Thanks to the legendary Dawn of the Tiberium Age mod, the entire original Command & Conquer can now be played cooperatively with two players. Both the GDI and Nod campaigns have been revamped for co-op, with new mission designs, expanded maps, and plenty of updates. Even as EA ignores the franchise, this community-driven project continues to breathe new life into the RTS classic.

Dawn of the Tiberium Age is royalty in the Command & Conquer modding scene, a standalone project going back to 2007 that enhances Westwood’s 1995 classic and its Cold War spin-off, Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Running on a custom Tiberian Sun engine, the mod lets players battle on multiplayer maps with all four factions, and even features entirely new single-player campaigns.

Already a stellar mod, DTA just hit a new milestone: you can now play all of the original Command & Conquer campaigns in two-player co-op. This has been partially possible for years—the DTA team adapted the GDI campaign for co-op in 2023—but now the Nod story supports co-op, too.

Importantly, the co-op campaigns don’t just add a second player and call it a day. Dawn of the Tiberium Age brings plenty of changes: artillery units get longer range, the view has been shifted to isometric (à la Tiberian Sun), and missions have been redesigned for cooperative play—bigger maps, more resources, more enemies, so no one feels like the third wheel.

The developers strove to keep the missions as close in structure and spirit to the original as possible, but tweaked certain “dumb” designs. “For example, GDI mission 4 used to be beat by simply driving your APC into the crate. In our version, you have to retrieve the crate with a truck and actually bring it back to safety.”

Presumably, the same approach was used for the Nod campaign. This update also brings a custom mission, Shadow Reprisal (in development since 2016), a new radar dome model for Soviets, improved Nod torpedo boat models, and six new multiplayer maps.

No word yet on whether the Red Alert campaigns will get the co-op treatment, but it seems like the logical next step. Either way, it’s great to see C&C kept alive by the community, especially since EA seems done with the franchise (even if they did recently release several source codes). If you want a modern spin on classic C&C, check out this year’s spiritual successor, Tempest Rising.

Source: PC Gamer