Dawn of the Tiberium Age is Command & Conquer modding royalty. With a history stretching back to 2007, the standalone mod aims to enhance Westwood's 1995 classic and its Cold War spinoff Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Built in a customised version of Tiberian Sun's engine, Dawn of the Tiberium Age lets players battle together in multiplayer maps using any of the games' four factions, and features a wide array of original single-player missions, including a whole new campaign.
It's a brilliant mod as it stands, but its intrepid designers recently reached a big new milestone. As of this week, you can now play all of the original Command & Conquer's single-player in two player co-op.
This has been partly possible for a couple of years—the DTA team adapted the GDI campaign for two-player co-op back in 2023. But now, they've also tweaked the Nod storyline to support playing with a pal.
It's worth noting that DTA's co-op campaigns don't simply port the vanilla experience from C&C and stick another player in. For starters, Dawn of the Tiberian age makes numerous adjustments to the vanilla C&C experience, such as giving artillery longer range, and tweaking the perspective to be isometric rather than top-down (a-la Tiberian Sun).
On top of that, the campaigns' missions have been redesigned specifically to support co-op, as the DTA team explained back in 2023 when they announced the GDI campaign conversion. The maps have been expanded in size to support two players, and filled with additional resources and enemies so that the second player doesn't feel more like a third wheel.
While the mod aims to ensure that missions are structurally and spiritually as close to the original as possible, the team did make tweaks to certain missions where they saw "dumb" design. "An example is GDI mission 4, which was usually beat by just driving your APC into the crate. In our version you'll need to retrieve the crate with a truck and actually bring it back to the starting area for safety."
Presumably, the modders adopted the same approach for the Nod campaign. Alongside the cooperative extension, the latest update also brings a new custom mission called Shadow Reprisal that has been in the works since 2016, as well as a new radar dome model for the Soviet faction, improved models for Nod's Torpedo Boats, and six new multiplayer maps.
The modders don't mention whether they play to adapt Red Alert's campaigns for two-player co-op, but that's the logical next step. Either way, it's great to see the team continue to breathe new life into C&C, especially since EA seems largely uninterested in furthering the series (though the publisher recently released the source code for several of the older games). This year also brought us a spiritual successor in the form of Tempest Rising, which is well worth checking out if you're hankering for a more modern take on C&C's classic action.
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