EndWar Interview - part one

How will the game recognize a player's voice?

de Plater: We have different configurations for different accents and we're using a third-party middleware company and you can configure the game for US and UK voices. But it's pretty good at recognition. We've had people at Ubisoft testing it with French accents, German accents and whatever.

Our benchmark when we started was to be better than SOCOM and four or five years on from that the software has advanced and the machines are more powerful so we can dedicate more processor time to the recognition. We've just lifted the quality of voice recognition higher.

Tell us about the massively multiplayer plans?

de Plater: We really don't have a strong separation between single and multiplayer game modes. Any game mode is playable in single, co-op, skirmish etc. The big multiplayer feature is what we're calling our Theatre Of War, which is a massively multiplayer campaign.

When you go online you can see a top down view of the world, the front lines, where the current battlefields are and then dive into a battle. Your result is recorded, as are all of the results from all the games around the world, then we accumulate the results and update the map so the front lines of World War III constantly shift. Everyone will be participating in this huge persistent campaign. We're planning to launch an open beta later in the year that we're real excited about, so people can get a taste of what we're trying to do.

Has as much focus gone into to the single-player game too?

de Plater: Yeah, you can play a single-player version of that same online campaign. There are scripted missions that lead up to how we get to WWIII and then you can play the meta-campaign turn-by-turn and you can play as any one of the three factions. It might be ten or 12 hours to play once but then you can play that from the point of view of all three factions. There's a good 30-40 hours of single-player gaming that'll be different every time you play.

How does EndWar fit into the whole Tom Clancy, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six universe?

de Plater: World War III is a pretty momentous event and the different elements of the Tom Clancy universe can come together in different roles. So the Ghosts are the ultimate elite soldiers of the US armed forces. They actually appear as elite forces in EndWar's armies. Some of the members of Team Rainbow, the European guys, also end up as military commanders and Third Echelon brings the intel. So it's really an over-arching story that sees many different genres and points of view come together for World War III.