As Bass surveys the strategy landscape, he sees developers making decisions like this all the time as they struggle to keep the genre a top-tier genre. "You have stuff like we are doing, trying to find ways to grow the fan base for the RTS, and then you have a game like Starcraft II that is staying very traditional and is relying on a built in fanbase."

Ultimately, he sees the genre moving online away from a "box product model and towards a service model of gaming." With so many big RTS games coming out this year, Bass is hopeful that commercial success will fund further experimentation with the genre, making them more like MMOs where the experience can continue to be updated.

The trick, of course, is training an audience that is still overwhelmingly single player to become comfortable moving to the online world. A single player skirmish is a very different experience from an online match.

"How do we get players online so that their first exposures are not negative?" asks Bass. "This is where the objective based victory conditions come in. If you play Battlefield, for example, you don't have to be awesome at shooters to contribute in a game. You can play as a defense or support player and find a role. There is a party system so you can move from game to game with your player. 1 v 1 is very harsh, but making the game more team based will help players that are more uncomfortable."

"Online is scary," he admits, "If you can play as a group with your friends and can contribute even if you're not the key guy, you can have fun."

We'll see how scary it gets when Command & Conquer 4 hits store shelves next week on March 16th.