C&C 4 Going the Starcraft 2 Way, Will Not Have Dedicated Servers or LAN Support

The slow demise of LAN play is becoming a trend, much like the entire “constant connection while playing” business. First, Blizzard’s Starcraft II decides to do away with LAN play, to the collective anger of many players around the world, notably from one small nation. Then Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 follows along, featuring the glaring lack of dedicated servers. Now, EA’s Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight has also removed LAN play and the support for dedicated servers, along with the annoying DRM protection of being constantly connected to the internet.

Destructoid quoted lead designer Sam Bass who stated that the system integrated with the achievements and unlocked materials easily.

…across single-player, multiplayer and skirmish and all the information is stored in a server. So if you go to another machine — friend’s house, Internet café – whatever, you can login with your profile and all the stuff you’ve unlocked is accessible to you there. It all lives on a server so you can’t really do dedicated servers with that.

Though EA has revamped the multiplayer situation to such an extent that it is fluid, it still will never have the charm of clan matches and face-to-face battles between two players. Let’s hope that in the future, gaming companies find a better way to handle piracy than this. For now, however, we have to deal with this.