Related Sections: Action Games Patches Strategy Games
Red Alert 3 gets a mega patch but stays the same
Electronic Arts has posted a huge list of changes to Red Alert 3, their superfast action-oriented real time strategy game. This is how the EALA studio rolls. They release a game, then sit back to gather feedback, complaints, and statistics before essentially rebalancing the whole shebang with a big fat patch. Which generates more feedback, complaints, and statistics. Play Red Alert 3 a year later and it'll probably be unrecognizable. Having gone through all this with their Battle for Middle Earth II game, which underwent three or four sea changes, I both applaud this post-release support and I wonder why they can't get it right the first time.
The new Red Alert 3 patch does nothing to change the fundamental runaway pace of the game, but it does plenty to tinker with the minutiae of unit stats and abilities. It also adds a mapmaker that guarantees plenty of player-made maps, of which one or two might not be awful. And to show that EA cares about DRM complaints, it lets you tell your computer it's not allowed to run Red Alert 3. From the patch notes:Added DRM Deauthorization into both the launcher and Options menu in-game. Clicking the "Deauthorize" button will deauthorize the computer from playing Red Alert 3, allowing players to run the game on a different computer. Restarting the game on the original computer will reauthorize Red Alert 3 on that machine.
I guess this will let you play the game on, say, your desktop and laptop, but at different times. Which should always be an option anyway. Better late than never.
By Kitus at 9:54 AM ON 12/05/08
Speaking of Battle for Middle Earth, which would be the best to pick up now for a bargain? BFME II or BFME III? I want to play with my son who is enjoying Warcraft 3.
By SuperHiro at 10:00 AM ON 12/05/08
The Anthology is the best bargain available.
http://www.amazon.com/Rings-Battle-Middle-Earth-Anthology-Pc/dp/B000N4JEN2/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1228489188&sr=8-1
By pc success at 2:08 PM ON 12/05/08
Hi!! I have got some valuable information through your site.Thanks for some wonderful info.It's really a super fast action-oriented real time strategy game.
By steve at 3:03 PM ON 12/05/08
"I wonder why they can't get it right the first time."
Really? Clearly, the amount of data you receive from releasing it in the wild is significantly greater than what you would get from any testing scenario.
The only way to guarantee that perfect release would be to finish the game, hand it out to X people for a year or more, and hope they'll spend as much time on a pre-release game as they would with a final one to uncover all of the exploits and balance issues.
By Tom Chick at 3:16 PM ON 12/05/08
Steve, my experience with RTSs is that EALA makes much more dramatic changes with their patches than other developers. They makes changes that, I feel, belong at the design stage of a game. The way BFME2 plays has morphed dramatically three times since it's been out. I'm not talking tweaks and balance revisions. I'm talking complete overhauls. C&C3 has gotten at least one such overhaul as well.
That's the "get it right" that I'm talking about. For instance, the essential balance of units in Age of Empires III and Company of Heroes hasn't changed since they were released. There's a strong design under those games that dictates how the pieces interact. While Ensemble and Relic might change things like how many hit points a unit has or long it takes to build, the fundamental relationships haven't changed.
Now to be fair, I don't know if that's the case with Red Alert 3 yet. And I'm not sure I even object. I've kind of enjoyed re-discovering BFME2 as its evolved. But I do know that you don't really see changes this drastic in other RTSs once they've been released.
By steve at 4:15 PM ON 12/05/08
Obviously you know more about the specifics of each of these games than I do, but a cursory look at Age of Empires III and Company of Heroes versus Red Alerts 3---at least my 2-3 mission experience with it, which was enough for me to say, "this is retarded" and go back to playing Fallout 3---makes me think that Red Alert 3 has more diversity between its sides.
Or maybe EA tends to wait to put all of its tweaks and balance changes into one mega patch instead of rolling out smaller, incremental ones. So, company of Heroes gets 4-5 patches over a couple of years, but is the change between its 1.0 and 2.0 versions just as big as each Battle for Middle-earth patch? I dunno.
Or they just take a pass on getting multiplayer right at launch, instead focusing on the single-player experience that seems to make or break your game at retail, which in turn gives you enough of a player base to justify large-scale multiplayer patching.
Or they listen more to their audience. I had a guy that used to e-mail me every time Ensemble released a game or we talked about any RTS, bitching about how one of the Age games was totally broken and needed a complete balance overhaul. Maybe EA listens to that guy.
By cuc at 8:05 PM ON 12/05/08
Eh, how do those EALA balance changes compare to, say, Blizzard changes? I recall Blizzard redesigning Warcraft III's armour types completely during one of its early patches, and other rather dramatic-sounding changes like that. But having never played multiplayer RTS games, I don't know how significant those changes are.
By ra3cheats at 11:40 AM ON 12/06/08
Yeah. The new patch is great and so is the Worldbuilder. Most of the cheats for this game have been patched, but I found a couple working ones at http://www.ra3cheats.blogspot.com
By waffles at 12:09 AM ON 12/07/08
Actually a year from now EA will just totally stop supporting the game like it has done with all the other RTS games it makes. Generals has a bunch of issues, but you don't see them rushing to fix it. Then you look at Blizzard still patching starcraft, d2, etc.
I also love how bfme2 runs on the generals engine and instead of fixing it's slowing down problems with too many units on screen, it by default puts a unit cap on, which you can turn higher but says "game performance may lag" when you try durrr...QUALITY SUPPORT
By Spam Assassin at 1:22 PM ON 12/07/08
RA3CHEATS: Seriously? You found RA3 cheats on your own website. Awesome. Keep up the entrepreneurial work, spammer.
Spam Assassin:
RA3CHEATS: Seriously? You found RA3 cheats on your own website. Awesome. Keep up the entrepreneurial work, spamm...More »