Dear C&C enthusiasts,
Let me introduce myself: I'm a C&C enthusiast and a long-time player. It started with Dune, developed by Westwood Studios, and later came C&C. In 1904, Westwood Studios was acquired by EA, including its staff. After a while, the quality of C&C games only went downhill. C&C 4 was disastrously bad and the last piece of junk EA ever produced for the PC.
In 2018, EA released the mobile C&C game Rivals. If you look at this game now, seven years later, you can only draw one conclusion: dramatically poor programming. The C&C game remains a top-notch game, but the content programming is childish. If you look at the "developer team," which, according to the game, consists of 80 people, they must be children with little to no programming skills. And that's not even mentioning the staff members who deserve special thanks (also around 50 people).
You wonder what quality these kids have improved in the past seven years. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Not because they don't want to (see also the dramatic beginners update from May 2025), but because they can't.
The app introduction states: Experience the thrill of victory in fast, fun 1v1 battles. There's nothing like defeating your rivals.A laughable and yet completely out of touch experience when the app is down. My current experience(s): For fun, I started over and am now in the silver class at level 23. When you play a game, 8 out of 10 times you are paired with a player with a maximum level of 60. These players have all the units at high levels, while you have to make do with a limited, select group.
While playing events like Rivals Champions, the unit level restrictions up to level 9 don't work, as evidenced by post-game analysis of firepower and damage output. It's ridiculous when you consider the app's introduction.Another ridiculous aspect of the game is that this Silver (beginner) class also includes players (quite a few) who previously played in the Master class and even the Tiberium class. The game demotes these players due to inactivity, and they now also find themselves in the Silver beginner/training class.How do you, as a programmer, or in this case even a rookie programmer, come up with the idea to make this possible? Result: a level 20 player plays in the Rivals race against a level 60 player with a tiberium-class background (unit strength) and experience.
So no chance in an unfair, ridiculous comparison of forces during the "game"
It's clear after the May 2025 upgrade that the quality of the game's 80 developers and maintenance (upgrades) is deeply, deeply substandard. The fix took far too long, and the apology email message "we're working on improving it" is laughable. Nothing happened again.
Conclusion: C&C is a beautiful game with beautiful shapes, or could be a beautiful game, but unfortunately, as long as EA's novice programmers are in charge of maintenance and updates, nothing will come of it. But can you expect this from children?
I still find it sad that Westwood ever passed this concept on to EA. EA isn't Electronic Arts, but rather Electronic failures.