I bought the C&C Collection after waiting to see if they would announce the Red Alert 2 remaster, however that seems unlikely. I wasn’t fully prepared for how “low effort” the Origin C&C collection would be.
So I installed RA2 and straight away I saw that things were a bit janky. When I attempted to change the resolution to the default highest which is 1024 X 768 the screen shifted all the way to the left and the colours looked like they went into some kind of CGA mode, awful. So I had to alt and tab out and force the game closed.
After doing a bit of reading on the web I discovered that you can just ini hack the RA2.ini file to your monitor’s resolution, however when I did that (1920 X 1200) the game ran like a complete dog, like a slideshow. So I read some more online and then discovered this patch, which I then installed and whilst it does help and speed the game up, I am unsure if it results in the same game speed as vanilla RA2. When I loaded up a skirmish the units were zipping around like a Benny Hill sketch almost as if the time / progress relationship of the game had been broken, within 10 seconds a bunch of AI tanks were on me and I was dead. I found I had to knock the game speed down to 5 (or fast as per in game options). I found out that in the ini file it lists game speed and for some reason the numbers are different, if you leave the value as 0 it will play at the fastest it can, but if you enter 1, it results in game speed 5 or “fast”. Screen scrolling seems to stay at the same speed regardless of menu setting BTW.
The game is at least playable now, it’s still really creaky, pauses a little and seems like it could break down at any moment like a 40 year old car. Its just a shame that EA thinks this is an acceptable way to present one of the most beloved franchises in gaming history. Bearing in mind the community fixes put in place, it would take minimal effort on the behalf of EA to get the package patched up to run without all these hoops to jump through.
Gaming on a;
i5 8700K
32GB RAM
1070ti
Win 10 64bit
Thanks for the reply @Nyerguds Nyerguds
I think you may have misunderstood my post. I didn't state that the 2020 remaster of C&C and Red Alert was low effort, I loved it and thought it was perfectly done. What I was saying was that the C&C Collection on Origin was "low effort" as the games now just barely run and are full of bugs and issues when running on modern OS's. Granted the great community has stepped up and provided ways to work around those, but its still poor from EA to leave them in the state they are in.
@Salamander Oh, oof. Yea, I misread that.
Yea, TUC is basically just the newer games combined with the old First Decade pack, without any real updates since TFD was released 15 years ago. The main issue here though is mostly that these games are ancient, and EA probably doesn't even have the full source code for a lot of them, meaning it would cost them a lot more money to try to maintain them than would ever be worth it to them. And meanwhile, the C&C community has already done loads of work digging into these old games for modding and patching purposes.
So it's a bit of a tradeoff... EA turns a blind eye to all those C&C community projects that undoubtedly play it pretty loosely with the EA EULAs by digging into the games' internals, but in return, they, and not EA, are kind of the ones keeping the games functional.
It's not ideal... but it works.
