Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun is a futuristic strategy game by Westwood Studios, which was released for Microsoft Windows in 1999. A sequel to Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Command & Conquer: Renegade, and predecessor to Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, the main storyline follows the second war between the Global Defense Initiative and the Brotherhood of Nod taking place in 2030, roughly 30 years after the end of Tiberian Dawn.
Compared to its predecessor, Tiberian Sun
relies heavily on science fiction technologies, and introduces a new
isometric game engine featuring varying level terrain to give the
impression of a true 3D environment.
Features
As a highly-anticipated sequel to Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun follows the continuing struggle for world domination between the Global Defense Initiative and the Brotherhood of Nod, and the struggle between humanity and the alien Tiberium substance. The game story is a follow up to the original, in which the Nod leader Kane resurfaces from death with renewed vigor, funds, and manpower. The game's theme revolves around the matter of the origin of Tiberium and its terraforming properties.
The game uses an isometric perspective with varying terrain height. Dynamic lighting allows for day/night cycles and special effects,
such as ion storms. Maps feature cityscapes where units could hide or
battle in urban combat. Some buildings and armored units are rendered
with voxels, although infantry is still rendered as sprites.
The full motion video is also scripted differently; while the cutscenes of Command & Conquer and Red Alert were filmed from a first-person perspective, Tiberian Sun used traditional cinematic shots for its FMVs featuring well known Hollywood actors such as James Earl Jones of the original Star Wars trilogy and Michael Biehn of Terminator and Aliens.
Tiberian Sun was speculated to be a BattleMech-type game, as shown in a teaser video in Command & Conquer, but later proved to follow the real-time strategy
formula. However, three mech units (the Wolverine, Titan, and Mammoth
Mark II) were featured in the game, replacing some of the more
conventional jeeps and tanks that were featured in Tiberian Dawn.
The
game took on a unique approach never before seen in a C&C game
before or after its conception. The developers took an "eliminate the
rush" approach to the RTS genre. Their goal was to rid the game of
spamming a mass of units. They used many methods to achieve this. This
included larger maps, defensive rather than offensive lower tiered units
(allowing players to have the option of building up a strong economy or
the choice of teching up quickly and harassing with higher tiered
units), the EMP Cannon (to disable a mass of enemy units), carpet
bombing/flame tanks (to quickly eliminate infantry rushes and/or
vehicles), fast transportation to get behind enemy lines via air or
subterranean transportation, Ion Storms that disable aircraft and
hovering units, and much more. This was a controversial play style that
many players failed to appreciate over most other C&Cs that have
their harassing units on a lower tier limiting players in the ability to
turtle successfully in online matches.
The expansion pack, Command & Conquer: Firestorm, took the storyline to new heights of complexity and introduces new missions and new gameplay features. Instead of featuring GDI against Nod as in earlier Command & Conquer games, GDI and Nod were shown as being compelled to join forces in order to overcome Nod's renegade artificial intelligence, CABAL.
Story
Tiberian Sun departs from the original Command & Conquer real-time strategy
games by portraying each army's commander as a character in itself,
rather than by referring to the player, who always remained unseen
throughout the storylines. Michael Biehn portrayed the GDI Commander Michael McNeil, who takes his orders from James Earl Jones' character General James Solomon. On the side of the Brotherhood of Nod, Frank Zagarino portrayed the infamous character of Anton Slavik,
who began the Nod campaign by attempting to, and swiftly succeeding in,
reuniting the Brotherhood of Nod after its division into many small and
harmless splinter groups after the death of Kane (played by the franchise's cut-scene director Joseph D. Kucan) at the end of the original Command & Conquer.
The plot starts off assuming that GDI won in the first Command and Conquer. In 2030, the world has continued to suffer greatly ever since the arrival of Tiberium.
The world's former individual nations have effectively ceased to exist
due to the spread of the dangerous extraterrestrial substance, and now
only pockets of areas remain which are monitored by the Global Defense Initiative, and are the hiding grounds of the regrouping Brotherhood of Nod. Plants and animals in these vast and worldwide wastelands are either dying or mutating
into hideous monstrosities, displacing human civilization mostly toward
the polar regions where Tiberium grows slowly, or to the ever scarcer
growing areas of the world where Tiberium infestation has yet to begin
to truly manifest itself.
Throughout
the course of the GDI campaign, Commander McNeil is tasked with
numerous objectives such as the securing and defending of a mysterious
alien spacecraft, the Scrin
Starship, defending his own ship from Nod forces when it was grounded
during an Ion Storm, and finally preventing Nod from destroying the
orbital GDI command station Philadelphia in order to make them
capable of launching a world-altering Tiberium missile unhindered.
However, Vega and his cohorts were able to steal much of the Scrin
Starship and apparently the Tacitus, a relic which was delivered to
Kane.
In these missions, McNeil encounters the mutants Tratos and Umagon and Ghoststalker of The Forgotten who eventually agree to cooperate in assisting with the downfall of Nod.
Throughout
the campaign, GDI must deal with General Vega, the Brotherhood
wrathbringer who attacked Phoenix and executed with Eye Candy, a drug
which Vega is both supplier and user of, its base commander Tao.
As
the Kodiak with McNeil and Chandra tracking down the renegade Nod
general, their reconnaissance squadron finds UFO technology that Vega
stole and brought before Kane. They encounter Umagon, a shiner, who in
exchange for her leader's life will provide support with the GDI. The
forces of McNeil track down Vega to his pyramid, but the officer commits
suicide (after being abandoned by Nod's dictator Kane).
They fail to stop the Nod leader and in Northern Europe, their headquarters are under attack. With ARG vehicles, they manage to reactivate the Hammerfest base defenses, but Jake McNeil,
brother to Michael, is executed. The GDI finds out the Brotherhood will
launch aggressive strike with their chemical missiles. After a few
battles against Nod, the Kodiak is grounded in an Ion Storm and Umagon
is caught and prepared by Kane for her "last Tiberium enhancement."
While the Commander defends the Kodiak, Kane prepares to unleash the
fury of the Tacitus to transform Earth. McNeil is contacted by
Ghostalker that Umagon was abducted and against Solomon's prime orders,
the commander rushes headlong to fight Kane. The dictator was seemingly
slain however and the Nod Temple razed.
In
the Nod campaign, Slavik manages to escape the facility where he is
about to be executed as a GDI spy under the authority of Nod's current
leader, Hassan,
who is secretly allied with General Solomon in order to be able to
maintain his position of power. With the assistance of his
second-in-command and right-hand woman, Oxanna Kristos,
Slavik wages a war against Hassan in the name of Kane, his forces
surrounding Hassan's pyramid headquarters very quickly. He succeeds, and
much to everyone's surprise Kane's face appears on a wall screen
to his loyal subjects just as Hassan is about to be publicly executed
on-stage. Hassan's throat is slit by Anton Slavik, the Brotherhood
reunited in full for the first time since the end of the First Tiberium
War. Not long after this, the war is then turned against GDI. It is then
a fight which could mean a total devastation of the world or Peace.
After a mission in which Jake McNeil (brother of Michael McNeil) is
captured, three nuclear missiles are set to destroy the orbiting Philadelphia. The three ICBMs hit the Philadelphia, annihilating it, much to the dismay of the captured McNeil. After this event, Kane broadcasts to the brotherhood that "A new age is upon us,"
and subsequently fires a missile, with so much Tiberium aboard that the
crystal is able to cover the entire surface of the globe from orbit. As
the missile is launched, Kane mysteriously teleports away.
Firestorm
The Firestorm expansion follows the events as they unfolded in the GDI campaign of Tiberian Sun. With the Brotherhood of Nod seemingly fractured into feuding warlords following Kane's second demise, Anton Slavik is determined to keep the dream alive through the resurrection of CABAL, a highly advanced AI developed by Nod. Unfortunately, CABAL betrays him and suddenly starts to use Nod's Tiberium cyborgs
to assassinate most of the Brotherhood's leaders, leaving them in chaos
and largely leaderless. CABAL then begins to conquer the world through
the systematic assimilation of human populations into its cyborg armies
on a massive scale. The Global Defense Initiative, meanwhile, continues
its ongoing attempt to stop the spread of Tiberium by retrieving the
mysterious Tacitus device; however with the assassination of Tratos by the Brotherhood of Nod, they were left with no alternative than to use CABAL. GDI was later betrayed by the A.I.
as soon as they recovered the last component of the Tacitus. The
ever-increasing threat of the renegade A.I. eventually forces Slavik to
approach the GDI with an alliance against a common foe.
The
combined forces of GDI and Nod eventually won the battle against CABAL,
but CABAL was apparently not truly destroyed. The final cutscene of the
Nod campaign shows CABAL's face on a display, surrounded by
fluid-filled cylinders with dormant humans inside, one of whom is seen
to be Kane. Kane's face is superimposed over CABAL's onscreen, and then
Kane/CABAL says "Our directives must be reassessed."
Unlike other campaigns seen thus far in the Command & Conquer series, the campaigns of the Firestorm
expansion are tied together. Playing only one side, one will barely end
up understanding the story, unless one plays the other campaign. For
example, the third GDI mission was to stop the quarreling of civilians
and mutants, however within the GDI campaign itself a reason as to why
this conflict began is never given - only in the Nod campaign. In the
same manner, Tratos was said to have been assassinated in the next
mission for what at first glance appeared to be no reason either. What
is also different from all former Command & Conquer campaigns is that both the GDI as the Nod campaign in Firestorm
will lead to the same battle at the end. If the player examines both
the Nod and GDI versions of the final "Core of the Problem" mission
closely, it becomes apparent that the southwestern corner of the map in
the GDI campaign and the southeastern corner of the Nod campaign are
identical. CABAL's core and all surrounding scenery is also identical in
both missions. In both of the briefings concerning this final mission,
the player will also hear that the other side is attacking CABAL from
another direction. Similarly, in the preceding missions, each side
refers in the briefings to missions being attempted by their
counterparts in the other campaign to weaken CABAL. Lastly, the endings
of the two campaigns in Firestorm co-exist (i.e. both happened at the same time and both are canonical). Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is the only other Command & Conquer game to follow the same format.
Reception
Despite the anticipation surrounding Tiberian Sun,
the game was released to mixed reviews. Delays had caused the game to
take four and a half years to develop, and as a result, the game
featured outdated graphics yet the game performance was sluggish on all
but the latest computers.
Many
of the touted features such as intelligent, adaptive AI, unit veterancy
and real-time lighting were either severely scaled back or completely
removed. Game strategy was lacking to the point where a player could
complete entire missions with an army of one type of unit (e.g.
infantry/ engineer rushes).
Others disapproved of the soundtrack, which departed from the Industrial music styles of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn in favor of slow, moody ambient music reflecting the game's apocalyptic setting in a world being ecologically ravaged by Tiberium. Westwood would later successfully eliminate many of the performance and stability problems, and would reuse Tiberian Sun's isometric graphics engine for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.
Hundreds of players still compete every month on the official ladder, no longer ran by Westwood, but by Strike-Team/XWIS.
Early Development
There is an early Tiberian Sun trailer, which can be found as one of the Sneak Preview movies within the Gold Edition of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn.
In this trailer it shows a Mech being tested to how well it can deal
with damage and doing target practice with a laser. This Mech is similar
in design to the GDI's "Wolverine", though it fires a green laser
instead of bullets. This trailer gives the impression that the game was
to be played from a first-person perspective and the gameplay was similar to the MechWarrior video game series.
Several images and references in the Tiberian Sun "rules" file indicate that more features were planned for release. A former Westwood employee working for Petroglyph Games
elaborated upon them in March 2007. A "loadout" screen was to be
implemented allowing commanders to pick units to take into battle before
missions. Drop pods which later appeared in Firestorm were intended to debut in Tiberian Sun, and be customizable before deployment. The "loadout" screen was finished in a prototype of Command & Conquer 3, but Westwood was dissolved and Electronic Arts
did not revive the concept. Lighting was intended to play a larger
role, as units spotted by lamps or guard towers would be susceptible to
enemy fire at greater ranges, and in turn would suffer a reduction in
their own range ability. Westwood planned the Hunter/Seeker Droid option
to support selection of target types, but ultimately the droid was made
to attack at random. Developers eschewed creating differences in
terrain types to preserve unit balance.
source: wikipedia
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