Year 2003 Previews

Full Gamespot Preview here » [January 21, 2003]

The day after Generals hit its final candidate milestone, we had an opportunity to visit EA Pacific's Irvine, California-studio and play a number of single-player missions as well as some multiplayer matches. The EA Pacific team, which previously created the Westwood-branded Red Alert 2, has been racing to finish Generals in time for the official February 11 release date.

Full ActiveReviews Preview here » [January 4, 2003]

The Sage graphics engine has done EA Pacific proud, not just giving the Command and Conquer series a much needed facelift, but also converting the strategy series to full 3d. The camera can be rotated and zoomed freely, and buildings can also be rotated before they are placed. Realtime shadows, billowing smoke, swaying trees, and dynamic lighting feed the eyes nonstop.

Year 2002 Previews

Full Gamespy Preview here » [November 9, 2002]

Enter C&C Generals, the futuristic child of the Command & Conquer universe begat by EA Pacific, the now adopted child of Electronic Arts and a not-so-distant scrapbook memory of former parent Westwood Studios.

Full Game Revolution Preview here » [September 6, 2002]

In only a few hours of direct hands-on time, we saw airborne chopper-assault troops scuttle down cables to take enemy buildings, witnessed autonomous bands of civilians flee a marketplace as enemy tanks rolled in, and watched aghast as a Chinese tac-nuke flattened an entire forest of individually-reacting trees. As long as the EA guys were showing off, they treated us to the spectacle of a US tank shooting up a tall building until said structure toppled, crashing down into another nearby...which crashed down into another...and so forth, down a line of six or seven, until the final domino in the line came a-crumblin' down onto another tank (!).

Full UGO Games Preview here » [August 29, 2002]

A few months after E3, I began to get worried about Generals. EA had shown the same E3 video at their event in Las Vegas, and I received the exact same thing on a VHS a bit later. What sort of shape is this game in that the developers can only show one scene that's months old, and nothing else? The future of my dream RTS had been threatened, so I traveled to Irvine, California for EA Pacific's (a branch of Westwood) C&C: Generals event with the dim hope that there might have been the slightest bit of progress made. Turns out I underestimated EA Pacific.

Full Gamespot Preview here » [August 28, 2002]

The days of full-motion video are over, even for C&C games. Generals' story will be told through in-engine cutscenes, and while we didn't see any close-ups on the small infantry units or heroes, the engine is at least capable of putting a lot of detailed objects on the screen at once. The story will follow a series of events through the three campaigns, but that doesn't lock players into playing them through in order.

Full Planet CNC Preview here » [August 23, 2002]

The destructibility of the objects inside the engine was mentioned. Generals is trying to be as realistic as possible in the game and is trying to make everything destructible. Cars, trees, light poles, and of course people would all have the ability to be destroyed in the engine. In fact as we were playing if you ran over the cars with tanks car alarms would sound, you could hear the crushing, it was overall a cool effect. One of the experimental designs we saw was the inclusion of wounded infantry. If certain infantry take enough damage, they will inherently move slower than at full health. This is something that they want to include but it may or may not be in the final build.

Full Gamespy Preview here » [August 22, 2002]

Skaggs demonstrated a bit of the interface to get us started. The Command Center is the center of your base, in much the same way as the construction yard was in the previous C&C games. It is also where you choose the general you want to command your forces. Each side has three generals to choose from, each with four special attributes that can be used in the game: a unique unit, two special abilities (sometimes weapons) and a veteran bonus (i.e. a tank general would have all his tanks start as veterans).

Special Preview!

Time of War Generals Preview!: [June-2002] At CNCDEN we have the translated version of the CNC: Generals mission preview that was on the French site Time of War.  Includes pics. Head here for that!

Full Firing Squad Preview here » [June 15, 2002]

At E3, we didn’t get any hands-on time with Westwood’s newest RTS and newest installment to the Command & Conquer universe: Generals. What we got was a 15 minute presentation of the game in a theater, with the action controlled by a Westwood representative going through a canned mission. The presentation showcased the game fairly well, giving us a good glimpse of the game’s 3D engine (this isn’t Westwood’s first foray into 3D – Emperor Battle for Dune was also 3D), which they call “SAGE.” Unlike Emperor: Battle for Dune, which featured a lot of barren wastes, the SAGE engine is very comfortable and capable of rendering complicated urban maps with destructible buildings.

Full Gamespy Preview here » [May 17, 2002]

It's true. The team that brought you the C&C series of games began operating under the name EA Pacific in late 2001 after Electronic Arts felt the Westwood Studios Irvine, CA, office had earned the right to branch out on its own. But don't be fooled by the name change because the same passion that went into Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge is already quite evident in the team's latest project, Command & Conquer: Generals.

Full Gamespot Preview here »  [May - 2002]

To be clear, Generals isn't an offshoot of either the original Command & Conquer or Red Alert storylines. It's a completely new game, with a completely new plot, in a completely new universe. The game is set 20 years in our future, and it involves an escalating situation between China, the United States, and an increasingly hostile terrorist organization called the Global Liberation Army, which has its roots in Central Asia.