Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
Frankly, after having played a quarter of the game and looked up the other three quarters, I actually feel like I did not miss terribly much.
I don't really know much about computer games in the early 90s, especially about RTSs. I know that this game was a massive hit and probably for good reasons, but looking at it now, it actually doesn't seem that interesting.
GDI and Nod units and buildings are mostly identical and every map in Europe and every map in Africa has the same very simple textures. But worst of all, there is almost no variation between the missions. Build a base, build units, destroy all enemy units and buildings. Sometimes you need to send an engineer into a building instead of destroying it, but that doesn't really change the strategy. And then there are a few missions where you don't have a base and have to do it with just your starting units. It's a bit different, but not that different. The only mission that stands out is the GDI mission where you have only a single Commando and one transport helicopter.

This game obviously is classic C&C, but also in a very rudimentary way. There is almost no story and it only exist in mission briefings. There are no developments or dialog during the missions at any point. What surprised me the most is that the cutscenes seem to be intended as serious and there isn't any of the campiness that defines the rest of the series. There GDI campaign basically has no Kane and the Nod Campaign only has him in the second half. And even he isn't really hammy. He plays around with his gun half the time while talking to you, but other than that he's really not very interesting. And tiberium isn't explained at all. Nor is really anything else. GDI feels like NATO+ and Nod is just a generic extremist group. Admittedly with an invisible tank.

The idea to let the player chose between multiple missions at various point looks interesting at first, but in practice the different missions are basically identical with simply different map layouts. There seems to be little point in replaying the campaigns to try out a different path, making the whole thing simply a gimmick.

When I was going into this, I was wondering if GDI are really the clear good guys and Nod the pure evil guys. Turns out they are. Nod very happily destroys undefended villages and kills the whole population and don't seem to pursue any goal other than power. I thought that perhaps there could have been more ambiguity.
Nod having a deliberate propaganda campaign to accuse GDI of war crimes against civilians was interesting, but the story in this game is so minimal that it doesn't really mean anything. Another interesting thing is that several missions of the Nod campaign have you actually do the killing of the local civilians. It's not just possible, but required to progress through the game. It's only 10 pixel sprites, but I guess back in the day nobody really thought much about such things. Even games with the most minimalistic art styles wouldn't do something like that today.
The final thing I noticed was the choice of locations. I don't think it's an accident that the Nod campaign starts in Lybia and that the GDI campaign ends in Bosnia. In the mid 90s, those were the scary places. I don't really remember the Gulf War as a kid, but I do remember the Yugoslav civil war being all over the news. I was too young to see most of the news, but I still remember lots of posters and adds from humanitarian aid organizations everywhere. We even mostly called it the Bosnian war in Germany. That stuff was crazy. And when this game was released, the war was still ongoing. It was about as unsubtle as placing a game in Syria or Yemen today. And I guess Lybia was kind of the North Korea of that time.
Things like these had me think that there might actually be some depth to this game, but it doesn't really do anything with that potential in practice. Same thing with tiberium. As the campaigns go on, they both mention that tiberium is spreading and becoming a health risk, but it doesn't go anywhere with it. Which does change in the next game.
You'd be right on not missing much. Tiberium Dawn is, at the end of the day, a very clear first attempt at a modern RTS. (Westwood previously did Dune 2, so they weren't complete newcomers to the genre). What C&C: TD did, Red Alert did much better, with a much more refined control scheme, a greater attempt to differentiate factions and a better, more varied map palette and slightly more mission variety.

On the story however, one should always judge this by the standards of its time. It was, IIRC, the first game to actually include any sort of full motion video (FMV) at the time. That the game took up two(!) entire CDs was unprecedented, with over 3/4 of that disc space solely for the movies alone. For games to have FMVs at the time, was pretty immersive, and you can bet a lot of people were engrossed in the story. (I know I was, back then). One should also note that the campiness for the series only really started with Red Alert 2, with Red Alert and Tiberian Sun still being fairly serious. (On the note of massacres, the Soviet side started you off with a good old fashion "extermination". Pretty brutal way to open a campaign, and one that drives home the message the the USSR ain't the nice guys.)