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Forums - Gaming - Command & Conquer 4 is Defective By Design

liquidninja on 15 July 2009

"APOC Clarifies Some C&C4 Concerns:
Mon - Jul 13, 2009, 12:44 pm [EST] posted by Lion

On the heels of Jeremy Feasel's Q&A session, our community leader APOC has chimed in with a few clarifications including the hot topic of being "online always" to play C&C4.
Hey everyone,

A few things to add to Jeremy's replies and some of your further concerns.

- 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.

What we are doing for multiplayer for the game and with our infrastructure for this game is unlike any we've produced before and I think you will finally see the culmination of a lot of key leanings from past projects in C&C 4, in this respect.

We can elaborate more on gameplay details after all the magazines hit, plenty of details for you to check in those! Gamestar will have a very extensive story.

-APOC
So we have our answer about the online always issue.

http://www.cncden.com/index.php?subaction=showcomments&id=1247514248&archive=&start_from=&ucat=22&

Samuel Bass said in a prior interview that because it's always connected they don't need DRM:

As a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we'll be shipping without any form of DRM.

http://game-preview.tungtram.com/2009/07/pc-command-conquer-4-q-exclusive-first.html

So it won't REALLY be DRM it'll just have the side-befenefit of stoping pirates at the expense of restricting when and if you can play the game.



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superchunk on 15 July 2009

I was thinking of buying C&CRA3 on ebay today for about $20, but then I read the reviews on Amazon about its DRM. So I deleted my watching of the various listings.

Now I was also thinking of this, but to be forced to be online and not include any DRM. hmm. I will wait for this to launch to see how it works and if it installs anything. I won't mind having a small network connection open whenever its playing. But, DRM and I'm out.



Legend11 on 15 July 2009

I'm willing to bet that pirates will be able to get around it.  The only thing this is going to do is piss off dial-up users that buy the game.



liquidninja on 17 July 2009

@Legend11
Well actually they say it will work with Dial-up.
But what happens when they shut down their C&C4 servers? Is C&C going to be a service like World of Warcraft from now on?



1337 Gamer on 17 July 2009

wow the fact that you have to be online in order to even play anything is a huge turn off. i wont be gettign this



Long Live SHIO!

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dorbin2009 on 17 July 2009

Your thread title is misleading.

If the developer intends for the game to be online all the time, then the game is not at all "defective". Furthermore, any gamer worth their salt is going to have an internet connection. I think the argument of online only games "not being fair to gamers" lost its edge in 2004. At this point, anyone even posting negatively to this is hypocritical, because obviously even though you have enough internet connection to post on VGchartz, one day you will obviously find yourself in a very rare situation of not having internet, and the first thing you are going to want to do is ...play command and conquer 4?



liquidninja on 17 July 2009

If you don't like the title then fine but it's not misleading.

They designed the game to only be playable with a internet connection even for the single player mode.

This would be fine if the game is supposed to be seen a service like World of Warcraft but for a retail priced product that's just evil.



Legend11 on 17 July 2009

@dorbin2009

Some people play games on a laptop and may not always be connected to the Internet. Some others for one reason or another may rely on dial-up and don't have a separate line for regular phone calls. Also I'm sure those in such situations would agree it's less hassle to disconnect when you're simply posting on a website as opposed to playing a game like this one. Also a person has the ability to work on their posts offline.

As for this game it isn't World of Warcraft or some other game that obviously requires a person to always be online, it's a game that can also be played alone. Although they give the reason of not wanting people to cheat on their stats it has to make one wonder if that's just an excuse for what would otherwise be considered extremely invasive DRM.



shio on 17 July 2009
Legend11 said:

I'm willing to bet that pirates will be able to get around it.  The only thing this is going to do is piss off dial-up users that buy the game.

pirates won't be able to crack this one, since C&C will need online to do pretty much everything. I'm pretty sure no pirated copy will ever be able to hack into the servers and take advantage of the tracking system.

And devs said dial-up will be enough for the game.



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TheThunder on 17 July 2009

Tiberium series was the only thing I didn't care about in the C&C universe. EA give me Generals 2 already !!!