A few months ago UBISoft announced a brand new title to it’s Tom Chancy brand called EndWar. While details remained sketchy, new beta information has emerged from the UBIDays show.
At first glance EndWar seems like UBI Soft’s entry into the RTS genre on consoles, but that could be the wrong assumption to make. EndWar will feature no base building, resource mining, and it won’t oped for the top down camera angle of the traditional RTS.
Instead you will be controlling infantry, artillery, tanks and other such support units in a full on 3rd person tactical view. You will move your units around the map either by using your controller or you can go totally hands off and do everything via voice command. UBI Soft was one of the first to take full advantage of the headset and voice commands way back on the Xbox with Rainbow Six. It’s unclear right now if this game is a commands only type game like Full Spectrum Warrior or if it’ll let the player pick up a gun and get in the fight directly as well. With all the management and strategy going on, it might be difficult to also be a soldier on the front lines.
The game will let you play as different countries including USA, Russia and Europe on the 40 different battlefields across locations such as Paris, Washington and Moscow. The game will support 1000 units on the battlefield at a time ranging from soldiers, tanks, gunships, infantry and of course Team Rainbow and the Ghosts.
UBI Soft plans for all battles to take place in a persistent MMO style battleground. It sounds like the game is online all the time whether you’re playing by yourself or playing with friends. There’s no word yet on if there will be some type of subscription required to play. We’re hoping all you need is a Live Gold membership to play online like all their other games, but developers are looking for other revenue streams to offset the rising cost of game development. So it could go either way.
The good news is that UBI Soft is joining a recent trend of having a public beta. Shadowrun benefited by a semi-open beta, Halo 3 is going through a semi-open beta right now and this November, Ubi Soft plans on having the EndWar beta up and running. Details on how to get into the beta have not been released nor has the length of time the beta test will go on. With a March 2008 release date though, expect the beta to run for no more than 5-6 weeks.
