Tom Clancy may have been responsible for predicting many things in the realms of politics and warfare, but whether he envisioned that by 2005 he’d have three highly successful video game franchises under his belt is another matter. By 2008 he looks likely to have a fourth. Joining the prestigious ranks of Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell is the punchily titled EndWar. The initial game is being developed at Ubisoft Shanghai, headed by Michael de Plater, whose former credits include design work on Rome: Total War. We say initial because Ubi are already planning to spin a series out of it.

While previous Tom Clancy games have been set amid plausible minor conflicts in relatively stable near-future scenarios, EndWar is set to blow the stage wide open with nothing less than World War III. The game is also different in other ways. It will be the first of the games to focus solely on this latest generation of hardware, with an emphasis on console play over PC play. And rather than being a tactical shooter like most every other Tom Clancy game of the past 10 years, it’ll be a strategy game – in real-time, but not a conventional RTS by any standard.







Described as an action wargame, it revolves around a conflict brought about just after 2020. By creating a joint nuclear defence system with Europe, the United States has effectively put an end to Russia’s nuclear deterrent, and the sleeping bear, sitting on a large portion of the world’s ever-diminishing oil stocks, is not best pleased. Following the sabotage of one of the US’s further attempts to launch military equipment into space, it all kicks off, with the three sides scrapping over a world-wide battlefield.

This bleak scenario is portrayed in an opening movie, where semi-recognisable mechanised weapons systems are deployed against one another, creating mass carnage in Paris before a large portion of the city is flattened courtesy of a non-nuclear kinetic weapon system launched from space.

In the game players will be able to side with Russia, the USA or the European Federation and battle it out over parts of Europe and North America. Each side has different strengths and weaknesses, with Russia favouring numbers and brute force, the United States favouring precision and speed and Europe taking a more cunning information technology-driven approach.

Although the war will always start out the same way, how it unfolds can be different every time, with players able to take control of territories in the manner they see as fit. In addition to the single player campaign is arguably the real focus of the gameplay: a persistent online battlefield where the outcome of individual skirmishes are tallied and the results causing a daily shift in the battle lines until one side emerges victorious.

EndWar is set to shun a micromanagement approach, allowing for fast and furious battles with the focus on strategy and not resources. The promise of smart, context aware AI combined with the ability to issue voice commands and see the battlefield from a soldier’s eye view should certainly alleviate any joypad woes for this type of game.

A typical battle can involve a few hundred units per side – all controlled as squads – and in multiplayer 6 v 6 matches are possible, with units of different abilities being allocated to different players, the amount depending on the number of players in the game. Just how different this makes the experience remains to be seen, but it should certainly make communication a key issue between players.

Without seeing the game in action it’s too early to pass any kind of judgement but certainly the vision and the experience behind it make EndWar an exciting prospect for online strategy fans on PC and consoles alike.

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