The death of Mercenaries?

I read recently a review of the new Command and Conquer Tiberium Twilight and it wasn’t a good one – with that said, I have seen some average to good reviews. Red Alert 3 was the same, some very mixed reviews. A long shot away from the uber-fantastic reviews of Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer originals and, let us not forget their predecessors, the games that really kicked the RTS genre into action, the Dune series. But notice the trend – as soon as EA got hold of the genre, it diminished and they simply cashed in on the series. They bought Westwood Studios and promptly killed it.

The first Mercenaries game was released in 2005, developed by Pandemic Studios and published by the almighty LucasArts. It was a great game – it received excellent reviews and it had incredible gameplay and was playable time and time again.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was released in 2008 and I couldn’t wait for it. I pre ordered it and recieved it on the day of release and I thought it was fantastic, and in fact I’m playing it again. The difference this time is, it was published by EA. It features an online co op which was supposedly very good, so I thought I would try it out. Except, I couldn’t connect to the servers. So, after researching a bit, I understand that Pandemic Studios are no more because EA closed them down and took their developers on, hence no more servers. Bugger.

So, I thought I’d go to the Mercenaries 2 website. Except, if you go to www.mercs2.com website, you get presented with the CPanel / APache from page. You get the same when you go to the Pandemic Studios website. Oh dear, it’s not looking too good.

So, what happened? Well apparently a new Mercs game is in the pipeline, Mercs Inc, being developed by EA with the old Pandemic Studios developers. But I can’t help thinking EA are going to kill yet another great series.

If someone can prove me wrong that the Mercs 2 servers are still live then please do get in touch with me, but I can’t see any.

In contrary to what I’ve talked about, Burnout was another series taken over by EA, but that has in fact remained to be a very good game.

As for Mercs Inc, will it be any good? Will it actually come out? Only time will tell….