Command & Conquer: Generals/Trivia

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• Banned in China: Literally: China didn't take very kindly to the way the game depicted them, so they decided to leave it out of their country... despite the fact China is shown becoming the world's biggest superpower at the end of Zero Hour. Also, if anything, the PLA was glorified by the game. Also, a throwaway blurb in the front of the game's manual states that the GLA have origins in Turkic Central Asian countries and implies that they have links to Uighur separatists in Xinjiang, a conflict the Chinese really don't like to talk about.
• Executive Meddling: This led to Generals 2 being retooled into Command & Conquer: Free-2-Play.
• Tech Marches On: In Command & Conquer: Generals and Zero Hour, the main attack helicopter for the USA is the Comanche. The games take place sometime in the 2020s. When the games were released in 2003, the Comanche was still undergoing test flights with the intention of eventually being deployed as a support vehicle to the AH-64 Apache. In 2004, the Comanche program was canceled by the U.S. Army, and its budget was reallocated to UAV development.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the alpha-stage, Generals was supposed to tie into the Tiberium universe. You can find many early Generals concepts with a lot of Nod units drawn on them. Most Chinese units at the time also bears the Nod insignia. There was some quite disturbing, but clearly Noddish unit design too, nameably, Kane's head in a jar.
  • The original Generals planned to have players choose a specific general from their Command Center in-game before they could start base-building, this idea was scrapped due to time constraints. Zero Hour re-implemented the idea, but instead players choose in the pre-game menu instead of in-game.
  • In the beta stage, each side was able to "subdue" enemy infantry with a specific weapon: the US uses flash-bangs, Chinese had stun bullets and the GLA employs tranquilizer darts. Subdued enemy units will fall under the captor's control, who can then load them onto POW trucks to send them back to POW camps, where the prisoners are used to "power-up" the player's special power, much like how Nod Chemical Missile logic worked in Tiberian Sun. The POW logic is broken and unusable in the final release, but assets for all the POW trucks and POW camps are still largely intact; the American POW Truck even appears under CPU control in the fourth mission of the USA campaign. Rangers still ended up getting the Flash-bang upgrade, but it now works purely as an anti-garrison/anti-infantry weapon (it's very effective against GLA Angry Mobs), yet they kept the "Subdue" voice when using this attack. More on the POW logic: the original idea was for players to send the prisoners back to the POW camp to power-up a specific power, and also receives a small amount of cash. The more prisoner the player sends into the POW camp, the longer the duration of their special power will be.
    • The US could activate the CIA Intelligence power from the Detention Camp, which allows them to see what their enemy can see for a brief period of time. The Detention Camp is still buildable in the original Generals, but without the POW ability, and the CIA Intelligence power became a normal special power which requires cool-down. Zero Hour completely removed the Detention Camp and merged the special power into the Strategy Center.
    • China could activate the Defector power from their Propaganda Center, which can be used to convert enemy units to your side. The Defector logic still exists in the final game, but it changed to convert a random unit from the enemy, which causes huge balance issues, as a result very few mods would re-enable this function.
    • The GLA Prison could activate the Demoralize power that rapidly reduces affected unit's firing rate. The Demoralize logic is marked "Obsolete" in the final release, but is in fact still workable with a few tweaks, although it now affects your own units as well.
  • The Red Guard used to have a bayonet which it could use to stab enemies. The code and cameos are still there and can easily be re-enabled.
  • The Zero Hour expansion's General's challenge was originally planned to feature a "boss general" for each side, each would have the special units of their sides generals as well as what the vanilla version of the faction had. Two of them were scrapped, however, with only Leang making it into the game, even though quote for the other two were made and are in the game's the sound files.
  • The Superweapon General in Zero Hour originally got the ICBM and Tomahawk Storm in addition to the Particle Cannon. The code, cameos and models are all present, but partly broken.
  • In the planning stage of Zero Hour, Dr.Thrax (Toxin General) and Prince Kassad's (Stealth General) faction work very different from their skirmish selves in the released version. Thrax had a unique model and cameo for his RPG Troopers, and his infantry are immune to toxin and radiation, while Kassad had almost all of his units and structures stealthed off the bat, was able to build up to 5 Jarmen Kell hero units, and holds the unique "Quad Sniper" upgrade which allows his Quad Cannons to fire sniper shots, instantly annihilating enemy infantry squads. The player still encounters this version of them in the USA campaign and GLA campaign respectively, and much of these assets can still be placed on the custom maps using the World Builder, but are otherwise inaccessible in Skirmish games.
  • Zero Hour was planned to feature one additional general for the USA and GLA, General Ironside and General Mohmar Deathstrike respectively, both of whom had lines recorded before they were cut. The latter was further in development, having unused icons, and was planned to serve a boss general for the GLA who had the strengths of all three generals but none of their weaknesses. Presumably Ironside was intended to have the same role for the USA. Deathstrike ultimately did appear in the first GLA mission of Zero Hour, in which the player has to escort his limo to a hijacked C-130 and destroy all US forces en route.
  • Fortunately, much of the cut content from Zero Hour has been restored by mods, most notably Shockwave.