Command & Conquer is Serious Business

My first review is a massive Wall of Text examining Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (and its expansion Kane's Wrath), made by Electronic Arts. Westwood Studios created the earlier games in the franchise, but Westwood no longer exists (many of them went off and formed a new company named Petroglyph.) Can EA Los Angeles fill Westwood's shoes?

There would be little point in retelling the main plot of the game or describing the basic gameplay as that ground has already been covered by a thousand reviews elsewhere. Instead I am examining the fine details that have been ignored by most reviews, in particular how well the story and setting hangs together, and whether the game fits into the overall Command & Conquer continuity. I find that contrary to the furious rants of some hardcore C&C fans EA have done a pretty good job at maintaining continuity. Unfortunately certain changes defy common sense and create plot holes that could easily have been avoided. The more these plot holes are examined, the more the overall story crumbles, until eventually what seemed to be a good solid story actually turns out to be riddled with plot chasms.

Classic gameplay

First things first: Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is a brilliant game. Eventually I'll be tearing it to shreds and exposing all its flaws, but I do not want to give anyone the mistaken impression that I hate this game. It feels and plays like good-old Command & Conquer, but bigger and flashier and more explosive than ever before. There is great attention to detail and it is clear the development team put their heart and soul into making a great product. The gameplay is a good blend of "old school" classic C&C gameplay and new features that seem to me like natural, sensible additions Westwood Studios themselves might have made if they were still making C&C games.

Some reviews have criticized the gameplay as being too similar to earlier games in the franchise and lacking innovation compared to other recent strategy games, but the fact is that there are plenty of people that still enjoy the standard C&C formula, and as the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." At the other end of the scale some hardcore fans have criticized every minor changes to the gameplay, so I guess you can't make everyone happy all the time. EA tried to be innovative with Command & Conquer: Generals, and the result was a decent RTS that was hated by fans of the previous games of the franchise. I have issues with the game's setting and plot, but the gameplay mostly gets a big thumbs up from me.

I especially like the squad system. I always found it daft in the old C&C games that you would train one individual soldier at a time. Who would invest time and money in training one individual soldier to be a standard rifleman? Now you train a squad of ten rifle infantry. The squad is only about as effective as one individual soldier was in the earlier games, but it helps the game to look a little more realistic and makes battles look more dramatic and exciting, with large numbers of soldiers firing and dying all over the place. As a squad's overall health bar is depleted you see individual squad members die. This also solves the problem of older C&C games where an individual soldier could survive direct hits from twenty anti-tank rockets. Commandos have swapped their slow-firing sniper rifles for rapid-fire machine guns that chew through squads, and Nod's infamous Obelisk of Light deals with infantry by firing a sweeping beam that eliminates an entire squad rather than a single focused anti-tank blast. It all works quite well.

There is one aspect of the gameplay that I think is a little broken: stealth. I find stealth abilities and cloaked units of limited use thanks to far too many means of stealth detection. I am fine with Zone Troopers and Orca fighters scanning for cloaked units or dropping sensor pods as those are abilities the player has to intentionally activate when suspicious. My gripe is with the structures and units that automatically have passive stealth detection. Every defensive structure can see cloaked units, even if the structure is an anti-air gun and the unit is a Stealth Tank. GDI's little Pitbull vehicles automatically detect cloaked units, and Pitbulls are cheap and useful combat units (especially with the mortar upgrade) that should be in any GDI base or attack force. The Nod attack bike and Venom aircraft have similar passive detection abilities, and the new Scrin alien faction have equivalent units with such abilities too. Successfully pulling off a sneak attack is so tricky that patches have significantly increased the damage of the Stealth Tank's attacks to make Nod players actually bother to build them.

The Disruptor, a Nod structure similar to Tiberian Sun's Stealth Generator can cloak buildings and units, but unlike the old Stealth Generator it cannot cloak itself. I could understand this design decision if detecting cloaked units was tricky and required something similar to Tiberian Sun's Mobile Sensor Arrays, but in C&C3 even a completely invisible base would be easy to find thanks to the vast selection of ways to detect cloaked units. Thankfully Nod has plenty of other good tricks up their sleeve, but stealth was supposed to be Nod's speciality and it a shame to see it nerfed.

When a structure or unit detects something cloaked there is a cool-looking sweeping green laser effect that appears to be a couple of metres long, but the stealth detection radius is actually as large as the unit's normal sight radius. I believe a simple and effective way to make stealth detection more balanced would be if the detection range was only half the unit's sight radius. That way players could sneak cloaked units past stealth-detecting units and structures by micro-managing their movements.

Living Up To The Legacy

In most respects, Electronic Arts' C&C3 really is a worthy continuation of Westwood's classic Command & Conquer franchise. EA's Los Angeles development team wanted to do more than imitate Westwood though, and so they also put their own personal stamp on the game, changing things enough to make it their own work, their franchise, their vision of Command & Conquer. Of course, that's pretty common when someone else does a sequel. Sometimes it goes well and sometimes it does not. James Cameron's Aliens is a very different film to Ridley Scott's Alien, but it respects the source material and simply takes it in a new direction. On the other hand, Alien 3 immediately kills off the few characters that survived Aliens, and in Cameron's own words that was "a slap in the face" to him and to fans of the previous film. Unfortunately, a few of the changes that EA have made to the universe of Command & Conquer are in the same vein as Alien 3 - they feel like a slap in the face to Westwood and the fans that have followed the franchise for more than a decade. I am positive that was not EA's intention, I think they simply underestimated the significance of certain aspects of the older games.

I expect that some of you would accuse me of overreacting; surely it is not a big deal whether or not a sequel respects the original creator's intent if the sequel kicks arse and the story still makes sense. Unfortunately some of the changes that EA have made to the Command & Conquer universe cause the overall plot of the franchise to no longer makes sense! Whoops.

Before I get into EA's big mistakes, I'm first going to defend some of the changes that EA have made. It is quite common for hardcore fans of a franchise to have a knee-jerk reaction of "They changed it, now it sucks." I am not a part of that crowd, because I do not believe that every decision made by Westwood Studios was perfect.

Where EA Went Right

Westwood's original Command & Conquer (which has since become known as Tiberian Dawn) was set about Twenty Minutes Into The Future, a contemporary conflict of tanks and planes on green hills and yellow deserts with a few sci-fi elements thrown in. The spin-off Red Alert was set Twenty Minutes Into The Past, an alternative World War II with Cold War technology. It swapped deserts for snow and the sci-fi elements were more fun and silly, but it still felt familiar.

Command & Conquer (Tiberian Dawn) had a sci-fi plot but a contemporary setting

When Westwood released Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun the setting shifted to Star Wars hover-vehicles and bipedal robot mechs struggling to control a bleak and depressing post-apocalyptic wasteland. It was supposed to be set thirty years after the original, but the changes to the world and the technology were so drastic it seemed more like a century. You can find similar high-tech infantry, walkers and hover-tanks fighting for dominance of a similarly desolate environment in the multiplayer first-person-shooter Battlefield 2142. I have no problem believing in hover-tanks and walkers fighting in the wastelands of the year 2142, but in the 2030s? Crazy.

Tiberian Sun was supposedly set just 30 years later, but everything seemed very futuristic

The basic C&C gameplay mechanics were still there, and the movies and mission briefings were fantastic, but Tiberian Sun did not feel like Command & Conquer. Only the Nod faction had something similar to a conventional tank, and how can you have a C&C game without tanks? Tiberian Sun was an excellent game, but it is original Command & Conquer and its Red Alert spin-offs that fans remember with nostalgia.

EA has addressed this by making C&C3: Tiberium Wars a hybrid of the previous games. Some levels feature high-tech cities, some are untamed wilderness, and others are bleak wastelands. To create the nostalgia factor most of the units are conventional stuff such as tanks and APCs given a bit of a high-tech makeover, but there are also futuristic units reminiscent of Tiberian Sun. (Of course the units of the new Scrin alien faction seem suitably alien, and it was no secret that if Westwood had made another C&C game they would have introduced aliens themselves.)

Some fans have complained about the technology of the good-guy GDI faction downgrading from mechs and hover-vehicles, but in the game's "Intel Database" EA have given a reasonable explanation for GDI's return to using tanks. Their story is that since the end of Tiberian Sun the Nod bad-guys have been perceived as less of a threat and so GDI's resources have been focused on combating the scourge of Tiberium and making the world more habitable. This also neatly explains why the whole world is no longer a depressing wasteland like in Tiberian Sun. Still, even if budget-cuts have caused the military to change focus from high-tech prototypes to cheap and reliable weapons, it does seem a little far-fetched that an advanced military with mechs and hover-tanks would completely scrap all their high-tech gizmos. EA have remedied this in the recent expansion pack Kane's Wrath which introduces sub-factions with slightly differing units, one of which is the Steel Talons division that still uses the Wolverine and Titan mechs from Tiberian Sun. EA have also added a couple of hover-vehicles to the GDI arsenal, including a hovering anti-air gun and a sonic tank similar to the Disruptor from Tiberian Sun.

Another cause of fan anger has been the important plot threads were left hanging. Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars seemed to completely ignore the cliffhanger ending to Tiberian Sun's expansion Firestorm. At the end of Firestorm's Nod campaign a movie revealed a room full of adult-sized embryos in stasis and a more developed body that was clearly the villian Kane, still wearing the metal faceplate seen in Tiberian Sun. The face of CABAL on a large computer screen showed that the renegade artificial intelligence had not been truly destroyed either, and the movie suggested that somehow the minds of Kane and CABAL were fused together. In C&C3: Tiberium Wars Kane returns without a faceplate and with no mention of CABAL other than a tiny entry in the Intel Database. I understand why EA did not feature the resolution to the CABAL situation in C&C3 - they wished to make the game accessible to players new to the franchise (Tiberian Sun came out in 1999!) and did not wish to burden newcomers with too much backstory. Instead, EA waited till the expansion Kane's Wrath (which jumps back in time to shortly after the end of Firestorm) to explain what happened to Kane and that artificial intelligence. It turns out that the weird mental fusion resulted in the creation of a new artificial intelligence known as LEGION. An especially inventive touch is that in Kane's Wrath you actually play as LEGION, carrying out Kane's secret plans while he remains in hiding and recovers from his wounds.

In Tiberian Sun Nod's elite forces were cyborgs and in Firestorm CABAL attempted to use cyborgs to take over the world. EA neatly explained the absence of cyborgs in C&C3 by saying that Nod was wary of cyborg technology ever since the CABAL incident, but EA have brought them back in Kane's Wrath. The expansion features a Nod sub-faction known as the Marked of Kane, a cyborg army sealed in underground bunkers for years until Kane orders you to revive them. This does a great job of reinforcing the idea that the player is LEGION, CABAL's successor. The game also answers questions about what happened to Slavik, leader of the brotherhood at the end of Firestorm. Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars left fans with many unanswered questions, but the Kane's Wrath expansion does an excellent job at patching up the Command & Conquer plotline.

Tiberium is Serious Business

For the past seven paragraphs I have been commending Electronic Arts Los Angeles team for successfully patching up plot holes. That seems a little bit at odds with my earlier statement that the Command & Conquer franchise no longer makes sense. That is because EA made one mistake, one terrible mistake that undermines everything else and destroys the continuity of the franchise in a horrible Buttery Effect of Doom. EA changed the nature of Tiberium.

The game is titled Tiberium Wars so clearly Tiberium is important. In gameplay terms it is the resource that you must collect in order to build stuff. Some fans have been irritated about the changes EA have made to this substance, mainly because they seem rather arbitrary and EA has not tried to explain them except by saying that Tiberium has "evolved". Something that neither EA nor most fans seem to have realised is that by making these arbitrary changes EA has also accidentally removed the justification for C&C's gameplay mechanics and the motivation for the conflict!

In Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, EA has decided that Tiberium is a self-replicating crystal that transmutes anything it touches into more Tiberium, emitting powerful radiation in the process. It is an interesting idea, a little similar to the "grey goo" scenario where self-replicating nanomachines consume the Earth, but on a far slower scale. The problem is being contained by the Global Defence Initiative, which uses high-tech sonic emitters to shatter the proton lattice of the crystals. As well as being the greatest threat the world has ever known, Tiberium is also a valuable resource because the radiation allows it to be used like nuclear fuel. Self-replicating nuclear fuel! Tiberium is destroying the world but it has also solved humanity's energy needs. Later in the game it turns out that Tiberium was deliberately seeded on Earth by an alien race known as the Scrin that is dependent on Tiberium radiation.

EA's scientific diagram of their new MIT-scientist approved Tiberium

It appears that EA wanted to let everyone know that Tiberium is Serious Business because they recruited MIT physicists to come up with an explanation of how EA's Tiberium actually works. They came up with the idea a "dynamic proton lattice" held together by exotic heavy particles, and the technobabble is pretty convincing, involving the heavy particles smashing atomic nuclei, incorporating some of the protons (causing the Tiberium to grow) and releasing the rest of the particles as radiation. I've got to give them credit, that sounds a pretty convincing sci-fi ecological threat. There's one problem though - it bears absolutely no relation to what Tiberium was like in the previous Command & Conquer games.

In Westwood's old C&C games Tiberium was not simply a crystalline element, it was an alien life-form that grew from brown plant-like pods, soaking up minerals and nutrients from the soil through root systems and storing them as green crystals on the surface that were rich in precious metals. Movies in original C&C (Tiberian Dawn) gave the chemical composition as being mostly phosphor, iron and calcium, but also 1.5% new elements unknown to mankind. (Is anyone else reminded of Richard Pryor trying to synthesise kryptonite in that awful Superman film?) It also breathed out a cocktail of deadly gases that were 29% unknown elements, as well as more traditional toxic stuff like methane and sulphur.

Westwood's Tiberium technobabble included chemical composition and an animation of its life-cycle

Later the player learnt that Tiberium was also a deadly biohazard that could infect plants and animals like a virus, rewriting their genetic structure and mutating them into bizarre new creatures. Here's a movie from original C&C which describes Tiberium-related illnesses and the ecological damage, with the climax being Dr Mobius giving a press conference and warning "It seems to be adapting the Earth's terrain, foliage and environment to suit its own alien nature."

Not only were the dangers and effects of Tiberium different in Westwood's original C&C games, the uses of Tiberium were different as well. For the sake of writing this review I bought an old second-hand copy of The Official Guide to Command & Conquer (published back in 1995). In the section describing the Tiberium Refinery I found this excellent explanation:

Tiberium allows for the creation of new items practically instantaneously (compared to previous fabrication methodology) at new beachheads. The process uses sophisticated Tiberium-inspired engineering combined with the latest computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) technology.

This is what justifies all the 'peculiarities' of Command & Conquer gameplay. It is why your buildings can miraculously rise out of the ground in a matter of seconds. (If you watch the animation when you place a structure it starts as an indistinct grey shape and then morphs into the final building.) It is why it is actually feasible to build small factories in the middle of a battlefield and produce endless streams of tanks. It is why you are instructed to carry out important missions yet given hardly any forces. Here's another excerpt from The Official Guide:

In this new kind of warfare, the focus is quality, not quantity, and quality here largely means the ability to deploy small numbers of excellent forces. Battles are fought in terms of hours, not weeks or years. This follows directly from the ability to deposit a very small amount of physically relocated items (primarily the MCY, with minimal fire support) that quickly become a larger force via the new Tiberium-inspired micromanufacturing techniques. This small, crack force can then focus on a seed of enemy aggression before it grows into a large, country-spanning tree, as used to happen back when nations took weeks or months to field a decent counter response.

The brilliant thing about Westwood's imaginary substance is that it can be used to justify a large number of necessary game mechanics. I have never stopped and wondered why Rocket Soldiers were able to fire an unlimited number of rockets - the only RTS game I know where you have to worry about your ammo is Company of Heroes - but The Official Guide manages to come up with an explanation for that too. It explains that 'Tiberium has touched many aspects of human life (for better or worse); one of the spinoffs is this lightweight launch platform with a virtually inexhaustible supply of micromanufacted warheads.' It also mentions that 'the sophisticated apparatus necessary for Tiberium-based warhead replenishment makes the bazooka soldier an easy kill', as weight factors mean the soldier cannot wear much body armour.

How about the Engineer's ability to instantly capture buildings? They gain access thanks to 'specially shaped charges and explosive-assisted hydraulic jaws', and they can 'practically walk in one side of a sealed bank vault and out the other without stopping'. They take control of the building using 'high-power RF locators, jammers, and CPU scramblers', because buildings constructed using the unique Tiberium-based build-process have an Achilles Heel:

In this new military age, every building has a core computer net that controls much of the operation of the facility. This computer net is required due to the intense combination of Tiberium-inspired construction and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). Together, these two technologies are sometimes called micro- or nano-assembly. The considerable computer capability needed for the nearly instantaneous construction of a building then becomes integrated as the core nerve centre of the facility.

This idea featured prominently in the first-person-shooter Command & Conquer: Renegade, where the heart of every building was a Master Control Terminal that was a critical weak spot. (Incidently, Renegade also explained why the GDI Barracks and the Hand of Nod could produce an unlimited number of troops: a Hand of Nod seen in Renegade's singleplayer had a helipad on the roof and a Transport Helicopter that dropped off reinforcements, implying that when you played Command & Conquer the number of troops in your Barracks/Hand of Nod was topped up by aircraft when you were not looking.)

The problem should now be obvious. Westwood's old Tiberium was toxic but it contained all the elements needed to instantly fabricate a soldier's rifle, rockets, a tank or a building. EA's new Tiberium slowly corrodes and assimilates anything it touches but it can be used as nuclear fuel. This means that it is still a useful resource that nations might fight over, but it no longer justifies the actual gameplay as it is not a building material. I can imagine the futuristic equivalent of big oil companies setting up refineries and gathering the radioactive Tiberium, but there is no reason the player should because you cannot make guns and vehicles out of the stuff. You are supposed to be shooting the enemy, not running a profit-making business.

The Scrin's Motivation

C&C3: Tiberium Wars introduced a third faction to the game, alien invaders known as the Scrin. The existence of aliens had already been revealed in Westwood's Tiberian Sun, with the discovery of an alien ship and a device called the Tacitus that was full of Tiberium-related information. The implication was that an alien race had intentionally seeded Tiberium on Earth in order to terraform our ecosystem into one that better resembled their home environment.

Westwood's Tiberium mutated both plants and animals into strange new creatures, and Tiberium Sun and Firestorm had levels that resembled alien worlds. As well as the toxic Tiberium that harmed troops there were various other types of Tiberium plant, and Tiberium algae that clogged up waterways and oceans. New creatures included dog-like Tiberium Fiends that could shoot shards from their backs, and Floaters that resembled giant jellyfish that could give electric shocks. Humans killed by Tiberium could mutate into Visceroids, weird lumps of flesh that could combine with other Visceroids to become large dangerous blobs. Even vehicles were not safe, as there were Veinholes surrounded by tentacles that would attack any heavy vehicle that attempted to roll over them.

Unfortunately, EA decided to not include any of this wonderful alien ecosystem in C&C3. Instead of alien jungles we were given 'Red Zones' devoid of life, wastelands dominating by gigantic Tiberium crystals and huge creaking Tiberium glaciers. (I must admit I did like the the ruined houses covered in Tiberium and the canyons full of massive crystal formations.) The reason for these wastelands rather than alien jungles is that the new Tiberium does not mutate plants and animals into Tiberium-based life-forms, it just kills things with deadly radiation and turns them into crystals. It turns out that this is the type of Tiberium the Scrin needs - they are dependent on the Tiberium radiation. (Not simply as a resource - they biologically need it to survive. You win the GDI campaign by destroying a critical Scrin structure that has been transmitting the essential radiation to all of the Scrin forces on Earth.) The Scrin are actually tricked into invading early by Kane, and they are surprised to find that we are still around and that the Earth is not one great big radioactive ball of crystal.

It seems the Scrin's dependency on Tiberium is even greater than our dependence on oxygen. During the early stages of the invasion the Scrin construct a Relay Node/Control Node that emits Tiberium radiation to sustain the Scrin forces. This node has an enormous range that reaches as far as the moon. The Scrin are defeated when GDI destroys this node - the Scrin spontaneously disintegrate within seconds. Aliens that disintegrate if they are not constantly bathed in radiation... I have not seen that kind of silliness since 1950s sci-fi B-movies. There is also the fact that Tiberium radiation is supposed to be deadly to humans, and if the Scrin are beaming enough of it to sustain Scrin units all over the globe then humanity should be killed by the radiation. You could argue that the radiation might be low-intensity and not very harmful to humans, but that would make the Scrin have the crappest biology of any species ever. Plants need sunlight to live but they do not instantly wither and die if you take them out of the sunlight; I cannot imagine an alien race that is sustained by low-intensity harmless radiation and yet cannot survive without that radiation for a few minutes. It is an excuse to have a ridiculous Achilles Heel/Deus Ex Machina: "destroy this structure and all enemy forces will drop dead".

Since the Scrin civilisation is completely dependent on the radioactive Tiberium crystals, the "evolved" radioactive version cannot be a new phenomenon. This begs the question - why did the Scrin bother to seed the "old" toxic plant-like Tiberium? Surely they could have just seeded the radioactive version. One possibility is that it was part of an elaborate plan - they seeded a version of Tiberium that would seem more useful and not quite as dangerous so that humanity would try to exploit it rather than racing to destroy it. The problem with that idea is that the Scrin could easily have picked a lifeless planet rather than the Earth and avoided having to worry about humanity at all. In Tiberian Sun it made sense that the aliens picked Earth - they wanted an inhabited world with a thriving ecosystem that they could then convert into their own alien ecosystem. In C&C3 the new nature of Tiberium makes an ecosystem irrelevant, as rather than creating new species the radioactive Tiberium simply converts everything it touches into more radioactive crystal. This would make Mars or some of the huge rocky moons of Jupiter and Saturn far more logical choices - the Scrin could have seeded them with the radioactive crystals and not had to worry about humanity interfering with their plans.

So, yet another problem with EA's new self-replicating radioactive crystals: it means there was no point in the Scrin seeding the organic mutagenic Tiberium seen in the earlier Westwood games. In fact, there was no need for the Scrin to come to Earth at all.

Kane's Schemes

EA's changes to the Tiberium have also messed up the motives of Kane and the Brotherhood of Nod. In Tiberian Sun and Renegade Kane conducted various experiments involving controlled Tiberium mutations in humans, and believed that "Tiberium-based life" would be the next step of evolution for humanity. Nod's cyborg soldiers - as well as having the advantages of high-tech cybernetic implants - could stand in Tiberium patches unharmed, in fact it caused them to slowly regain health. If you won Tiberian Sun's Nod campaign you saw a movie sequence in which Kane launched a world-altering missile that spread green stuff all over the Earth in order to evolve the whole human race. The new self-replicating radioactive crystal featured in C&C3 cannot be used for such schemes as it simply kills people and turns them into crystal rather than transforming them into a new type of creature.

So EA came up with a new motive for Kane - inviting the aliens to Earth and then using their own technology to travel to other worlds. This is quite a departure from Kane's old agenda. Kane spent years researching Tiberium mutations and setting up his plan of forced evolution. I guess he was forced to adapt and come up with something new when the Tiberium mysteriously evolved for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Kane's new scheme hinges on the usage of Liquid Tiberium. Liquid Tiberium is supposed to be very unstable and difficult to produce, and also dangerously explosive. When Kane tricks GDI into firing an ion cannon at Kane's temple - which has a store of Liquid Tiberium beneath it - the result is a massive explosion that attracts the attention of the Scrin aliens. Late in the game you get the option to use a Liquid Tiberium Bomb, but if you use the bomb you get an alternative "bad ending" in which you defeat the bad guys but essentially obliterate Europe in the process. So... Liquid Tiberium... powerful (and nasty) stuff. This is a bit baffling, because surely the entire point of the game's Tiberium Refineries is that they melt the Tiberium into liquid. That's what refineries do. In-game the refineries have massive open-topped vats full of glowing green liquid, so liquid Tiberium should not be a rare commodity at all, and blowing a refinery up should result in a massive nuclear explosion. Also, in the Kane's Wrath expansion there are Tiberium Troopers that spray Liquid Tiberium at enemies, similar to the old chem troopers in original C&C. Against infantry they are OK but no more effective than standard Black Hand flame throwers, and the sticky goo can slow down vehicles. Surely it should be either instantly deadly or extremely volatile and liable to explode?

The only answer to that is that "Liquid Tiberium" is not simply Tiberium melted to form a liquid, but some other special type of Tiberium. I really think EA could have given it a better name. They could have called it "Tiberiate, a man-made isotope of Tiberium". Or perhaps "enriched Tiberium", to make it sound a little like the enriched uranium used to make nuclear weapons. Liquid Tiberium does not make sense and is simply sloppy.

Another Tiberium-related bit of sloppy thinking is the "Tiberium Infusion" upgrade available to Nod players, which infuses all of your basic infantry with Tiberium and makes them immune to the dangers of walking through Tiberium patches. Given that Tiberium assimilates anything it touches, surely infusing someone with Tiberium - no matter how small a quantity - would give them radiation poisoning and eventually turn them into green crystals from the inside out? Good going, Kane - you've just murdered all of your own soldiers in one of the most painful ways imaginable! The idea of infusing someone with Tiberium worked in the older games because Tiberium was a living thing, so perhaps it could be manipulated by something akin to genetic engineering. People are given modified 'safe' versions of viruses in order to vaccinate them against the dangerous versions, and perhaps 'safe' versions of the Tiberium organism could be given to troops to protect them against the dangerous natural version. That idea does not work for EA's new radioactive Tiberium, however, as it is just one substance, one self-replicating element.

Evolution or Accident?

There is a big problem with EA's claim that Tiberium evolved. The earlier versions of Tiberium were life-forms with a complicated chemical composition, a life-cycle and the ability to infect and transform other creatures. The new type of Tiberium is just a radioactive green rock that grows. How can an animal or a vegetable "evolve" into a mineral? That is a very shaky definition of evolution. Furthermore, this new Tiberium completely replaced all of the existing Tiberium that was spread all across the globe, a very drastic change. I figured this change could not be down to natural evolution, and so I tried to come up with some theories that might explain why the Tiberium changed.

At the end of Firestorm GDI gained vital information from the Tacitus that was supposed to be the key to saving the world from Tiberium. Kane's Wrath takes the story back to two years after the end of Firestorm in order to tie-up the loose plot threads, but it features the radioactive evolved Tiberium, which means the Tiberium evolved into its new form just a year or so after the end of Firestorm. So my first theory was that in the couple of years between Firestorm and Kane's Wrath GDI released something that was designed to completely wipe out all Tiberium, but they made a mistake. I mentioned earlier that Westwood's old Tiberium was made up of 1.5% unknown stuff, and I thought that perhaps GDI's experiment caused that unknown element to change into an unstable self-replicating version and completely consume the Tiberium, transforming its chemical composition from 1.5% unknown to 100%.

I was rather chuffed with myself for coming up with this theory, as it solved the mystery of how a living thing could transform into a mineral. It emphasised the idea that the Tactitus is a very powerful and dangerous tool, and it was a nice twist that GDI's attempt to use it had replaced one ecological crisis with another. I then realised there was a big flaw in this idea - the Scrin are dependent on the evolved radioactive Tiberium and so it would not make sense for an accident on Earth to create the evolved version. The Scrin could not have planned for GDI to mess with the Tacitus and cause such an event. The more likely option is that the Scrin themselves released something that transformed the Tiberium. The flaw there is that the Scrin do not show up until Kane invites them with a Liquid Tiberium explosion half way through the game.

The only option remaining is that the Tiberium had some kind of built-in timer. After a certain number of years or a certain number of generations a genetic time bomb went off, the Tiberium produced some chemical that changed the unknown element and made it self-replicate, consuming the Tiberium and covering the world in self-replicating radioactive crystals instead of mutagenic plant-pods. Hmmm. I'm not convinced. As I said earlier, there is no good reason why the Scrin could not have simply seeded the radioactive version rather than taking a gamble with such an over-complicated scheme.

The especially irritating thing is that I cannot think why EA decided to change the Tiberium, as it creates all these oddities without achieving anything positive. It seems to be change for the sake of change. The only thing I can think of is that they wanted a new art direction. They did not like the crystals crowing out of brown plant-pods, they wanted the crystals to come straight up out of the ground. They wanted Red Zones dominated by gigantic Tiberium Glaciers of glowing green crystal. True, the new Tiberium does look pretty cool, but the old-stuff looked OK too. Great going guys - you broke the story simply for the sake of having some new-look crystals.

What I Would Have Done

EA could have made a game with essentially the same story but kept the Tiberium the same as in the original games made by Westwood. If I was one of the head honchos on EA's Command & Conquer 3 development team at the start of the project and the C&C3 storyline was being discussed, I would have proposed this alternative version to avoid the whole mess.

1) GDI uses the Tacitus to figure out how to combat Tiberium using sonic emitters (just like EA's C&C3 story). There's no reason Westwood's old plant-like Tiberium could not have the same resonance weakness as EA's radioactive Tiberium, as both types of Tiberium are mostly crystalline. (The Tiberium crystals could have the colour and shape of EA's redesign - EA's "evolved" Tiberium does look pretty cool - but with the important element of having the crystal itself growing from a sort of pod/growth rather than directly out of the ground. Also, the centres of Tiberium fields would be mutant 'blossom trees' from the earlier games rather than fissures in the ground.)

2) GDI uses napalm carpet bombing and specially designed chemical weapons to combat all the other weird Tiberium-based life-forms that we saw in Tiberium Sun and Firestorm, such as the weird plants, mutant creatures, vein holes and the algae. GDI also uses Tacitus knowledge to develop some kind of atmospheric decontamination technique to get rid of all those harmful gasses that messed up the atmosphere and caused all those ion storms.

3) GDI eventually reclaims large portions of the Earth from the scourge of Tiberium. These areas become GDI-controlled Blue Zones that are essentially identical to the Blue Zones seen in EA's C&C3 . Energy is not an issue thanks to fusion power plants; according to the Official Guide the 'Advanced Power Plant' structure in original C&C contained a tokamak fusion reactor and it is reasonable to assume that nuclear fusion has been used ever since. The world therefore no longer has an energy economy dependent on oil. Instead it has a Tiberium economy, as modern industry and the military is dependent on Tiberium-fuelled micro-manufacturing. For this reason GDI allows some Tiberium to grow in confined areas within Blue Zones, safely cordoned off by sonic barriers. We therefore end up with Blue Zones that are essentially identical to the ones seen in EA's C&C3, without changing the Tiberium.

4) GDI is unable to combat Tiberium in the Nod-controlled Yellow Zones due to the animosity between GDI and Nod. Also, Nod still has the cult of Tiberium, the belief that Tiberium holds the key to the future evolution of mankind, so Nod emphatically opposes the destruction of Tiberium. GDI is able to eliminate most of the various mutant creatures and plants from Yellow Zones as they can be wiped out by aircraft, but it is impossible to use the ground-based sonic emitters to destroy the actual Tiberium fields. The allows the Yellow Zones to be essentially identical to the Yellow Zones seen in EA's C&C3.

5) Although Blue Zones and Yellow Zones will be almost completely devoid of Tiberian Sun style life-forms, infantry killed by Tiberium contamination have a chance of mutating into a visceroid. (C&C3 does feature visceroids, but only as a rare side-effect of the Scrin Corruptor weapon.) The visceroids would be more similar to the Tiberian Sun versions, with harmless 'baby visceroids' fusing to become a dangerous 'adult visceroid'. This danger of creating visceroids will make the "Tiberium Contamination Detected" warning rather more worrying for players, and make Nod's Tiberium Infusion upgrade even more valuable.

6) Red Zones are areas untouched by GDI's efforts. Rather than being C&C3's barren wastelands dominated by gigantic crystal formations, instead they resemble incredible alien jungles. A few of the plants and animals resemble creatures seen in Tiberian Sun and Firestorm, but most are new species. (Creating alien jungles would require quite a bit of additional work by the art department and the modellers, but the rapid evolution/mutation nature of Tiberium means that at least the art department gets to flex its creative muscles and not be restricted by the previous creature/plant designs seen in Tiberian Sun.) The air is toxic to unprotected humans and the Red Zones are ravaged by ion storms. Ion storms could be scripted events in a couple of the Red Zone missions.

7) Some of the human mutants (known as "The Forgotten") attempt to integrate into GDI society in Blue Zones. Unsurprisingly this leads to racial tensions - they are mutants and some argue they are not truly human anymore. There is also a fear amongst some GDI citizens that they may be somehow infected by the mutants. The difficulties prove too hard for many mutants and so large numbers choose to live in the Yellow Zones instead. Unlike the mutant exodus mentioned in EA's C&C3 it would be implied that some mutants do live in Blue Zones, essentially becoming an unpopular ethnic minority.

8) There are no capturable Mutant Hovel structures. Mutants live in communities and have their own identies and will not go and fight for someone simply because an engineer turns up to capture a building! Instead of Mutant Hovel structures some Yellow Zone levels could have small mutant villages made up of several buildings and tents. They are effectively just 'civillians' that are mostly indifferent to both GDI and Nod. They do not take sides, as unlike in Tiberian Sun there is nothing in the storyline about diplomacy with the mutants and adding such elements would overcomplicate matters.

9) The Liquid Tiberium research of EA's C&C3 is replaced with research into the unknown elements that make up 1.5% of Tiberium, mentioned all the way back in C&C3. These elements could be stable within Tiberium and Tiberium-based life-forms but unstable if extracted. One of these elements - which I'll nickname 'Tiberianite' for convenience - is so unstable that in liquid form it is radioactive and highly explosive. This element is also released as part of the 29% unknown gasses that Tiberium naturally breathes out, but the gaseous form is far less volatile.

10) Kane's Tacitus research back in the days of Tiberian Sun taught him that although the Tiberianite gas is less volatile than the liquid form there would eventually come a day when the gas in the atmosphere would reach a critical concentration and a lightning strike from an ion storm could ignite a chain reaction. This nuclear reaction would spread across the entire Earth, transmuting the Tiberian gases into other elements. The new chemical make-up would match that of the Scrin's natural atmosphere and would be the final stage of the terraforming process. (Or rather, 'xenoforming' process.) Kane reaslised that the Scrin would be monitoring the Earth to detect when this atmospheric conversion took place.
11) Kane's World Altering Missile from Tiberian Sun was designed to cause a different kind of chain reaction, but it similarly required the atmosphere to be full of Tiberian gasses. GDI's clean-up of the toxic atmosphere has not only postponed the atmospheric conversion that would trigger the arrival of the Scrin; it has also made Kane's scheme to evolve humanity unworkable. (This justifies Kane having new plans and new goals without the need to change the nature of Tiberium.)

12) Kane comes up with a new masterplan. He realises that if the dangerous liquid form of the Tiberianite element is shocked with a powerful ionic blast the resulting explosion would have a similar signature to the natural atmospheric conversion process. This would trick the Scrin and cause them to invade the Earth early while humanity is still strong and the Earth is still nowhere near the conditions the Scrin desire. Kane learned from the Tacitus that when the Scrin invade planets they build "Threshold towers" that act as interstellar portals, and Kane intends to commandeer one of these towers for his own purposes. Rather than attempting to evolve all of humanity into Tiberium-based life, Kane shall instead evolve only a select chosen few, and these chosen ones will then 'ascend' and journey to a new world. A new beginning.

13) Kane realises that in order to create the necessary effect the liquid Tiberianite must be subjected to an enormous ionic blast, larger than the strikes of an ion storm. He needs the power of a GDI ion cannon.

14) The events of the start of the game are essentially identical to EA's C&C3: GDI have a economic summit on the Philadelphia space station to discuss the conflicting interests of GDI's Tiberium-elimination project and the economy's need for Tiberium in micro-manufacturing. In EA's C&C3 it is an energy summit, but it basically comes down to the same thing, the world economy is dependent on Tiberium. Just like in EA's C&C3, Kane launches a missile and destroys the Philadelphia, kicking off a new war.

15) Kane eventually tricks GDI into firing the ion cannon at Temple Prime, detonating a resevoir of concentrated liquid Tiberianite lurking beneath. This attracts the attention of the Scrin. (Same as EA's C&C3 except that instead of using liquified Tiberium crystals it uses one of the elements that makes up Tiberium. The fact that Westwood's Tiberium is a life-form with a complex chemistry makes Tiberium very versatile, and deriving new substances from Tiberium is infintely preferable to making up new forms of Tiberium itself.)

16) The Scrin arrive and are surprised that Earth does not match their intended ecosystem. The transformation is not complete, and the natives have a military that could pose a threat. The Scrin consider aborting the mission and waiting a few more decades, but then detect that humanity has figured out how to reclaim areas from Tiberium infestation. If the Scrin leave humanity may eventually eliminate all the Tiberium and Tiberium-based life and the Scrin scheme will have failed. It is determined that humanity must be extermined.

17) The Scrin expedition lacks the firepower to erradicate humanity, so they decide to carry out diversionary attacks on population centres while Threshold towers are constructed using Tiberium-based micro-manufacturing. The Red Zones are the ideal location for this due to the plentiful Tiberium and the fact that the environment is hospitable to the Scrin but hostile to humans. When the Threshold towers are complete the Scrin will have access to reinforcements and more resources and will be in a better position to wage a war.

18) The mutants seen in Tiberian Sun were able to regain health by standing in Tiberium fields, but they did not have a long life expectancy as eventually the mutations could become fatal in a manner similar to cancer. (Thankfully GDI developed a treatment by the end of Tiberian Sun, saving the mutant character Umagon.) The Scrin also have a Tiberium-based biology, but it is more stable and resistant to mutation. This means that Scrin can safely stand in Tiberium fields, but they cannot regain health in this manner. The Scrin can be healed by some concentrated Tiberium-derived chemicals; this is the substance sprayed by the Scrin corruptor unit. As in EA's C&C3 the Scrin's Tiberium-based biology makes them vulnerable to the sonic resonance weaponry that GDI uses to destroy Tiberium.

19) Since the Tiberium is Westwood's original version rather than EA's radioactive version, the Scrin are not dependent on Tiberium radiation to survive. Instead of emitting radiation the Scrin Relay Node/Control Node is a telepathic communications centre. It sends and receives signals between the brains of all Scrin forces, allowing each Scrin unit to have constant awareness of where its comrades are and what they are doing, and allowing distant Scrin forces to coordinate their efforts. (This is in keeping with the fact that the Scrin have units such as the Mastermind that can mind-control other units.) GDI realises that if they can destroy the Relay Node it will cause a sudden shock in the brain of every Scrin unit, leaving them completely disorientated or perhaps even killing them. As in EA's C&C3 there is an option to use a deadly bomb, though with the minor change of it being a Tiberianite bomb rather than a Liquid Tiberium bomb.

20) When GDI destroys the Relay Node, the final movie shows some Scrin forces being killed instantly, while others stagger around in circles screeching. Airborne units plunge from the sky and crash. The end of the movie shows GDI aircraft and Zone Troopers with railguns finishing off some helpless Scrin survivors.

21) If the player uses the Tiberianite bomb the GDI campaign has a 'bad' ending essentially identical to EA's C&C3. The 'good' ending where you refuse to use the bomb would also feature an extra scene with Billy Dee Williams (the head of GDI that urges you to use the experimental bomb) horrified at the fact he nearly caused a disaster, resigning from his position and begging for the player's forgiveness. (I was disapointed that the 'bad' ending for GDI seemed longer, more interesting and featured more actors than the 'good' ending; surely beating the final mission the "correct" way should not warrent a lesser reward.)

So there you have it. An alternate version of C&C3 that still has essentially the same story and mission objectives but is also perfectly consistent with the previous games made by Westwood Studios.

Final Notes

I have greatly enjoyed Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and the Kane's Wrath expansion, and I look forward to Red Alert 3 with great anticipation. The EA LA development team have kept much of the essential C&C goodness the same, and given excellent justifications for most of the changes that they have made. Unfortunately the changes to the Tiberium and the aliens' intentions for Earth do not have such justifictions, and it seems to me like someone on the dev team wrote the storyline without doing the research and replaying the previous titles first. Westwood firmly established in Tiberian Sun and Firestorm that Tiberium was seeded by aliens to mutate Earth species and change our atmosphere in order to create an alien ecosystem on Earth, fit for colonization. If EA LA had made that extra bit of effort to incorporate that into their storyline I could have been fooled into thinking that Westwood Studios was back in action. If they had come up with a good explanation or justification for changing the storyline I might have been able to accept that instead. Unfortunately EA failed to do either, and EA's world without mutations and radiation-loving Scrin just underline the fact that we will never see the true conclusion to the original Command & Conquer story. Still, game does kick ass though. Can't deny that.