Announcing our TD GDI Campaign Co-Op Remake news - Dawn of the Tiberium Age mod for C&C: Tiberian Sun

We've recently posted some briefing images of remade Tiberian Dawn GDI campaign missions. As people have been asking us to remake the Tiberian Dawn campaigns in DTA, we finally figured we'd get to it... but since simply remaking the original missions 1 : 1 would be pointless (there's the Remaster you can always go play for that), we decided to do it with a little twist: the whole campaign is going to be in two-player co-op.

Now, you might be thinking that we can't simply port the TD missions over for 2-player co-op without making major changes, especially because DTA's gameplay is somewhat modernized compared to Tiberian Dawn - you don't need to place buildings right next to one another in DTA, our artillery units have longer range, our perspective is isometric instead of top-down etc. Throughout the years, this has been one reason why we haven't remade the TD campaigns; it has been hard to find a settlement on exactly how we should modernize the TD campaign missions for DTA, considering both what's possible with the engine and what's reasonably achievable for our staff - containing mappers of different skill levels and personal preferences.

But this time we think we have the recipe nailed down, and we'll open it up below in Q&A format, responding to common questions that people have posted to us on various communities.

Q: Are the maps remade in original scale or are they bigger than in Tiberian Dawn?

A: We have decided to "upscale" the missions to account for the extra player and DTA's gameplay. We have bigger maps, more space for base-building, more tiberium to harvest, more enemies, and slightly larger enemy bases.

Despite this upscaling, we've kept the mission design as close to the spirit of the original as possible. We've kept the overall layouts the same and tried to make the map really feel like you're playing the original mission, but enhanced and in co-op form - while playing you might even notice some identical spots and map details as in TD.

Q: What kinds of "modernizations" will you make?

A: As stated above, we try to make the missions feel close to TD. However, where we see really outdated or just dumb design, we'll take the liberty to improve it. An example is GDI mission 4, which was usually beat by just driving your APC into the crate. In our version you'll need to retrieve the crate with a truck and actually bring it back to the starting area for safety.

Q: What is the difficulty like? With two players the AI must also be harder for there to be some challenge, right?

A: First off, yes, since there are two players, the players overall have around twice as many resources as you had in Tiberian Dawn. This has made it necessary to also increase the enemy AI difficulty compared to the originals - there are more pre-placed enemy units on the map, the AI builds units faster and attacks more fiercely, and it is also smarter than in the original.

However, we've aimed to keep the overall difficulty similar to that of Tiberian Dawn, so if you and your friend could individually beat the Tiberian Dawn campaign, you will be able to beat this co-op campaign as well. This means that, while DTA is known as fearsome when it comes to difficulty, this co-op campaign is going to be significantly easier than the average DTA mission. We're also utilizing difficulty levels so you can customize the challenge - Normal will roughly match Tiberian Dawn in difficulty, Easy will be easier, while Hard will provide challenge to the seasoned veterans who find TD too easy.

Q: What about mission variants? In TD you could have multiple variants of the same mission, for example GDI 4 A/B/C.

A: We feel that many of the TD mission variants actually bring little gameplay variety, having practically the same mission with just a rotated layout. So, we have decided we won't recreate them all. Instead, we figure what is the most "iconic" of the variants and re-create that version of the mission, and focus on quality over quantity.

An exception is variants that are totally different, with different objectives. For example, we consider the GDI 08 "Doctor Mobius" and "U.N. Sanctions" missions to be different enough that remaking both is worth it.

Q: Why are some of the mission numbers different from the original?

A: We decided to merge the first two missions into one, because they take place in the same area in TD and the second mission is just a continuation of the first; in co-op they play more naturally that way. Likewise, the "Havoc" and "Destroy the Airstrip" missions we've recreated as parallel-running alternatives as Mission 05 A and Mission 05 B, because the original "trick" in the TD setup was impossible to replicate in a multiplayer setup.

Q: Will there be cutscenes?

A: We unfortunately haven't yet managed to make the game play cutscenes in multiplayer without breaking sync between players, so it is possible that the cutscenes will have to be sacrificed in exchange for co-op, at least for the initial release. But we'll keep hacking the TS engine in hopes for a solution!

Q: Can you play the campaign alone?

A: Like all existing DTA co-op missions, you will be able to play the campaign with an AI ally by hosting a LAN game by yourself. How useful that AI ally is will vary - in our testing it has been fine in most base-building missions, but it won't be much of help in micromanagement missions. As we've designed the campaign for co-op, our main priority and focus is making these missions play well with human players, and consider working AI allies more of a "bonus" than necessity. In many cases it'd be even impossible to make the AI ally play well with the AI limitations of the TS engine.

Q: When will the campaign be released?

A: We're planning to release the campaign in two parts: the first half, and the latter half. Now, thanks to our new map editor and effective cooperation among our staff, we are proud to announce that we already have half of the campaign ready despite that we've only worked on it for two weeks! So, we just need to apply some finishing touches, and we can push out the first half. We're planning to release the first half of the campaign during this month, so within the next two weeks!

We're really excited and curious how the first half will be received, so we'll gather feedback from the community and take it into account while working on the second half, which will be released some time later during the spring.

If the reception is positive and there's public interest, we might even remake the Nod campaign as well as the Red Alert campaigns in the same way!

Naturally, the TD campaign isn't the only thing we've been working at. We've also continued work on the Covert Revolt campaign, improved our map editor, and kept improving the game engine, most notable cases including artillery unit AI improvements, customizable base layouts for the multiplayer AI, and fixes for saved game corruption bugs. On the latter, we believe that we finally have all saved game corruption issues hunted down - some of the bugs were caused by Westwood code, some by CnCNet code and some by Vinifera code, so it has been a complex journey.

We hope to see you on the battlefield later this month once we launch the first half of our TD GDI campaign remake!