It seems that the recent backlash against Ubisoft for its choice of DRM in an effort to prevent piracy of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 hasn’t been enough to deter EA from doing something very similar indeed.

Strange things and contradictions afoot at EA...

Indeed, there seems to be very little to differentiate between the two anti-piracy methods, with both requiring an active internet connection in order to play even the single player campaign. While it represents a solid step away from EA’s previous DRM (including the much criticised SecuROM approach), it seems very likely indeed that we can expect to see many users unimpressed with the move, especially here, given the issues that can arise with our oh-so-patchy Irish internet connections.

The only word we’ve heard so far on the whole thing is from a posting to EA’s own forum for the game, but community manager Apoc, which seems to run in two different directions at the same time. The post opens by saying that there won’t be any DRM for those who pick up a copy of Command & Conquer 4, saying that,

“First thing to be clear about, Command & Conquer 4 has NO DRM. Zip, zero, zilch, none. We already made this clear.

Second, you do not need the disc in the machine to play Command & Conquer 4, however the following is how it works:

-AFTER you install Comman & Conquer 4 with the disc on your machine, when you try to LOGIN at the Launcher for the first time, it will ask for your serial key. You will enter your serial key to activate your Master EA Account. The serial key, like in our past games, can only be activated for 1 master account …

-You can install the game disc as many times as you want on any machine. Re-install etc.

-You do not need the disc in your machine to play. Your EA account just needs to have been activated by your serial key. After that, you can play Command & Conquer 4 on ANY MACHINE that has it installed. All you need to do is login.

-To play Command & Conquer 4, the computer needs to be connected to the internet. We’ve always made that clear as well.”

If nothing else, the statement that there’s no DRM at all and the fact that you’re required to sign in to EA’s fairly rigid online service seem entirely at odds with one another. Still, it’s nice to see the whole thing moving towards something of a more user-friendly affair; the requirement that SecuROM had to “de-authorise” content on one machine before installing on another was a bit of a brain teaser for those who’d had a machine suddenly fail and wanted to continue playing their games.

Apparently, if you lose your connection mid-game you’ll be given a few seconds to reconnect before being booted…