Command & Conquer 4 will require constant Internet connection

The developers of the upcoming Command & Conquer 4 game have been kind enough to compile a list of answers to the biggest questions on the forums -- all well and good, and well worth a read if you're a C&C fan.

The troublesome part comes in when Electronic Arts (EA)'s community manager Aaron Kaufman elaborates, stating a constant Internet connection will be required to play the game (in single player or multiplayer):

"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."

If it's not an MMO, why aren't the tracking features (and hence Internet connection) not requisite, like say, Demigod (or pretty much any Games for Windows LIVE enabled title)? Not to jump the gun, but we're guessing this is in fact a means by which to reduce (or eliminate) piracy for the game, similar to Blizzard's tactic with StarCraft II.

For an MMO, naturally, a constant connection is understandable -- it's just part of the territory. But for a game with a single player mode? We can't fathom a reason it should be required, and is bound to cause problems for those without 100% stable and persistent connections (which is a lot of people, particularly with wireless Internet as well as laptops being so popular). A similar thing went down with BioWare's Mass Effect, and we all know how that turned out.