Command and Conquer Junkie

Answer: Breakaway Games. Not EALA.

In truth, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. EA’s Los Angeles studio certainly had oversight over the development process and provided guidance, but it seems the majority of the work was actually outsourced to a company called BreakAway Games. We are not the first ones to observe this, but in light of the Kane’s Wrath 3+ month lack-of-patch debacle, we felt that it warranted additional investigation.

Generals World staff member Blbpaws has thus written an article investigating the effects of outsourced game development at EALA:

Looking in general across the board, RTS games that are outsourced by EA generally score in the 70s—that’s 6 to 7 points lower than their counterparts developed at EALA. Looking in specific at two of the biggest game review sites, GameSpot and IGN, we can see that the effect still exists, with the average drop-off between an in-house game and its outsourced expansion almost nine points. Nor are these rankings easily dismissed. In a meeting with Wall Street analysts in February, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello is quoted as saying, "our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments [metacritic scores], and that is a very big deal." Obviously, the head decision makers at Electronic Arts find there to be some legitimacy to these scores.

Indeed, a simple glance at the games’ MetaCritic scores highlights the curious pattern.

These statistics aren’t perfect (they’re averages of various reviewers’ scores, compared across games developed at different times by a varying group of individuals), but they do seem to reflect the general anecdotal consensus that I’ve found around the community. (Namely, that the development of The First Decade, the Rise of the Witch King expansion, and Kane’s Wrath were all sub-par.)

Blbpaws’ article delves into further detail, taking a look at the roles key Tiberium Wars developers had in Kane’s Wrath’s development (hint: little-to-none) and providing additional analysis.  I encourage you all to read through it.

• Article: An Investigation into Outsourced Development

To what extent does the outsourcing of Kane’s Wrath explain the numerous desync bugs the game shipped with?  To what extent does it explain the balance issues?  And to what extent did it contribute to EA’s inability to release a patch in a timely fashion?  These are the questions that you, concerned C&C fan, should ask.

ModDb released an article yesterday about an up-and-coming Zero Hour modification known as Cold War Crisis.

Travel back to the 1980’s Cold War era and control either the USSR or US forces in their struggle to achieve military superiority. The mod is Cold War Crisis for C&C Generals: Zero Hour. After four years in development does this mod earn a download or will it crash and burn behind enemy lines? Mod DB has a preview, trailer and in-game footage all on show.

This seems to be a very high quality, and to me, fairly interesting concept. One interesting concept this mod incorporates is secondary functions.

Individual infantry units have different stance and secondary functions as well. Going prone will stealth your units until they start to fire. This places more importance on the micro-management of units.

The mod is slated for release late this month or early August.

Generals World is proud to announce that three new tutorials have been added to the site.

• How to Show Captions in Maps by Me Myself & Pi
• Using Markers as Script Conditions, Instead of Flags by Drummin
• How to Make Professional Cliffs by paimail

We at Generals World would like to thank Me Myself & Pi, Drummin, and paimail for their contributions to Generals World. If you have a tutorial you would like to contribute to Generals World, feel free to post it in our tutorials forum. If it is good enough, we may add it to our tutorials pages.