Michael De Plater, Ubisoft’s Creative Director, has said the sequel will focus more on story depth which was something they ”didn’t give attention to” first time.
The sequel is ”a smaller team, and still Shanghai.” EndWar was touted for its voice command, and it ”beat just about everything” except for Halo Wars in the console RTS market.
”Even given we’re obviously saying what we did wrong and so on, it’s still one and a half million units. We still sold more than Red Alert 3, sold more than Company of Heroes, sold more than World in Conflict,” De Plater told VideoGamer.com.
”It’s still, along with Halo Wars, the biggest new RTS in the last four or five years. Even with those faults it’s still up there.” Story dropped off the face of the planet once you got into the campaign some, and became just tug-of-war until one faction prevailed.
”Compared to strategy games it’s really successful. We beat C&C on our first go out. We were up there and not far off Halo Wars, which is obviously a big license. We beat just about everything – everything except Halo – for the last three years that’s come out,” he added.
”For a strategy game that’s a huge success. For a console game that’s not such a big success.”
Ubisoft are promising depth in story and gameplay, can this pledge help you forgive the sins of the original EndWar? Maybe you enjoyed less ‘blah blah’ and more boom?
”It’s a really good position to be in, in a way. After the first one, now we have a really good understanding of what to do, and we’ve solved lots of the hardest problems,” noted De Plater.
”…which are accessibility, camera, controls, rendering that many characters, having that game work in 3D, our online as well, having persistent campaigns, having persistent player armies, so we’ve kind of done the hard stuff. There’s a really clear path forward there.”
No release window was hinted at by De Plater, only that a smaller development team is working on the sequel at Shanghai. Let’s hope smaller is better for EndWar’s sake.
