Last year's EndWar was one of the more intriguing takes on the RTS genre, with it's voice enabled controls and united Clancy-verse story. Speaking to VideoGamer.com, Ubisoft creative director Michael De Plater revealed that a sequel is in development, with work being done in particular on the story and to balance the three factions.
“It’s a smaller team, and still Shanghai," described De Plater. “I couldn’t put a time on it. Basically the thing is stepping back and looking at, in particular those two issues that we can address, and wait and see.”
While the first EndWar lost some of its visibility launching alongside huge games from last holiday like Gears of War 2, De Plater revealed that the game still sold quite well. “Even given we’re obviously saying what we did wrong and so on, it’s still one and a half million units," he said. "We still sold more than Red Alert 3, sold more than Company of Heroes, sold more than World in Conflict. 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.”
“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. For a strategy game that’s a huge success. For a console game that’s not such a big success," he continued. “We’re in exactly the same position and the same sort of figures and numbers that was in Dave Jones’ presentation on Crackdown [during which it was revealed the game had sold 1.5 million units]. It’s just at break even, which isn’t that exciting. Us, Crackdown, Mirror’s Edge, we’re all in that same situation, which is in that same thing of where it is very hard to launch a new IP.”
When EndWar and Halo Wars (both console exclusives) are two of the biggest RTS titles to release in the past few years it's another signal that core PC gaming is in trouble.
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