Is anyone playing Tempest Rising?

I caved and bought the deluxe edition to play today, I guess the basic edition launches next week.

I got a mission and a half in to the demo and it definitely scratched the classic C&C itch though some things like basic UI elements were annoying.

Installing the full thing now...

Bump

Did the first four or five missions of the Global Defense Force campaign. I'm a little disappointed at how... Bland the story is.

So background, in this game's Earth, the Cuban missile crisis went bad, there was a nuclear war, some weird plant-like lifeform known as Tempest started propagating and this faction known as the Tempest Dynasty formed across Eurasia and it's a Tempest worshiping cult.

The game takes place in 1997 and you can play as the Global Defence Force (basically the GDI) or the Dynasty (NOD).

You get briefed C&C style though the briefers are CGI not live action and you can ask a few questions to get more lore.

Missions have primary and secondary objectives. Each objective gets you requisition points you can use to unlock perks for your military (but you have a limited number of slots to equip them) and after each mission you get a Doctrine point to unlock a Doctrine perk. Honestly I don't know what half the shit in the Doctrine trees does :/

Gameplay is fine, though there are two things I wish they would improve

1) Upgrades. So far at least I've only seen two upgrade options and they're both just something you buy for a building to unlock new units and there's no visual representation of the upgrade and it feels like an incomplete system. Like, there either needs to be more upgrade options or just scrap that concept.

2) Unit attack/defense against other units is like beyond min-maxed. You can absolutely shred units if you have the right unit types but like in the original C&C having the wrong units means doing virtually no damage (like tanks vs. infantry).

Finally starting to get into air units, though in the first mission with them it's just a transport helicopter. That can stealth which is cool I suppose.

In this mission there's a Peacekeeper, which has anti-infantry weapons and A&A missiles.

I forgot to mention the soundtrack was created by the original C&C soundtrack composer so the music is an easy 10/10 A++.

edit: also forgot to mention I was playing around with the Riot Vans, you can put engineers in there for self-repairing and if you put drone operators in there you get the benefit of the drone attacks... it's like the party vans from Battlefield >_>

I might check it out sometime in the future, but I need to get around to playing C&C 3 and Red Alert 3 first. After playing the other C&C games last year.

ShaneMcComez posted...

I might check it out sometime in the future, but I need to get around to playing C&C 3 and Red Alert 3 first. After playing the other C&C games last year.

C&C3 was kinda meh, RA3 was pretty awesome though. They also made C&C 4 but that was a really awful wash. The main gimmick was that you had a giant mobile platform as a base and you would spec into different upgrades off of it... I couldn't bring myself to finish it.

After playing this mission, The Pass, I've come to realize a couple of things about the air units in this game...

1 - They are somehow both ridiculously OP but also easier to shred than paper at the same time. I don't know enough about the Dynasty powers just yet but some of their defenses or weapons are *really* good at slowing and disabling air units. But hey if that's not around everything gets hosed.

2 - The air AI sucks right now. It acts just like ground units. It's funny because I saw a video about Stormgate's big recent update and they actually addressed this and just let the air units swarm which looks way better and functions more realistically. This makes air units ineffective though.

I also cleared out the whole map before I tackled the main objective, but some of the locked secondary objectives involved destroying certain enemy buildings. So those just respawned in my bases >_> Also have too much time on my hands...

ALSO... I've been neglecting to build actual construction yards but I think the benefit of this is being able to build things faster. The GDF let you queue up buildings like the Protoss in SC2 (though only one of each type of building gets built at a time, so I think having multiple construction yards would make it quicker), and then the Dynasty people build buildings like... your units I guess, so once it's ready to build then you choose the construction site.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a56d8dfb.jpg

Hexenherz posted...

C&C3 was kinda meh, RA3 was pretty awesome though. They also made C&C 4 but that was a really awful wash. The main gimmick was that you had a giant mobile platform as a base and you would spec into different upgrades off of it... I couldn't bring myself to finish it.

I feel obligated to get around to final C&C games, just to see how the Tiberium storyline finishes. Also I've had C&C 3 game for the PC for well over a decade now, so I need to get around to playing. I'll probably watch a playthrough of C&C 4, as it sounded like a MOBA game from what little I read.

The co-op campaign of Red Alert 3 always sounded fun to me. Also has several good actors in it, so I'm sure the fmv scenes are going to be fun to watch.

Hexenherz posted...

Missions have primary and secondary objectives. Each objective gets you requisition points you can use to unlock perks for your military (but you have a limited number of slots to equip them) and after each mission you get a Doctrine point to unlock a Doctrine perk. Honestly I don't know what half the shit in the Doctrine trees does :/

Kinda reminds me of StarCraft 2 with you getting upgrade perks the more missions and secondary objectives you complete. I personally like that feature in RTS campaigns, having that ability to tailor your army units and building production to your liking, before a mission.

Yeah but I feel like in Starcraft 2 a lot of those abilities were explained better and/or were things you would otherwise be able to unlock and explore in a regular skirmish match. In this game, some perks are pretty clear ("buildings are constructed 20% faster") but others don't make sense to me without searching more ("a marked enemy is totally silenced"). I know what Marking is, but I don't know what "Silencing" does.

Just did another mission and lol there's a unit called an Assassin Drone Operator that has two drones that just one shots all infantry and two shots any armored unit, and the drones have some good health.

C&C Red Alert 3 co-op campaign sounds like it would be awesome. I was trying to figure out what it actually was, but instead found that the community for the game is great and they made a mod to be able to connect online and play it since the official servers went dark.

edit: I will say the GDF story does have some intrigue to it, but I'm on the 7th mission and it's too slow coming, I just think it's either going to be rushed unless they did the campaign like Starcraft, with the Dynasty continuing the story, but I think this is more like C&C where the stories are parallel.

Also I noticed that there aren't really any strict time limits like what you'd encounter in other RTS games. There are optional objectives for rescuing squads and primary objectives to hold off attacks but you have as much time as you need. I am only playing on Normal difficulty, maybe on higher difficulties it becomes more stressful.

One thing I don't like - 200 unit cap. No way to raise it, it's just a default limit. Not very C&C-like :(

Huh ( MAJOR LATE GAME SPOILERS )

There's actually a third seemingly fully fleshed out faction. I don't think it is playable though but impressive. Also stressed me out and I turned off the game lmao

Hexenherz posted...

C&C Red Alert 3 co-op campaign sounds like it would be awesome. I was trying to figure out what it actually was, but instead found that the community for the game is great and they made a mod to be able to connect online and play it since the official servers went dark.

Nice. Glad there's a way to playing online.

Hexenherz posted...

Also I noticed that there aren't really any strict time limits like what you'd encounter in other RTS games. There are optional objectives for rescuing squads and primary objectives to hold off attacks but you have as much time as you need. I am only playing on Normal difficulty, maybe on higher difficulties it becomes more stressful.

I don't know if the game lacking time based objectives will bother me too much. I think I prefer the "destroy the enemy base" type of main objectives to a mission the most. With a little bit of mission variety mixed in. And I don't mind there being optional objectives to mission, that you could go for to get bonus points, upgrade skills, and all that.

I think that's the #1 thing that disappointed me the most with StarCraft 2's single player campaign, and that you don't get any missions where you take on your opponent(s) head-to-head. You don't get any preparation for what online multiplayer is like.

Hexenherz posted...

One thing I don't like - 200 unit cap. No way to raise it, it's just a default limit. Not very C&C-like :(

Very un-Westwood Studios like. None of their RTS games I've played; including the C&C series, Dune 2000, and Emperor: Battle for Dune, had a unit cap. That's Blizzard's thing to cap units in their games.

Well, there were a couple of time-based objectives but on Normal difficulty they weren't too obnoxious. There was some variety in objectives beyond just destroying bases (though usually this was at least a secondary objective in some fashion, maybe not outright bases but support posts where they're training reinforcements).

And yeah the unit cap is kinda lame, though it does take a while to hit I guess.

I just finished the GDF campaign in 11 hours. Missed a few optional objectives... for most of the missions they are impossible to miss but in a couple there are some counter-intuitive triggers you have to make to make them appear.

Gonna try the first one of the Dynasty campaign, which looks like it's classic C&C - parallel timelines instead of a continuation of the story.

Welp
The Dynasty seem more like a Zerg-type faction where the units are cheaper and you're supposed to mass them up. And it feels more micro intensive. Actually lost the first mission lol but part of that is most likely because I was just half-assing the last part and falling asleep.

OK I was just dumb and tired last night, the mission wasn't hard I just lost all my units to an easily avoidable air strike >_>

Anyway.

ALSO at 12 hours in I'm realizing there's a Perks list for units that shows you what special passive abilities they have. So like with Dynasty I thought there was no field medic unit but it turns out you can put units into these little "Havoc" missile jeep things and they heal at 5 hp per second...

Would have been useful to know for keeping my units safe lol

Dynasty have "Plans" you can activate that cost massive power but give big perks. And, there's a Tier 6 Doctrine that gives you a whopping 150 credits per active plan every 5 seconds. But like I have no interest in the previous doctrines leading up to that -_-

Does the game have a tutorial mode? Or at least a menu option you can go to to read up on what all you can do in-game?

ShaneMcComez posted...

Does the game have a tutorial mode? Or at least a menu option you can go to to read up on what all you can do in-game?

No tutorial, just tossed you into the main story.

There are tooltips that pop up and sometimes secondary objectives to explain some of the units' abilities, structure features, or gameplay features but it doesn't cover the full interface.

Like I knew about the unit info panel but I thought it mostly showed the health, attack and defense ratings and didn't know about the passive ability tooltip until starting the second campaign.

It's also crazy how there's a disparity between factions (imo). GDF are more straightforward, you produce units and there's interplay between the units - some Mark enemies for bonus points or provide boosts to nearby friendly units.

With Dynasty there's way more micromanagement, like you can change a reactor mode so it boosts production in nearby buildings but it also damages them in the process. I'm also not a fan of most of their units. Anti infantry units use flamethrowers that have shorter range as do their flame towers and you can't build guard posts to garrison units in for defense. Probably all irrelevant for online play but turtling helped a lot in the GDF story