EA apparently has Dante's Inferno and Dead Space maker Visceral lined up to tackle the Command & Conquer licence.

The game is "pretty far out", Visceral Games label general manager Nick Earl told Gamasutra.

But the rest of the project remains, for now, under wraps.

Nick Earl is boss of action and strategy games at EA under the new Visceral Games label. This is part of EA's plan to make brands out of its successful studios.

"Regardless of which particular geography, everyone feels like they're part of one group. Think about the DICE brand as becoming a strong FPS brand with games like Battlefield, Bad Company 2, and with BioWare being a strong brand for RPGs - we're trying to do that inside the action space, where EA has not had a strong position for some time," Earl explained.

Will Visceral's Command & Conquer be an action game? There have been some before: you might remember the awful Command & Conquer: Renegade from 2002. More recently, EA had a shooter called Tibierum that was announced in 2007 and thrown in the bin in 2008.

Why? Tiberium wasn't good enough for Riccitiello's table. "It is confirmed that Tiberium has been cancelled, as the game was not on track to meet the high quality standards set by the team and the EA Games Label," the publisher said at the time.

Command & Conquer is renowned, first and foremost, for being a real-time strategy series. The Tiberium saga of whic was brought to a disappointing close earlier this year with Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight on PC.

For now, however, Visceral Games will concentrate on delivering Dead Space 2 on 28th January 2011. Expectations are high, both inside EA and out; Earl believes DS2 will elevate the Visceral "brand" to the "next level".

Video: EA's canned Tiberium game.