Dawn of the Tiberium Age mod for C&C: Tiberian Sun

Thanks to everyone who participated in our anniversary event today!

In the event we revealed an upcoming campaign with the following trailer:

Now, after the video you might have some questions, as some people had during our anniversary event. I've collected some answers below in a Q&A format:

Q: What is Covert Revolt?
A: Covert Revolt (CR) is a new original, full-length singleplayer campaign for Dawn of the Tiberium Age that we're planning to release some time next year.

Q: What is that first part about? Does the campaign have cutscenes?
A: Covert Revolt has pre-mission and some post-mission cutscenes like the one you see in the beginning of the video. I wanted to have something similar to the TD & RA FMVs in the campaign, but because we don't have the development resources for actual FMVs, I instead push the story forward with images and text displayed by new logic built into our client. You could imagine the cutscenes to be a bit like a visual novel; the "slides" progress forward as you click with the mouse.

Q: Where does the campaign slot in the C&C lore?
A: Covert Revolt is going to be a side-story, comparable to our older The Toxic Diversion campaign. It takes place in an unspecified neglected country in Eastern Europe during the First Tiberium War (TD), in a geographical area that the official games never touched. This allows us to have a setting where we can plausibly have both Allied and Soviet as well as GDI and Nod equipment without retconning the official C&C lore, where old RA equipment has no place in the main conflict between GDI and Nod. The conflict in CR starts as an internal war within the country with outdated equipment, and eventually the bigger factions intervene with their own motivations.

So far DTA's missions have mostly stuck to a "TD setting" with GDI vs Nod, or a "RA setting" with Allies vs Soviets; in other words, while we've had 4 factions in multiplayer, our singleplayer and co-op missions have mostly stuck to using only two of the four factions, which I feel has left our missions a lot of unused potential on the table.

Q: How long is the campaign?
A: The full campaign will have over 20 original missions. However, like some of our earlier campaigns, this campaign also has multiple different endings and also multiple different paths that you can take. I've always loved player choice in, for example, RPG games, and thought that RTS games could use some of that. Thus, a single playthrough of the campaign varies from about 10 missions to 15 missions, depending on the path that you take.

Q: What about the difficulty level?
A: We realize that DTA missions are known for high difficulty, which has left the community with mixed feelings towards our missions. Many have criticized them for being too hard, while others have enjoyed the challenge.

To solve this issue, I have paid special attention and effort to difficulty scaling in this campaign. Every single enemy attack and difficulty-impacting mission event in the campaign has separate versions for Easy, Medium and Hard. This has made scripting the campaign missions significantly more work as many things have to be scripted 3 times rather than once (luckily our new editor makes doing this relatively quick), but as a result we have natural-feeling difficulty scaling for all missions, by far better than the original Westwood C&C games did.

Our aim is that Easy difficulty should be beatable by anyone who has played the original TD or RA campaigns. Medium difficulty is roughly 2x more intense than Easy, while Hard is, again, 2x more intense than Medium, providing the "familiar" hardcore DTA experience for those that really enjoy challenging themselves.

Q: But the footage in the trailer looks super hard?
A: All of the footage that you see in the trailer was captured on Hard difficulty. As stated above, on Medium you'll be facing only half of the difficulty, while on Easy you'll only be facing even fewer enemies.

Q: The trailer says "Coming 2023". Can you provide any more accurate release date, like Q2 2023 or something like that?
A: Unfortunately we can't provide a more accurate release date prediction yet. Currently the campaign is about 30% done, including programming work that went into creating the cutscene system for the client and our new map editor.

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Overall, Covert Revolt is my first full-length campaign and a really ambitious project, where, in addition to just adding more content into DTA with cutscenes that provide the classic "C&C feeling", I also want to push my over 10 years of C&C mission design experience to new levels and gameplay-wise provide you with one of the best and most interesting C&C campaign experiences ever.

I also have to provide credit and thanks to the rest of our staff and testers, who have been testing the missions created so far and provided a good deal of feedback that helps me achieve this goal.

You'll get to evaluate our success when we eventually release the campaign next year. For now, we hope you have fun with our new GDI and Allied advanced infantry and improved balance.