The Command & Conquer Forums have a Q&A session with Jeremy Feasel about Command & Conquer 4, with the designer answering hot questions raised on the forums about the just announced real-time strategy sequel. Also, a name the game contest is soon getting underway on the Command & Conquer 4 Facebook Page, where they've already figured out the easy part of the game's title (the part with the number) but are still working on the hard part (the part after the colon). Finally, Command and Conquer DEN (thanks Ant) has a follow-up statement from community manager APOC, who confirms that as things currently stand, players will have to be online to play the game:

A few things to add to Jeremy's replies and some of your further concerns.

- C&C 4 has been in development for well over a year already, so, please put to rest any fears this is a 1-year project. Most games don't announce until they are around 1 year or less from release and either way, our development team will not put a rushed game out on the shelf. They've been working quietly on this project for a while now. We have had multiple RTS teams in the building so while Red Alert 3 was being worked on, a lot of early go-ahead-forward work on C&C 4 was progressing.

- 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.

We can elaborate more on gameplay details after all the magazines hit, plenty of details for you to check in those! Gamestar will have a very extensive story.