It seems that dedicated servers and LAN play is fast becoming a thing of the past as C&C4 joins the ever lengthening list of PC games that won’t support them.
Modern Warfare 2 seems to have set a precedent as more and more developers are abandoning dedicated servers. The latest game to drop support for the PC staple is the upcoming Command & Conquer 4, which, following StarCraft 2’s example, won’t support LAN play either.
Lead designer Sam Bass said that the features had to be sacrificed in order to implement some of the game’s features: “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.”
I’m not entirely sure that the added functionality is going to wholly satisfy PC gamers who see their platform seeming to get a rough ride from developers and publishers recently, although at least the reason the features were left out was in an effort to make the game better, as illogical as that may seem. Command & Conquer 4 will be available for PC on March 16th.
Source: Joystiq
