C&C Labs News Wire

Lion of RADEN has received confirmation from two EA employees that the email sent out to the fans yesterday is in fact legitimate. Here's what Mike Murphy, an online community manager for Electronic Arts, had to say:

Mike Murphy (EA): Indeed it is a real email, but other than what Mark wrote, I can't comment on anything further about the game.

Lion also contacted the Senior Community Manager at EA, Nathan Fahrenthold. Nathan also confimed that the email is real:

We really wanted to reach out to the community with this announcement as opposed to messaging one of the large game news sites. We hope to continue doing this in future announcements.

Also newsworthy is the fact that Nathan will be managing the online community for the new Command & Conquer game.

Stay tuned for all of the latest updates. Generals World has some exciting plans for the future that have been underway for quite some time. See - a little push from EA, and look at all of the buzz.

Thanks again to Lion for contacting the people at EA.

Update: I just ran across this thread posted by Mark, in Middle-Earth MW's Battle for Middle Earth forums. It's entitled "A word about support". I think you'll all find it worth a read. Here's a clip from it:

Some of you have been asking about post product support for B4ME, especially given the notes that we are thinking of an expansion pack and working on RA3.

Rather than get into arguments and debates about how much support there has been on Red Alert 2 or Generals and then whether people will be happy with support for B4ME, I thought I would give a bit of the bigger picture going forward.

The key thing to note is that we're going to have a dedicated team for B4ME going forward. This differs from our past process of having a our one team jump from product to product(i.e. Red Alert 2, Yuri's, Generals, Zero Hour, B4ME). The very nature of having this team means that the landscape for support and development of B4ME games has changed from how things have worked in the past.

Next thing, is that we are going to support the product (and already have) because we know it's important and it's the right thing to do.

I'm rather impressed by Mike's admission that EA's support for some prior C&C titles has been, well, lackluster. They're promising more support for Battle for Middle Earth than previous titles. Not saying I haven't heard that before, but this time they do appear to be making structural changes internally to have a team dedicated to B4ME product support. We can only hope that this will be extended to the next Command & Conquer.