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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I remember coming to it a bit later and being annoyed by several aspects of the game, even though it was obviously groundbreaking.

In particular I remember my units just sitting around allowing themselves to be shot by enemy units that had longer range instead of moving two meters to get in weapons range. I recall it wasn't good at letting you form groups and issue mass commands too.

C&C and especially Warcraft really nailed the UI and gameplay details for the RTS genre a couple of years later.

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I've never played dune 2, but I played Warcraft then c&c, c&c felt like such a huge improvement over the first Warcraft. You could select far larger groups, the pace was faster and building was much more free. It wasn't really until Warcraft 2 and StarCraft that it really caught up to the command and conquer series.

I remember C&C being hard until you realised that you could ring your base with sandbags that the enemy would never destroy.

...or build a line of sandbags across the map and ring the enemy base.

in unpatched version, you can place sandbags near enemy tanks, click sell button, move your cursor inbetween the sandbag and the enemy tank and click to sell the enemy tank.

I still remember my primal fear when I tried the same thing in RA and the computer happily ran my sandbags over with its tanks!

OG Warcraft is one of those games that was groundbreaking at the time but is nigh unplayable to modern sensibilities.

Warcraft II is still very retro and missing a lot of quality-of-life stuff (especially the original pre-Battle.net edition) but it's at least tolerable. OG Warcraft is nails on chalkboard level bad.

The only two things exceedingly terrible about og warcraft was the walking speed and the road system...well i guess too, the races were basically identical, way too many underground missions that sucked hardvand generally it lacked manybthings...

But, i dunno, it was the first rts i'd ever played and the first game i got to go to the computer store and pick out. I spent the whole drive back just reading the book over and over again. It'll always have a small special place.

It was the first game of its kind, the UI and the AI obviously had many weaknesses which Westwood improved upon in later games (while C&C still had issues that are annoying by todays standards). That being said, Dune2 for 10 year old me was magical, like many games of this time.

Indeed. I think the original C&C is still pretty playable. It might not be fun after a few levels compared to a modern RTS, but all they core elements of the modern game are there.

Dune II does not hold up in the same way (and I love the source material). Not being able to select multiple units at once is alone a game breaker.

> Not being able to select multiple units at once is alone a game breaker.

Well, it's really not, because the game was fantastic and a lot of people enjoyed playing it. Game breaking would have been if when you played against another player they had multi select and you didn't.

Modern RTS players get very good at issuing actions to many specific units individually at high speed, it's an acknowledged skill today.

If your only strategy is a mass siege tank zerg, then yeah, no multi select is a little bit inconvenient.

You could always target a string of consecutive units and send the leader to (x) and the rest would follow. And get picked off 1 by 1 if you forgot about them long enough.

However, if the leader stopped when he got in weapons range the rest of the units would just sit back there and watch him fight. Westwood learned some lessons from Dune 2 that made Command and Conquer much better to play.

I'm a bit surprised there isn't a remake of Dune 2 out there that fixes the UI quibbles and updates the graphics. There was a lot of neat stuff in the game (it was surprisingly feature rich for being basically the first of its genre) but few people these days remember it. Maybe someone will get the rights for a remake when the new movie comes out? Sadly Westwood is buried out back in the EA studio graveyard.

IDK about Dune 2, but Dune 2000 has a ton of expansions/mods on the moddb.

On that note, there was an official reboot to C&C released last month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remastered...

More importantly, Dune2000 can be played using the open source engine OpenRA, see my sibling comment: EA announced it would release some old source code to help with the project.

Well, I found this within one minute of searching: https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE/blob/master/enhancement...

Engine or full reimplementation are common for previously widely popular games, some are even supported by the developers: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/05/ea-to-open-source-part...

Also: http://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/

> It tries to be as similar as possible to the original gameplay but to integrate user interface features most modern realtime-strategy games have like selecting multiple units

I still enjoy how much the presentation of the original C&C tries to make it feel like you’re actually commanding an army from your computer. I think that part of it is still fresh now, even though parts of the gameplay are dated now

i played through d2 before c&c and loved it. after c&c, same feelings as you. context...

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