Well, here we are, the first blog for Command & Conquer 4!

I am very excited to have the opportunity to talk about our game but I’m also feeling more than a little trepidation; over the years we’ve seen some excellent blogs by our previous development leaders such as Mike Verdu. As you might suspect, Mike’s something of a hard act to follow but I promise to do my best. Over the years we’ve turned out some great products, ones that I know many of you reading this have enjoyed. I’ve certainly enjoyed working on and playing many of them myself and feel certain that, as you hear and see more of C&C 4, you’ll find it is a game worthy its heritage. You can find many of the details about our game in the press, on Battlecast Primetime, and via our very own website at www.commandandconquer.com. Which brings me to the subject of this first blog - I want to address some of the questions that I've been reading about Command & Conquer 4 in the forums and hearing about from the community.

Let's start with the big one, why C&C 4 is an online game? We made the decision to move the game online so that we could better support the community with a live team much like MMOs. The C&C franchise is very much defined by its community and we wanted to create a feature that innovates the gameplay and adds depth for our sophisticated players. That feature is “Player Progression”. Similar to a career mode, Player Progression allows you to earn experience and gain levels over time, but to experience it, you have to be online. Player Progression also allows you to get access to new units, powers, and upgrades that you can add to your army. Your progress is saved in your online profile so that you can move freely between all game modes; campaign, skirmish, co-op and multiplayer. You always have an updated profile that lets you take your latest upgrades and powers into the next battle. We also wanted to use the Player Progression system to promote fairness and prevent cheating which some people do when playing offline. Another cool benefit of the Player Progression system is that you create an online personas that is tied to your online account and not just to a computer. So if you play the game at home and then log in at work, you'll pick right up where you left off. No need to move saved games and no need to create another persona. You can do this on any computer that has C&C 4 installed, just log in and play with your persona with no need to keep the disc in the drive.

As for not being C&C 4 actually allows you to build deployable weapon systems and defensive structures, giving you’re the opportunity to lock down areas, defend locations and harass your enemies even when you are focused on another part of the map. That's all the detail I’m able to give you right now, at least structure-wise. Yeah, it’s kind of a tease, but I promise that we will talk about it more in a future blog.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was Tiberium itself. I know a lot of you are wondering why you haven’t seen that much of it in the screenshots that we've released to date. Rest assured that Tiberium is in the world as it would really be hard to make a Tiberium universe game without everyone’s favorite green proton lattice. If you view our announcement trailer you can actually see how much Tiberium has devastated Manchester in 2062 by filling in the country side and even consuming many of the buildings in the city itself. The screens that we have released show some of the areas in the world that have been terra-formed through GDI's alliance with Kane (OMG!) which is why you don't see a lot of Tiberium in them. In our future screenshots, you will see some of the areas that are still being ravaged by Tiberium and have not been fully reclaimed.

I've also read you are curious about how the Crawlers, our all-in-one mobile base units, work. While I can’t reveal too much information about the Crawlers at this time, I can say they’re the inevitable result of evolving military doctrine and technology.

In closing out this first of many blogs leading up to the release of C&C 4 in 2010, understand that we take all of your comments very seriously and would love to hear from you in the forums. If you have a question or concern then please feel free to post it up. APOC and 2POC will do their best to ensure that you get a response. Also, in future blogs, plan on hearing from many of our other developers on the team. I'm just a small part of this crew and many of the team have some awesome details about the game that I'm sure they would be happy to share with you.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. I’m looking forward to meeting and spending time with our biggest fans in the world at CommandCom and GamesCom.

"BigMike" Glosecki