Command & Conquer beta coming early 2013, will be "longest running in franchise history"

EA's new Command & Conquer - and BioWare Victory's first - will shift into a beta gear in the first half of next year, according to a blog post on the official website. Not only that, but it will be the "longest running beta phase in franchise history", presumably because it's so different from the other games. Originally billed as a sequel to Generals, the now subtitle-less Command & Conquer will be a free-to-play entity, first without, and then with , a single-player mode.

If you reckon they failed to deliver that with Command & Conquer 4, then the entity known as EA_CIRE agrees. "The team here and I know that previous Command & Conquer titles had issues – some less, some more. C&C4 (yes, I just named it!) was especially far below the expectations and standards a lot of us had for C&C games. So we know how you guys feel – and I am talking a lot with our design team to discuss the game mechanics, features and meta-game of our new Command & Conquer in development."

As for solid info/footage of the game, we'll have to wait another few months. "We don't just want to tell you about the game, we want to show you," the post teases, so it looks like any commanding and/or conquering will have to wait until next year at the earliest.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.