Two new games in the Command & Conquer series have been announced by EA (hereafter referred to as "the retarded monkeys"): Tiberium, a spiritual successor to C&C Renegade and sequel to C&C 3; and Kane's Wrath, an expansion pack to the retarded monkeys' previous game, C&C 3.
Kane's Wrath is slated to have a story that spans the twenty or so years before, during and after the events of Tiberian Sun (C&C 2) and Tiberium Wars (C&C 3), hopefully filling in C&C 3's many wide plot holes. It had been declared that Kane's Wrath will feature CABAL (as seen to the right of this post), Kane's AI advisor gone rampant. CABAL is a favourite among Command & Conquer enthusiasts, and many of us were saddened to learn that CABAL would only have a brief mention in C&C 3's history. The fact that CABAL very nearly succeeded in converting every last human on Earth into a cybernetic slave in C&C Firestorm didn't weigh very heavily on the retarded monkeys' shoulders, I suppose. Kane's Wrath is due to come out in spring 2008, according to Wikipedia, which means we should have delicious cyborg goodies before you can say Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform.
Tiberium is a first-person shooter, much like C&C Renegade, which supposedly takes place eleven years after the events of C&C 3. There is very little released so far of this game which is going to be released in the third quarter of 2008. Gametrailers has a gameplay trailer for Tiberium, which seems to indicate that the story of Tiberium revolves around fighting the alien race known as the Scrin. The retarded monkeys have decided to not actually show any of the substance Tiberium in the gameplay trailer, which I find somewhat odd. What is interesting is the nature of the main character's weapon. Instead of have multiple weapons as traditional FPSs are wont, Tiberium instead features a transforming weapon that can morph into different uses depending on need. I think that's a pretty neat idea. We'll have to see how it plays out in practice. The game trailer, which doesn't feature any gameplay, does feature the substance Tiberium. But like most game trailers it's completely useless at determining if a game will be any good. Time will tell.
Since I'm on the topic of gaming I'd like to bring up a disturbing trend I've been seeing in modern games. Recently games have been increasingly hiding content, weapons, maps, features and other gameplay extras from users until they fulfill certain in-game requirements. It's what game creators like the retarded monkeys usually call "unlockable content". What it means is some things are not available to all users of a game from the get-go. They may be superficial things like cool hats to put on your multiple character, or minor things like new weapons or major things like having a different ending depending on the player's skill level. This is fine for things like RPGs, a genre more or less defined by unlockable items, but it's not at all a good thing in FPSs and RTSs.
C&C 3 had unlockable backstory: you can only know the events that lead up the current events if you played certain levels and accomplished certain extraordinary tasks beyond simply playing the game. Many of these tasks are mercilessly difficult to accomplish, and so many players will never unlock the full backstory. Halo 3 has a similar mechanism, except the player can only see the backstory if he's playing on the game's hardest difficulty settings (which, by the way, is incredibly hard). Valve is planning on adding a mechanism to Team Fortress 2 wherein players have to accomplish certain in-game tasks to unlock extra weapons that can be used in normal gameplay. This is only the tip of the iceberg of "unlockable content".
To me, this concept serves only to alienate players. Instead of making a game fun, game makers add in loads of "meta-gaming" so that players feel compelled to play the game more out of a desire to "get that last item". Instead of creating a game that is played based on its own merits (like fun, excitement and entertainment), games are made that resemble purgatorial obsessive chores more than the interactive narratives they're supposed to be. And then there are the gamers who simply can't put the time and effort into getting these extras, and so they feel inadequate and left out. They have to rely on their friends' recounts of the game's "true" (read: hard-mode) end because they can't get it themselves.
In-game metagaming also takes away from those of us who want to play the game for the game itself and not the endless item hunt. I don't really want to play a game which is filled with players who are only there to get some achievement to unlock the next thing. That kind of player doesn't make for good conversation, and he definitely doesn't work co-operatively with others (assuming the game is co-operative in the first place). Why would a game company put its customers in situations like that?
People who enjoy hunting for items and unlocking story through persistence can go play World of Warcraft. The rest of us are rather tired of RPG-like obsessive hunts creeping into real games.