Tiberian Sun Reborn
As of October 24, 2011, C&C Reborn has been officially renamed Tiberian Sun Reborn and is now in development by your friends at Bluehell Productions, known for the already-successful Red Alert: A Path Beyond plus the under-development RA2: Apocalypse Rising project. Moving in with the BHP staff are Renardin, DarkAngel, and Exdeath, all formerly of the C&C Reborn team. Wallywood, sound artist for BHP, will be handling day to day development as the project coordinator.
Let me reassure you, Tiberian Sun Reborn (TSR) will retain an individual style and gameplay. It will not be a carbon-copy of RA:APB as some have feared; in fact, we're eager to try out several concepts that simply wouldn't work well in the Red Alert battlefields fit well with that atmosphere. Some of our learnings and engine enhancements will come over of course, as we're still on an extended W3D engine.
As a final note on this subject, as of November 14, the old C&C Reborn forums have closed, and we welcome you at our new forums at BluehellProductions.com. Additionally, regular Development Blogs have resumed, and will be posted on our forum. We'll repost the highlights here.
Gameplay Changes
Have you played the old C&C Reborn betas? We're aiming to take things in a bit of a different direction based on what we've seen from public playthroughs, internal test events, and our work on the other projects. Several key gripes people had will be addressed, and we are going to strive to explore the existing Tiberian Sun atmosphere and unit roster without straying too far from established canon. Some notable changes that are coming:
- Snipers removed outright. No more headshots from stealthed guys!
- EMP mechanic added via defense cannons, and mines, as a gambit to stall an attack.
- Tech Level system to unlock units over time or as objectives are completed.
- Per-round unit veterancy to allow niche specialization, and power up early-game units.
- Extra mutants no longer on team rosters.
- Ion storms to add atmosphere and to pose an environmental hazard.
- Engineer "hacking" to sabotage, cripple, and even destroy enemy structures for lasting damage.
- Extra game modes and objective-based maps
- Revised superweapon system to replace the old purchased beacons
Let's talk about some of these.
EMP effects will allow you to stall an enemy's high tech attack rush, at the expense of also shorting out your own units caught in the area of effect. In addition to the EMP Cannon, there will also be a Mobile EMP vehicle you can drag along to the front lines, and we're experimenting with certain infantry being able to set lesser-powered EMP mines to block a chokepoint without freely farming kills. If affected by a blast, high-tech units will be unable to move or shoot for a short while; most infantry will be entirely unaffected, allowing them to either escape or mount an attack.
The building hacking is a new concept to replace Engineer's C4. A problem we saw in A Path Beyond is that Engineers do not fare well on the offense. Their whole attack, while it works well in conjunction with conventional attacks, requires a relatively harmless soldier to defend his explosives that could be easily disarmed if he's killed. The requisite long timer on the explosives means that most friendlies tasked with defending the Engineer himself would probably be better off simply attacking the building.
Instead, TSR's Engineers will effectively attack a secondary systems-integrity counter on an enemy structure. Sneak inside an enemy building and whip out your computer, and you will begin cutting off critical building systems! Stay hidden long enough and you'll knock the whole building offline. Factories will no longer build, power plant generators will shut down, and so on. An Engineer can even outright destroy a building if left alone long enough. However, Engineers only can hack while using their equipment, not while fighting back. Their damage also does not "stack" with convential attack at all, but provides an alternative way to knock a building out temporarily (or permanently) as this "hidden damage" is not easily repaired or even obvious. Buildings will, however, slowly and automatically restore their own systems integrity over time. Hopefully it will serve as a "stealthy" alternative to attacking a building, ensuring that even if your attack is detected and fails it will not be entirely in vain; also, the enemy will not be caught off guard by instant building destruction.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to stay tuned for more news.
Can we expect a new beta featuring the vehicles and new features in the next release? And is there any form of ETA? (Like 2012 Q1 or Q2?)
We'll be more interested in talking timing once we kick the new APB build out; we're doing some final internal testing there but APB 2.1 is essentially ready for mirrors.
The next copy of TSR you'll see will have vehicles :) And many of those new features we've talked about are already done. I'll post more news within a week with some of the new modelwork for things.
Watching both mods from the very beginning, its funny how its turned out.
I feel like the old man with a walking stick who can finally smile at the small town regaining the hopefulness and promise it originally bestowed when this old man was a young whipper'shnapper.
Drat, I was beat for first post.
Well, I saw "Under new Management" and went, "Oh boy...This doesn't look good." But, since it's Bluehell...You guys are awesome, I haven't personally played any of your project, but I occasionally look at them and they look fantastic.
Glad you guys will be updating more frequently, too. I missed getting updates from Reborn. =[
as long as you don't gut the whole thing, i don't care who the shows run by, but im glad that your the one running it though.
Well atleast it didnt die, as I thought it did. I really did wish you guys sort of followed TA to the Unreal Engine, as the W3D is sort of ancient. Oh well, I guess it still works. Good luck!
Sweet Jesus, yay!
Feared that the game was dead.
I'd still love it if a renegade mod managed to get rid of the hopping around style gameplay in favor of something more tactical, but that'd need some serious map editing.
At last, some progress for this priceless mod! ^^