Chrissyx Homepage » Command & Conquer 4

C&C4 – Tiberian Twilight

Year:	2010
Developer:	Electronic Arts Los Angeles
Publisher:	Electronic Arts
Code name:	Arena
Original title:	C&C4 – Tiberian Twilight
Abbreviation:	4
Executive Producer:	Michael S. Glosecki
Composers:	James Hannigan, Jason Graves, Timothy Michael Wynn
Rating PCG:	72% (04/2010)
Newest version:	1.03

Story:

The year is 2062 and humanity is at the brink of extinction. With only six years left until the mysterious crystalline structure Tiberium renders the earth entirely uninhabitable, the two opposing factions - Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod - inevitably find themselves in desperation for the same cause: to stop Tiberium from extinguishing mankind. The unthinkable becomes reality and Nod's enigmatic leader Kane takes off for GDI headquarters.

Trivia:

C&C4 released officially, in some places even before, on March 18, 2010; in the USA already on March 16.
C&C4 differs with its focusing on casual gamers drastically from all other titles: No base building, no resource management and therefore neither harvesters nor Tiberium fields, always online requirement and no support for LAN or dedicated servers.
For the first time EA did not utilized GameSpy as online services but an internal system called Blaze.
Joseph B. Hewitt IV also expressed negatively in an AMA on 07/26/2014:
Every time I start to reply to this, I just shake my head and sigh.

And there is so much more you don't even know about. Like the time we were going to do a Sim Ant for mobile and it was canceled during development because marketing didn't think Ants were a good idea.

I heard Brian Michael Bendis talk about doing the Spider-Man cartoon for MTV and actually had somebody in the meeting say, "But does it have to be a spider?"
Even Joseph Kucan gives C&C no more chance on 07/31/2014 in an AMA:

Hi, Joe, do you think C&C will return?

No, I don't. At least, not in anyway that would include the Kane character.

TLDR: No.
Ed Del Castillo's judgement about EA's handling with the series was devastating in a podcast on 03/10/2014:
I think that you know Command & Conquer is a is well beyond a multi billion dollar franchise. It is an epic story that should've be told again and again and could have been as big as Star Wars if they had put the love behind it and not just try to milk it like a dairy cow.
C&C4 was never planned as a true, canonical Tiberum title, but rather being the result of Arena and a singleplayer mode. Greg Black on 06/23/2010 in an interview:
The important thing to know is that C&C4 was never meant to be a true Tiberium universe canonical game, but rather an experiment in online play. It originally started as out an Asian market online-only version of C&C 3. At some point the company executives decided it made the most business sense to add a single player campaign, call it C&C4, and put it in a box. The team of course protested this change in direction but the decision stood. The team did what they could to make a good game given the realities inside EA, but ultimately it was the product of a dysfunctional corporate culture.
The bottom line is the game being a product out of EA's dysfunctional corporate culture (!).
Aaron Kaufman confirmed the Arena origin of C&C4 in an interview on 12/12/2010:
That was the original plan after we released Red Alert 3; C&C 4 was a transformation of a C&C specific multiplayer game, but based on market conditions and such at the time, we had to drastically change that plan. After C&C 4 CommandCOM, the community response to the gameplay was evident that process didn't have the greatest hope of succeeding, but the dev team once again poured sweat and tears in to making that game as great and unique as possible. C&C 4 may not have been C&C's best moment in the sun, but the current C&C dev team is definitely taking some key learning's from it, don't fear.
The development time was about 13 months, which Aaron Kaufman also criticized during the interview above:
You can't make a great RTS game in 13 months and the fact our former C&C team did that nearly 5 times in a row (especially if you count BFME 1, 2, ROTWK, KW, RA3: Uprising), and produced consistent 80+ AAA titles nearly every time is one of the most unheralded and unknown miracle success stories of the video game industry ever. We should write a book on the years 2002 – 2008, or just give a tell-all to WikiLeaks.
Also Louis Castle is disappointed and regrets the lack of resources during the development in an interview on 09/08/2010:
C&C ran away from me quite a long time ago so I can't claim to have guided such a massive undertaking. I think it's sad that the final chapter was under resourced to the extent it was. I think C&C is one of the strongest brands in the industry and deserving of a massive development effort.
He repeated this also during another interview from 08/15/2010 and mentioned additionally that C&C4 ended differently than planned at Westwood:
LC: I think that the team they had doing it was a very talented team, they worked on a lot of the other C&C products. They were seriously resource constrained when it came to trying to make the product they wanted to make. I’m a little disappointed by the product at the end of the day. Not because the team didn’t do a good job with what they had, I just think it was under resourced to be the finale. I thought the story was interesting. It wasn’t the way we had originally envisioned it, but that’s OK. They were the ones who were in charge of the canon at that point, so it’s up to them to decide how it ends.
Aaron Kaufman revealed on 04/20/2010 that during the development the Scrin were scheduled to be included:
There was a time when the Scrin were being considered for the game, that much is true.

-APOC
Scrin units were indeed found inside the beta's BIG files.
LEGION from KW is the Nod AI.
The community result of the subtitle naming contest was revlead at the CommandCOM hosted during the gamescom 2009 on 08/21 : Tiberian Twilight! A title which was only known for Westwood's C&C3: TT so far and also having a long history.
While the intro and Kane's proposition for the Tiberium Control Network to the GDI is set in the year 2062, the actual plot is taking place another 15 years later not until the year 2077.
On 07/09/2009 the successor to TW was officially announced as the ending of the story, which had begun with TD.
Prior to that C&C4 already became public knowledge: The EA UK PR Team on Twitter has leaked the announcement one day early:
Already on 06/19/2009 the essential key aspects of Command & Conquer 4 have been mentioned officially in its entirety for the purposes of a survey: