Electronic Arts announced
Command & Conquer: Rivals at EA PLAY in Los Angeles two weeks ago. The first seconds of the game's reveal trailer made a lot of fans happy as they have been begging the publisher to revive the fortunately forgotten and classic real-time PC strategy series for yearsm, only to let them down when it turned out that
Rivals is built from the ground up for mobile devices.
Since that announcement,
Rivals remains the most disliked trailer that debuted during E3 2018 with over 50, 000 dislikes on YouTube alone and Angry Joe's recent rant about the current state of
Command & Conquer has more views than the said trailer. In an interview with GamesIndustry, EA chief design officer Patrick Söderlund tried to explain the drastic change of the direction for the series.
"
For us, I think people make the mistake of saying, 'This is what you really want,'" Soderlund said. "
Mobile is the biggest gaming platform on the planet today. When the team came up with the construct of the game and we realized that there was a great fit for the C&C brand and we could make the game better as a result, that just felt like the next natural step. RTS games are still relevant in the market and for the most part PC-based, but if you can get a successful multiplayer, competitive-type RTS game to work well on mobile, we believe that could reach hundreds of millions of players in the world. That's what motivates us to do it."
Mobile is not only the biggest gaming platform right now, but also the most lucrative, with
Fortnite's mobile port generating even more prafit than the standard console and PC versions of the Battle Royale game. "
We believe this is a modern, contemporary interpretation of the Command & Conquer brand, but I think [mobile's] scale--not only across age but across gender--made this the natural platform for it. We're going to come to a point where we need to respect mobile games as much as console games," Söderlund explained.
There's no doubt that fans of
Command & Conquer have different ideas of what the franchise really means to them than EA
. Rivals won't feature a single-player component, so it will only appeal to those who enjoy multiplayer. It's been six years since the last major
Command & Conquer and the mobile nature of
Rivals won't change the fact that EA seemingly doesn't have an idea what to do with it.
Command & Conquer: Rivals is a thrilling, competitive experience built to define Real-Time Strategy for Mobile. Featuring intense, 1v1 real-time matches with rival commanders, you test your skills in combat in the War for Tiberium. Master the battlefield with continuous control of your forces, crush your rivals, and lead your army to victory.
Command & Conquer: Rivals doesn't have a release date yet.