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EA recently announced that they were making C&C4, for release sometime next year. The announcement trailer looked rather cool, with Kane meeting the GDI heads to propose some sort of alliance to deal with the environmental problems the Earth is facing.
Then I read this preview article for the game, which brought about quite a few surprises. Namely getting rid of the C&C trademark of base building, harvesting etc, and replacing it with a control point system, along with a large crawler type vehicle that spawns all your units. I'm rather surprised to see these big changes to the game, given that I liked building my base!
Control points remind me of Dawn of War 2 a little (which was good), i prefer base building myself. Im also not happy with a GDI-NOD alliance. This may be the first C&C that I dont pickup.
The control-point style of gameplay, as shown in the Ground Control games, World in Conflict, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, is indeed a better style of gameplay as it encourages players to stop turtling and get out into the field and fight. CoH interestingly combines the two by allowing you to build a base as well, but base defences are pretty poor and the control-point system means you can't just sit at home, you need to go out and fight.
That said, we have seen through six previous C&C Tiberium Universe games, seven Red Alert games and two Generals games a system of gameplay that works quite well. C&C, to me, is about building your base, harvesting Tiberium (or gold or, erm, nebulously-defined 'supplies') and building lots and lots and lots of tanks.
C&C isn't Dawn of War or Company of Heroes and shouldn't try to ape them, especially as Dawn of War 2 got pretty lukewarm reviews even in this day and age (where the repetitive grind and silly level-scaling of OBLIVION didn't stop it getting 95% in most magazines for some reason) and the fan reaction to the game system appears to have been negative.
In short, it seems bizarre that if you have a popular SF RTS franchise with one of the most elderly and respected names in the business, you suddenly change the entire way the game works and has worked very well through fifteen previous games just for the final instalment. I could see them using this new system in a new C&C subfranchise or maybe in the Red Alert or Generals universes if they are going to be ongoing (although I think the joke in Red Alert has worn thin now), but introducing it at the last moment for C&C just seems weird.