C&C 4 has been in development for well over a year already, so, please put to rest any fears this is a 1-year project. Most games don't announce until they are around 1 year or less from release and either way, our development team will not put a rushed game out on the shelf. They've been working quietly on this project for a while now. We have had multiple RTS teams in the building so while Red Alert 3 was being worked on, a lot of early go-ahead-forward work on C&C 4 was progressing.

As of right now, you need to be online all the time to play C&C 4. This is primarily due to our "player progression" feature so everything can be tracked. C&C 4 is not an MMO in the sense of World of Warcraft, but conceptually it has similar principles for being online all the time. While some may be taken aback by this, we've been testing this feature internally with all of our world-wide markets. We wanted to make sure it wouldn't take away any significant market or territory from playing the game. We have not found or seen any results that have made us think otherwise. You won't need a fast connection, in fact, you could be on age-old dial-up, and have the same single player experience as everyone else. Online all the time won't cause lag for single-player. We've also heavily worked on the online infrastructure such that people with slower connections will not lag other players with faster connections in Multiplayer.

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Via C&C Den