Generals 2 – The Game That Never Was

Electronic Arts split EA Los Angeles into two studios in 2010. One half became Danger Close, which went on to make Medal of Honor: Warfighter and subsequently get closed in 2013. The other half became Victory Games, a new studio built specifically to develop Command & Conquer titles going forward. Jon Van Caneghem, the designer behind the Might & Magic series, was brought in as general manager. The studio spent its first year in relative quiet, then in November 2011 found itself operating under the BioWare label, briefly renamed BioWare Victory. On December 10 2011, at the Spike Video Game Awards, EA confirmed what had been circulating in rumours for weeks: Command & Conquer: Generals 2, a direct sequel to the 2003 game, built on the Frostbite 2 engine.

The original Generals had sold well and been well received despite a difficult production history that included significant late-stage design changes. It was also the last conventionally structured C&C game EA Los Angeles made before the studio’s RTS output became increasingly troubled. Tiberium was cancelled in 2008 after years of development. Command & Conquer 4 shipped in 2010 to poor reviews and community hostility over its departure from base-building mechanics. When Generals 2 was announced, the appetite for it was real. Three factions were confirmed: the European Union, the Global Liberation Army carrying over from the original game, and an Asia-Pacific Alliance representing a coalition of East Asian nations. The setting placed events in 2023, ten years after Zero Hour, with the United States having withdrawn from global engagement and a resulting power vacuum reshaping the geopolitical map. It was a coherent premise and a plausible direction for the series.

What happened over the next twenty months was a sequence of decisions that progressively dismantled what had been announced. The BioWare label was dropped in November 2012 and Victory Games reverted to its original name. That was a minor branding change. The August 2012 decision was not minor: the game was renamed to simply Command & Conquer, the single-player campaign was cut entirely, and the project was converted to a free-to-play live service platform. The stated vision was a series of interconnected free-to-play games set across the C&C universe – Generals first, then presumably Tiberium and Red Alert to follow. Campaign missions would be sold separately. The multiplayer skirmish mode would be free. The engine was upgraded to Frostbite 3 in May 2013.

Alpha testing ran through 2013. The feedback was not positive. The free-to-play structure brought with it concerns about pay-to-win mechanics that were never convincingly addressed, and the absence of a traditional single-player campaign removed the thing most C&C players came for. The competitive multiplayer the game was now built around was functional but not compelling enough to anchor a community. On October 25 2013, EA announced that the beta, which had been delayed repeatedly from its original first-half 2013 target, would start in November, with release scheduled for late February 2014. Four days later, on October 29, Victory Games was closed and the project was cancelled. EA’s official statement attributed the decision to community feedback indicating the game was not meeting expectations. A Victory Games employee posting as EA_Baelor described that explanation as not the full picture, attributing the closure to corporate politics. The gap between those two accounts has never been publicly resolved.

The timing was notable for a specific reason. A major content update was scheduled to deploy on the day of cancellation, adding a new general, a new unit type, a cooperative Onslaught mode, and a reworked progression system. The servers that the alpha build depended on were shut down approximately a month later, rendering the build permanently unplayable. In April 2025, EA released the Generals 2 source code under the GPL v3 licence, the same release that covered the original Generals and Zero Hour. The code exists. The game does not.

The cancellation had consequences beyond Generals 2 itself. It placed the entire Command & Conquer franchise in a state of suspension that lasted until 2018, when EA announced Command & Conquer: Rivals, a mobile title. The C&C Remastered Collection followed in 2020, developed by Petroglyph – a studio founded by former Westwood employees – and released to a positive reception that demonstrated the appetite for the series had not gone away. Whether that appetite extends to a new Generals remains an open question. As of 2026, nothing has been announced.

Victory Games produced one cancelled game and was then closed. The studio’s entire existence lasted three years.