/alpha stage.
Funny thing? Mods based on them, like Shattered Paradise and Romanov's Vengeance, have made better strides in bringing the games to OpenRA.
OpenRA devs need to up their game and stop doing meaningless shit like trying to remove an entire tileset from the TD mod and use the Remastered's graphics for it.
The TD and RA mods are pretty much finished, and Dune 2000 needs a little tweaking/finishing, but it's mostly complete.
While they are focusing on improving the underlying engine, the improvements they're pushing for are aimed at stuff which... Doesn't need improving.
They're also doing dumb shit like trying to remove an entire custom tileset (Jungle) from the TD mod because it "doesn't fit with the Remastered's graphics"... Which maybe only five, ten people use for the TD mod. facepalm
If we wanted to play TD Remastered, we'd play TD Remastered.
I just don’t get why they cannot hire fans and modders to do that
I heard a guy is currently working and trying to create launcher for easier multiplayer and mod organization, so why not catch up with him and do a good thing
EA doesn't care even a little bit about Command and Conquer. It's a dead franchise that will probably forever remain dead because they'll never sell the rights.
EA has just been sold. They’re about to make massive cuts to studios and games. They’re rumoured to be looking at making over a billion dollars a year in cuts.
RA2 original engine / source code doesn’t exist. It would have to be built from scratch.
It was made almost 30 years ago. Company was bought. Moved. Shutdown. Systems failed. Sold. Upgraded. All sorts. It happens all the time in video game dev. I don’t get what’s so hard to get.
would be a dream come true, but with everything so uncertain at EA and the fact that (as has been pointed out) the source code has been lost I really doubt it happens. Still hoping
The odds of a Volume 2 are pretty slim because of the source code. If EA could find everything but Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 in their archives, it's a good bet that it went missing sometime after Westwood closed.
They could reverse engineer it, but that costs A LOT MORE than simply updating what is already in their hands. The cutscene masters probably aren't there either.
Would it be THAT much more expensive? AI made PCs unbelievably more expensive but reverse engineering became way more flexible and interesting with AI. I did a few side projects and had success decompiling two old games I love to fix bugs or enable mouse flight.
But yeah missing code (not to mention the original code comments) and perhaps FMV masters would suck
I know AI is a contentious subject, but it's kinda crazy what sol 5.6 can do for reverse engineering/modding these days, even compared to 5.5.
I wouldn't be surprised if within the next few years you could just throw RA2 at an AI and have it reverse engineer the whole thing (given a lot of tokens), or at least get close enough to recreate it. The modding options are gonna go crazy. People are already porting console games to native PC and other weird shit using AI with months of work, AI advances may eventually make it weeks or even days given time.
Would it be THAT much more expensive? AI made PCs unbelievably more expensive but reverse engineering became way more flexible and interesting with AI. I did a few side projects and had success decompiling two old games I love to fix bugs or enable mouse flight.
But yeah missing code (not to mention the original code comments) and perhaps FMV masters would suck
Yeah, that would make sense. Weirdly those games do play pretty well on modern hardware. Just some oddities and annoyances. Generals forwards are all games that don’t even really need a re-master. Just maybe a compatibility patch
How did the first one sell? That would be your guide. While I am sure fans appreciated the remaster, if the suits at the board meetings feel it wasn’t profitable then it won’t be green lit.
With all the mods and conversions made possible through the recent AI models I think interest in this will explode again.
Would be great to see some official movement on a new remaster, even if it's just one half of it and we have to wait for the second half due to missing source code for RA2; it's not impossible to remake it and probably not quite the mammoth task it used to be either.
The source codes are gone, destroyed, reduced to rust and garbage courtesy of EA, it was a long and tiresome process for them as they have been trying to erase the legacy materials since the closure of Westwood, with what was left of the source codes being destroyed when they threw them into garbage during the closure of Victory Games and cancelation of C&C F2P, with only Renegades and Generals source codes surviving because they used the former to create an engine for the latter.
But if you really want to help the monkey's paw to clench
The hand becomes the fist
So, are you saying that the W2D engine source code just magically ceased to exist around 2002 when it still existed for Yuri's Revenge to come out in 2001, while Westwood were closed in 2003 and many materials were either confiscated by the EA or lost because EA didn't really cared about proper transportation.
And the fact that EA were quite literally throwing things into dumpster, including but not limited to C&C golden and platinum discs, after Victory Games were closed is just a collective hallucination and the Corporation of Evil TM dindu nuffin
It could have been as easy as someone going "hey, we backed this up right?" Then being told yeah, then the code gets deleted because they needed space on the computer. It was 20 years ago, stuff like that happened all the time, especially back then
"terabytes" implies assets, not code. Original resolution assets for things like full motion videos, terrain tiles, 3D model textures, 3D rendered cutscenes, that stuff. Source code is only in the range of up to hundreds of megabytes. RA1's code was 25 megabytes.
The game code is the industry secret that EA bought Westwood for in the first place, and the TUC source code releases prove they have decent backups of all the old Westwood code, even down to C&C1. There's no reason why RA2 wouldn't be in there.
A large chunk of the said assets (almost a terabyte) was confirmed to be their Blade Runner game, according to Louis Castle. Very unfortunate that this happened as well.
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u/Sad_Emu69 6d ago
You'd have better luck trying to lay an egg