C&C Tiberium Tossed?

[Telefrog]

So EA's shooter C&C Tiberium is officially dead (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55006).


An Electronic Arts spokesperson confirmed the cancellation and the loss of staff. The game was originally scheduled for release in late 2008 but was pushed back to 2009 or 2010 for unexplained reasons. Verdu, for his part, is more concerned with moving forward, but doing a better job in the future.

"We need to make sure this doesn't happen again. I believe we are already doing a better job of engineering success in from the start. The quality bar has been raised. Now we need to step up our focus on great design and execution, catching any problems early and correcting them quickly."

Hopefully, everyone involved gets back on their feet quickly.

[McCrank]

Disturbing how game companies speak these days...Gone are the days of "yeah, we are just kicking it here at the studio, this game looks like its gonna be fun, and we like the idea, so we all hope you like it when it is released" days of Sierra and Origin, and in are the "we have genetically enhanced our development team to ensure success from the start, there will be no failures" days of EA and the like...

-Chris

[Juste]

Wow that was....unexpected.

[MSUSteve]

I'm fairly shocked by this news. I mean, that game was on the cover of Game Informer not so long ago and now it's completely shit canned? That's a long and quick fall, isn't it? I must say, I thought the game looked very interesting and they had some cool ideas. It just must not have been going well with regard to actually implementing them.

[Fersis]

I always wondered what happens with all the assets and code.
Are reused ? are stored? are trown away?

Sorry for my english

[gordonrumble]

Disturbing how game companies speak these days...Gone are the days of "yeah, we are just kicking it here at the studio, this game looks like its gonna be fun, and we like the idea, so we all hope you like it when it is released" days of Sierra and Origin, and in are the "we have genetically enhanced our development team to ensure success from the start, there will be no failures" days of EA and the like...

-Chris

In a couple generations when budgets are over a hundred million dollars, programmers will be chained to their desks while designer's families are held hostage.

[John Sansker]

In a couple generations when budgets are over a hundred million dollars, programmers will be chained to their desks while designer's families are held hostage.

Pretty sure EA does this already. (bah dum bum)

Hi, we're EA, we don't learn from past mistakes, ours, or anyone else's.
( C&C: Renegade pretty much killed Westwood studios, so for EA to greenlight another shooter in the C&C verse was just plain stupid to start with)
( and, oh yeah, not even Blizzard, that can make just about anything awesome, would touch trying to make a FPS in one of their universes, Starcraft: Ghost???)

[Sol Invictus]

It was going to be another Hellgate: London. I'm glad they tossed it. Here's to quality!

I always wondered what happens with all the assets and code.
Are reused ? are stored? are trown away?
Thrown away or indefinitely shelved. Same difference. It's what happened to all of the art, sound and story assets of Ultima Online 2.

With any luck we might see some of the concept art or textures in a new C&C game, but I wouldn't count on it.

[Menzo]

Pretty certain that the code and all relevant assets for cancelled games must be thrown away, assuming you take the tax write-off. If you end up using anything from the project, you have to re-book it as an asset.

[Sol Invictus]

That's a huge shame because Tiberium had some fantastic concept art.

[DennyA]

You know, given that nobody wanted a C&C shooter last time EA, er, Westwood did one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Renegade), this was probably a reasonable call.

[Kareem]

Yeah I was ambivalent about this one because of how terrible Renegade was, and there was nothing shown that gave the illusion that this was going to be anything other than a generic shooter capitalizing on a popular setting. Well, we don't have to worry about it anymore.

[Adree]

Yeah I was ambivalent about this one because of how terrible Renegade was, and there was nothing shown that gave the illusion that this was going to be anything other than a generic shooter capitalizing on a popular setting. Well, we don't have to worry about it anymore.


Renegade multiplayer was great fun.

[Sol Invictus]

From the previews it looked like Tiberium was going to be like a multiplayer version of Republic Commando with shitty made-for-console controls and BF2 multiplayer objectives.

[Wheelkick]

Renegade multiplayer was great fun.

Seconded. Had some good times with that.

[krise madsen]

gamasutra.com also posted this news story. Didn't really pay much attention, until I read the comments (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20462) Holy crap!

Respectfully

krise madsen

[Sol Invictus]

Before this gets deleted off gamasutra, is this dude an insider? Sure sounds like one:
oh, I called it! Here it is in a nutshell, the next couple of moves for both EA and ATVI

Tiberium woes:
A Designer who had originally built only 1 mission on Halo was promoted by then manager John Batter, who had a hard on for Hollywoodesque big talent. John poured milliions into James Bond over Medal of Honor. This mean that less experienced personal got bigger salaries than the MOH teams. The designer "Dan Orzlak" experience on 1 mission in Halo was quickly used to calm DANJAQ's butterflies. He was promoted to Design Director. Although very personable, he only understood Halo's systems superficially. Why? Beause he was never a system's designer. Boom, fast forward to the next project.

The Producer pretty boy from marketing (insert his name) and Dan came up with a game called "vertical" that never saw the light of day. Neil young then moved them to Tiberium. While Neil squashed the old guard and created his own kingdom, FEAR fell upon all those working on Tiberuim. In other words no one wanted to make a design decision.

5 years later, Dan and team had changed the weapons 5 times. Hired a myriad of clown hack jr designers, all who wanted to be the "AI designer!" Dan was let go, and in came Tim Coolidge, who left after 2 weeks.

The company tried to hire experienced designers instead they hired a couple of more less than jr designers to save the project, one was let go after 1 week (please post why) I believe they came from now soon defunct Spark Unlimited.

The new lead designer Andre Garcia was left at the helm with 1 month to save the a doomed project full of hacks. BTW Andre was probably the only real working experienced dev on the team.

At the same time, MOH's creative director Jon Paquette who never wanted to be a designer in the first place, left to his long wishes of becoming a wannabe writer. The MOH team for the first time ever, used the same technology to create a prototype. You see every previous MOH game the engineer felt compelled to "refactor" and "redo" the entire engine, those rooks!

So the MOH demo rocked making Tiberuim team look like they've had their amateur thumbs up their nice asses. What are the execs and stock holders to think? James bond gone to ATVI because of a misplaced design director and now millions lost because of a jr team?!

In other news, ATVI is literally violently working on their newest Call of Duty which from what I heard is going to be the most VIOLENT game ever! Not a surprise that HBO wanted the same thing for Band of Brothers Pacific, which was canned.

Will COH PAcific ship at the same time as Speilberg's new BAnd of Brothers Pacific (Which happens to be super violent as well?)

YOU BETCHA!

Will we see cannabilism and toasted people?

YOU BETCHA!

This goes to show you as my predictions said.
-EALA will shut down, the RTS team is great but only sells 1mill units, hardly enough to stay in business for EA
-Tiberuim shuts down, lays off jrs, moves experienced to MOH
-MOH team is moved to Pandemic, keeps same GM as Exec Prod. on new IP.
-EA Casual, which has now hired a horrible ex Brasher SR Prod Trujillo, will also move to Pandemic.

All in all the house that MOH built has fallen to horrible hands of horrible Producers and every worst hiring practices. Hey EA next time check mobygames on the resumes!

Types poor English, too. Maybe it's our boy idrisz. I'm joking, of course. idrisz doesn't work for EALA. :P

[Royal Fool]

That comments thread is crazy.

[The Bird Flu]

That stinks. I was looking forward to giving it a shot after reading the GI preview. Sounds like they had some good ideas.

[Fersis]

Before this gets deleted off gamasutra, is this dude an insider? Sure sounds like one:


Types poor English, too. Maybe it's our boy idrisz. I'm joking, of course. idrisz doesn't work for EALA. :P

Or maybe he is in a hurry and he his really upset :(
Nice comments on that article.

Sorry for my english.

[MSUSteve]

That comments following the Gamasutra article are riveting, at least to someone outside the industry like myself.

[Menzo]

I love the internet. There's always some random guy, who may or may not actually know anything about anything, who's going to try to simplify what is probably an extremely complicated situation. He KNOWS what happened, and is going to explain it to you with all the righteous indignance he can muster.

Things are never so simple. Don't believe it for a second, and any random anonymous poster on Gamasutra has an agenda.

[MSUSteve]

I love the internet. There's always some random guy, who may or may not actually know anything about anything, who's going to try to simplify what is probably an extremely complicated situation. He KNOWS what happened, and is going to explain it to you with all the righteous indignance he can muster.

Things are never so simple. Don't believe it for a second, and any random anonymous poster on Gamasutra has an agenda.
It's really too bad that someone so inarticulate took it upon himself to "expose" what happened within EA LA. I can't parse out exactly what he means because his writing is so terrible.

[Telefrog]

It's really too bad that someone so inarticulate took it upon himself to "expose" what happened within EA LA. I can't parse out exactly what he means because his writing is so terrible.

Yeah, I wish it were more clear.

The official stuff is bad enough though. It definitely sounded like the development team had serious issues.

[Hump]

I'd rather have Renegade II multiplayer anyway.

[ConayR]

There's a waterfall of comments on Tiberium and EALA management on Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20462
70 comments, mostly filled with venom and anger. Poor management has always been a problem in software industry but I would never imagine people can be stressed like this.

[intruder]

So one DRM infected game less from EA.

/cry

Not really. Burn in hell EA!

[John Keefer]

If this goes against the rules of self-promotion, then delete it, but I would have linked it even if it hadn't come from our site:

http://www.crispygamer.com/comics/Backward/Backward-2008-10-03.aspx

[Alan Au]

Things are never so simple. Don't believe it for a second, and any random anonymous poster on Gamasutra has an agenda.
That comments section is the next best thing to hanging out in a pub with the ex-EALA folks. It's all personal opinions and impressions, but the emotion is genuine. This is what those people really believe, objectively true or not.

- Alan