Command and conquer rivals needs attention
I'm writing to you today about Command & Conquer Rivals, a game with a passionate and dedicated community. Despite its initial challenges, the game has grown significantly, particularly after a shift...
Forum Discussion
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.
This is not a very charitable reading of the state of the game.
The team of 80 people were all fired less than one year after the game released. The reason is because not enough people downloaded the game (stated by ex-devs, management was happy with how much people were spending, unhappy with how many players). People didn't even give the game a chance.
The level caps work as stated. While level differences are unfair, if your levels say the same thing (eg 9 vs 9), the matches are fair.
The problem is only an evergreen skeleton crew in India is managing the game now. They are managing dozens of mobile games, thus they only focus on keeping the games functioning. The game actually has very few bugs, most things work as expected with a few minor exceptions. (Warcraft Rumble, similar sized team, had new gamebreaking bugs weekly that made the game unplayable for over a year before they canned the entire team) Rivals in comparison has had one gamebreaking patch over 7 years which was fixed within a month, the iOS graphical bug which is annoying and unprofessional but playable, scavengers not being banned in a specific game mode which is annoying but not even the strongest strategy in that game mode, and minor inconsistencies in unit tile occupancy memory (sometimes the game thinks a unit is on a tile when it isn't and gives an order to attack it, maybe 1/100 games occurrence), and minor inconsistencies in projectile speed that cause attacks to be duds (they kill the same unit model and are wasted on one drone for example), and mammoth freeze (which is mostly an emulator problem). All in all the game is very stable and well coded relatively speaking.
What the game needs is a well-reasoned balance patch, but it seems like the managing team gives zero French-dips about doing one. Also I will give credit to the statement of the game being unwelcoming to newbs, it seems like most players beyond account level 9 are casual players with max levels (respective to their league, like they have level 12 units but they are in diamond) and most units unlocked at this point. As a new player you probably run into Challenge Battle Unknown Unit and level disadvantage every single match after you unlock Nod, however this has always been the case, it is just crystallized to an extreme.
