» Sat May 28, 2011 5:12 pm
C&C4 was initially being made as an experimental f2p C&C for the Asian market, but the upper management decided to sell it as C&C4 in the west. This was confirmed by a couple of disgruntled devs after the EALA layoffs. Other than that their main complaint during the last batch of C&C titles was that they weren't given enough time to finish the games, nor the resources to support them after launch.
I think the post-Westwood team were a great developer mostly held back by inept management. C&C3 with Kane's Wrath is among my all-time favorite C&Cs, its biggest drawback was the lack of long-term patching. A great competitive community formed around that game which ultimately didn't last because of some exploits that were never fixed. EALA did form a team specifically for supporting their older games and had a patch planned, but then the layoffs happened.
Mark Skaggs, the lead developer behind Red Alert 2 and Generals, left EALA for Zynga and helped make Farmville and are now of course insanely successful.
The new studio is a clean slate and I'm hoping EA can learn from their past mistakes this time.