Kane, the arch nemesis in the Command & Conquer game is back in the fourth installment — of course he’s back, who else is as bad-ass as Kane?

While the Battlefield Bad Company 2 beta has taken the headlines in the “beta testing” game world these days, another beta is also available for yet another anticipated game, Command & Conquer 4. You can get the beta here, and unlike Bad Company 2, you don’t need a key — it’s a public beta.

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, has received an official release date, and will be in stores on March 16 in North America and March 19 in Europe. While those are dates on the release, they’re also dates on when the C&C 4 team will get sacked, as EA plans to let go the entire team behind the game as soon as it wraps up.

The wait between Command & Conquer: Generals and its successor, Command & Conquer 3, was about 5 years. EA seems to be avoiding a repeat as they have just released the debut trailer for Command & Conquer 4.

RTS fans, don’t expect any actual gameplay footage as the trailer features exclusivly what looks to be just cinematics. However, if you’re following the plot of the franchise you’ll be intrigued to hear that Nod head-honcho Kane makes an appearance in said trailer.

EA has no set release date for Command & Conquer 4 but they hope to have it hit the market sometime in 2010. Will the game have what it takes to oust Blizzard’s forthcoming Starcraft II? We’ll have to wait and find out.

Here’s something that is sure to piss a few people off — Community Leader APOC has recently said that you will need to have a constant internet connection to play Command & Conquer 4:

“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.”

He then goes on to point out that this won’t be a big deal as it won’t require high-speed connections and won’t cause any lag in single-player gameplay. Hell, you can even use one an oldschool 56k connection because who needs phone calls, anyways?

ThatVideoGameBlog points out that this seems eerily like a ploy to hide the fact that EA will use a constant internet connection as a way to prevent piracy rather than using DRM.

I admit to having no interest in the genre, but I often find myself pitying RTS fans due to the long lag time between releases of titles worth playing. With some PC games if you purchased a top of the line system when the original came out you might still be able to play the sequel. If you still had your PC from when Starcraft was released it’d probably struggle to load the trailer for Starcraft 2.

Luckily for RTS fans a survey suggests development has begun on Command and Conquer 4, the final chapter in the Tiberium saga begun nearly fifteen years ago in the original title. The RTS classic comes back with some new changes and improvements. They’re boasting the Crawler, the first ever mobile base in an RTS game (yes, there have been games where the base could move, but presumably this one can move and still retain all its other functions while doing so) as well as some RPG flavors to the game.

As players battle in any mode, whether single player, multiplayer or skirmish they’ll gain experience points which allow you to unlock new units, abilities, equipment and upgrades to take the fight harder to your opponents in your next battle. Cooperative campaigns are making a comeback so players can get a friend in on the action as well in addition to huge five on five multiplayer matches with new objective modes as well as the standard gameplay.

None of these features are exactly confirmed though since they’re all simply mentioned in the survey, but since the Crawler is mentioned in the headline I’m guessing that’s a big favorite.