Strategy fans are certainly extremely excited these days, as two of the biggest franchises in the genre, StarCraft and Command & Conquer, will deliver new titles in the near future, either at the end of 2009 or in 2010.

But as StarCraft II fans were disappointed to see that no LAN support would be added in the first chapter of the game, C&C fans will now get their fair dose of sadness, as Aaron Kaufman, a community manager from Electronic Arts, which will be publishing the upcoming Command & Conquer 4, has revealed that the title will need a constant Internet connection.

The reason behind this claim is the new player progression feature, which will chart the progress of the player and reward him properly in terms of new units and new scenarios for the single and multiplayer modes of the game. The manager has also revealed that, while you can say that the title will be going on an MMO route, it won't be like World of Warcraft for instance.

“As of right now, you need to be online all the time to play C&C 4,” Kaufman says on the C&C Den. “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 worldwide markets.”

This is certainly bad news for people who don't have a stable Internet connection or who don't want to go online just for a single feature in a game. Of course, besides the reason of charting a player's progress, this requirement will also be a big hurdle for video game pirates, who will find it that much harder to crack the game and offer it as a download on Bittorrent websites or file sharing networks when it will be available in stores.