14 DAY TRIAL // Is there any place left for LAN matches and for dedicated servers in the land of PC gaming? It seems that the answer is “no” with Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight confirmed as being the latest in a long line to ditch them both. StarCraft II will not have either LAN play or dedicated servers and their absence from Modern Warfare 2 was a big point of discussion when it came out on the PC alongside the Steamworks controversy.
Sam Bass, the lead designer working on the conclusion of the Kane saga in the Tiberium universe, justifies the decision by telling Destructoid that “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.”
We already knew that Command & Conquer 4 would use online tracking in order to see how the player progresses in the game. Much like Ubisoft latest DRM scheme, the title requires the player to always be connected to the Internet but it's unclear whether they will lose their progress and see their game get shut down when there's a problem with the connection.
Bass also said that the team working on the Tiberian Twilight put in a lot of effort on the “networking back end of this game,” making sure that players with slower connections are not at a disadvantage to those who have fast Internet speeds and eliminating all sources of lag.
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is set to be released on March 16 and will use a structure very different from that of previous titles in the series, with player classes and specializations determining how a battle plays out.