Writing on the Command and Conquer Den, community manager Aaron "APOC" Kaufman said that those who play the single-player campaign of Command and Conquer 4 will need to constantly be connected to the internet, in much the same way as players of MMOs. "As of right now, you need to be online all the time to play C&C 4," he explains. "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."
OK, indulge us in a bit of conjecture. What strikes us as weird is that, just last week, What They Play editor John Davison said on 1UP's Listen Up that he wouldn't be surprised for games to adopt a streaming model (read: no physical media) by the time C&C 4 is released. It seemed sort of oddly specific at the time, but now we're wondering if there might be more reasons that your computer has to be connected to play. Just saying.