How Would You Remake Command & Conquer?

EA’s attempt to revive the Command & Conquer franchise as a deck-based RTS, akin to Halo Wars 2, hasn’t been well received thus far. People are still waiting to play the game, of course, but it does beg the question: what would a proper re-imagining of the series look like?

RTS games have had a rough run over the last few years. There’s been few successes on the classic gameplay – We Are Billions and Tooth and Tail two of the few standouts – and the rise of MOBAs has help popularise a much simpler approach to the genre.

There’s still a huge fanbase for the Command & Conquer series. Sure, it was never the best strategy game – C&C‘s appeal was the Cold War-esque conflict between the West and communism, the wonderfully cheesy FMV sequences, and the completely implausible sci-fi shtick around it all: Tesla towers, tanks that could teleport back in time, all sorts of silly shit, really.

But people’s appetites for gameplay has changed significantly.

So how would you bring the C&C franchise back?

Image: ModDB

I’ve always had a huge affinity for C&C Renegade, the RTS-FPS hybrid that gave me a little more of the onground action that I wanted from Activision’s Battlezone remake in 1998. Nobody else really seemed to like C&C Renegade at the time though: the game was never popular, and the FPS-RTS hybrid formula never really caught on outside of the excellent, but hard as nails, Natural Selection series.

But I still feel like some limited RTS elements, even if it was restricted to a tactical layer of strategy, could work. A turn-based C&C wouldn’t be a bad move either, adding an XCOM style of flavour into the series. And it’s hard not to imagine the ultimate: what would a straight, wholly-FMV based adventure in the C&C universe be like? (A Creative Assembly-inspired Total War take on Red Alert would really be something too.)

Either way, let’s hand the reins over to you. You’re bringing the C&C series back. Any platform. Any genre of choice. Any developer.

What do you do?