As before, you can either choose to play the righteous, humanity defending GDI (Global Defence Initiative) or the utterly evil, backstabbing Brotherhood of NOD. Playing as the GDI, you discover that the Brotherhood is gaining power once more, and it appears as if Kane is back. The man giving the GDI orders is General Solomon and the lucky guy on the receiving end of these orders is Michael McNeil, a Commander who, as we are all too often reminded, loves to win. The GDI campaign largely involves chasing Kane around the globe and dealing with his horrible plans for the planet.

Playing as the Brotherhood gives you a slightly more interesting scenario as you are the Commander of a small rebel faction from the Brotherhood seeking to lift it back to its former glory, which has all but been destroyed. Kane is dead and the new NOD leader answers to GDI, so it is up to you to wrest world order from the elitist GDI forces.

Both sides of course still have to harvest the Tiberian crystals that are slowly covering the surface of the earth. Tiberian is the main resource in Tiberian Sun, allowing you to create new buildings, troops and tanks. Westwood also decided to include a new blue coloured strain of Tiberian that is twice as valuable as the green Tiberian, yet on the downside of things is ever more damaging to unarmored troops and is highly unstable, reacting to all nearby explosions quite violently with its own self destructive explosions. This new type of Tiberian adds a new tactical aspect to the game as taking control of blue Tiberian can swing the balance of a game, and yet it can be very dangerous to troops (and indeed your Harvester if an enemy troop decides to blow up the blue Tiberian).