Launch Update and Upcoming Patch

Fellow Command & Conquer fans,

The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection has now been live for ten days, and our teams have been absolutely humbled by the response from players and journalists around the world.  I’ve been spending the past week engrossed in streams, articles, and community comments about the game, trying to absorb every piece of feedback players are providing.  But at the same time, also just smiling as I observe players being transported back to their childhood with waves of nostalgia, hopefully providing a positive moment during these times.  Congratulations and thank you to everyone in the community for helping to make the launch such a memorable event. 

I wanted to cover a few topics in today’s post.  The first is to highlight one of the most meaningful features of the Remastered Collection - the Installation Videos.  Players from around the world have been loving these sequences, with entire articles being written about the emotional reaction they garnered.  But unless you went into the Bonus Gallery to read the details, you may not know that these two videos were not created directly by our development teams, but instead by long-time C&C community member, Luke “CCHyper” Feenan. 

Luke has been an integral part of our Community Council since the beginning of the project.  When I learned Luke was a graphics designer by trade, I asked if he would be willing to remaster the installation sequences into something truly special.  He created a five-second test for us, and it was instantly clear he would be able to pour the passion and attention to detail into the project.  So we contracted Luke to work with us, and over the course of six months he created the sequences, brainstorming with Petroglyph and myself on how to shift them from an “Installation” sequence to an “Upgrade” sequence.  We would review the progress with Luke every two weeks or so to provide feedback, and Luke’s skills and creativity were surpassed only by his professionalism.  I’m so proud of Luke for creating content that will go down in C&C history, and that the first thing anyone experiences in the Remastered Collection was created by a member of the C&C community.

The second topic I wanted to discuss was our upcoming patch.  We’re currently putting the final touches on this patch, as we continue to prioritize and react to player feedback.  The goal of this patch is multifold:

1. Complete several of the top community requested features which just missed the launch date, including items like Private Game Lobbies and a choosing sub-factions for RA Quickmatch
2. Address many of the top bugs which have been seen in the launch version, including a potential improvement to the framerate stuttering issue
3. Implement some additional quality-of-life improvements, such as enabling the “Deploy” hotkey to unload APCs and multi-queue units on the Repair Facility in Tiberian Dawn (same now as RA)
4. Iterate on our Quickmatch ruleset to ensure we’re creating the proper foundation for competitive play

In total, there should be several dozen items addressed in this patch, and we’ll provide a comprehensive set of patch notes when the patch is released. 

Regarding the Quickmatch rules, we’ve heard strong and unanimous feedback from our engaged multiplayer competitors.  In fact, we’re actually able to make several of these changes on the backend and have decided to implement several of these changes effective today.  The key changes to Quickmatch as requested by the community are the following:

• Increasing the Game Speed from Normal to Fast
• Reducing the Starting Units to zero
• Removing Aftermath units from Quickmatch in Red Alert  (due to extreme balance issues)
• Adding two more maps to the Tiberian Dawn map rotation:
  • Monkey in the Middle
  • One Pass Fits All

We’re hoping the community can play with these changes over the next week and continue to provide us feedback as we strive to improve this mode of the game.

Thanks again for all the appreciative words over the past ten days, and please continue to provide your feedback so we can improve your experience with the Remastered Collection.

Cheers,

Jim Vessella

Jimtern