There's a downside to being an older gamer which I don't think I'd ever really considered before. I can remember the origins of some "new" games, recalling the source material of the games that came before them, and watching in faint horror as they're repurposed into something contemptible. A recent article on Kotaku covered Electronic Arts' new mobile game, Command & Conquer: Rivals, and the writer caught all manner of hell for it from commenters. In some respects, the commenters were wrong. In others, they were absolutely right.
I'm going to get this part out of the way first: Zack Zweizen is not (to the best of my knowledge) a paid shill or plant from EA who just showed up on Kotaku one fine day to pimp C&C: Rivals. And as much as I've come to dislike a lot about Kotaku, I will say they've been pretty good about clearly delineating their sponsored posts from their regular content. Commenters accusing him of being a shill, or accusing Kotaku of failing to properly designate his piece as sponsored content, are barking up the wrong tree this time. The only thing Zweizen can be accused of with any sort of accuracy is being excited about a mobile game at E3 and not being sufficiently skeptical of EA. It happens.
That having now been said, I'm firmly in the "this game sucks" camp. The first big objection is what happened the last time EA decided to dip into its archives and try to resurrect a franchise. People who remember the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper also remember how utterly shameless it was about trying to raid your wallet. Zweizen's article mentions that the version he played didn't have microtransactions enabled, but also mentions there are indications those mechanisms will be implemented. EA has been burned badly twice on microtransactions, first with the mobile Dungeon Keeper, second with Star Wars Battlefront II. While it's possible EA has learned their lesson and realized it will not win them any fans if they go hard on the microtransactions, it's also possible (and far more likely) that they will be unable to help themselves from trying to grab more cash than is prudent. If I were in Andrew Wilson's shoes, I'd be thinking real hard about trying to avoid entering a situation which even remotely resembled my most recent debacles.
My next objection is how the game treats the source material. It strips away damned near everything about the Command & Conquer series that made it entertaining and exciting, leaving behind a few bones which only vaguely suggest it was part of a larger organism. If I had to describe the gameplay of Rivals, my high-level description might be, "capture-the-flag mixed with best-of-three arm wrestling." Each side has a base and can build units, each side can harvest tiberium, and that's about it. Even if units are being pulled from earlier games, it has none of the strategy, virtually none of the logistics, and none of the charm. I feel like I need to check and make sure they didn't remove Joseph Kucan's face, because the elements being plundered feel that badly implemented.
I understand EA is a business, and they want to make money. But there's ways of making money that don't antagonize and infuriate large segments of your potential market. This game already has two big strikes against it, and I don't see things diverging terribly much from the outcome which happened the last time EA found itself in this situation. It's like EA cannot produce a game without blowing off both feet and both kneecaps as a starting point. The last three CEOs of the company have carried a tradition of tone deaf indifference about their products surpassed only by Time Warner and their vaguely disguised contempt of DC Comics. And even then, Warner Brothers occasionally lets a good movie or two about Batman escape into the wild, whereas a popular meme has EA filling a mass grave with the bodies of game studios and series it acquires.
If the downvotes on the game's official trailer are any indication, this is not a game that people wanted to be made, to say nothing of being willing to play. For myself, I'm not going to be downloading Rivals, and I'm not going to be recommending anybody do so. If EA comes out with a new C&C game worthy of the name, I'm more than willing to give it a look. But there has to be a better call to serve than, "Give us money."
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