Ubisoft has a pretty special Christmas line-up coming our way, with heavy hitters Far Cry 2, Prince of Persia, Shaun White’s Snowboarding and Tom Clancy’s EndWar all queuing up to demand your money. Representatives from each of the games have been Sydney-side this week to have a chat, a beer and to show off more of their respective products to the local journos. And boy did we make the most of it, unearthing some pretty awesome news.We ended up having a good chat with Vinh-Dieu Lam, the Lead AI Programmer for Tom Clancy’s EndWar, an ambitious title that goes for the risky double whammy of being both a new IP coming out at Christmas and a game trying to make an RTS work on consoles. Balls are stacked up on a mini-guillotine there’s no doubt, but don’t worry, the next generation of Ubisoft coders are far from an endangered species. EndWar is quite special, and has such sophisticated voice recognition software that it really does take the whole controller or keyboard & mouse debate out of the picture. We know, we’ve played a fair bit of it. But financial and critical success may be simply a bonus short-term benefit for Ubisoft with EndWar. It seems that the developer has greater long-term aspirations for the franchise than we had ever imagined. Indeed, chatting with Vinh, we got a much better understanding of how important EndWar really is to the whole Tom Clancy canon. As you may be aware, Tom Clancy has sold his name over to Ubisoft, who can now go about taking the established IP like Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six wherever they feel like, while introducing the likes of EndWar and fighter-jet simulation HAWX. But unlike the other four which focus on niche elements of combat, EndWar offers the complete war. The full picture. So here is the exciting news. The plan over at Ubisoft is to use EndWar to facilitate a future Tom Clancy MegaGame that allows each of the five titles to behave as one giant experience. We’ll get into the analysis shortly, but first we’ll give you a transcript of how the conversation went down…
Chris Stead: So how many tie-ins are there with the units and the vehicles of EndWar with the broader Tom Clancy universe? Vinh-Dieu Lam: There are minor tie-ins with this game, but after this [game] there will be a lot more tie-ins. Some of our airstrikes come from the HAWX list of fighter jets, some of the Ghost Recon units are in the game, like Scott Mitchell is the commanding officer of the American army, so there are a few tie-ins. It all acts as a basis for future tie-ins. Chris Stead: When you say future tie-ins, how far will you take it? Like, would we see a multiplayer game where someone is flying the jets using the HAWX mechanics, while someone else is controlling a squad on the ground Rainbow Six style? Vinh-Dieu Lam: Yeah, eventually. But in the next versions you’ll find, say, missions generated in the next Ghost Recon (presumably GRAW 3) affecting the world map in the next EndWar (presumably EndWar 2). So maybe in the next EndWar you will need to attack Paris but before you can it may generate some sort of Splinter Cell recon mission or a Ghost Recon mission or things like that. But that is the direction we are looking at. Chris Stead: Right, so for the next iteration of releases is it a case of the five games being separate, but you have to play one and complete something before you can activate a mission in the next one and then finish that to open the next one? Vinh-Dieu Lam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with EndWar, the meta-campaign side of it is a standalone server so you can feed things into this system so it can basically generate any sort of mission. So its missions generate for EndWar at the moment, but there is no reason why we cannot generate missions from the other franchises. This is where we are looking at tying together the different franchises. Chris Stead: That’s really cool. So that kind of makes EndWar quite key to it all because it is kind of the bigger, broader one - it’s the link between all the franchises. Vinh-Dieu Lam: Yeah. Plus also in terms of the timeframe it is the latest one as it is set in 2020, whereas GRAW is set in like 2014 and HAWX is just prior to EndWar. So everything up to this point leads up to the EndWar conflict.
Chris Stead: So the Tom Clancy games were always focused on this one big vision - the EndWar? Vinh-Dieu Lam: Yeah. This is where Tom Clancy is heading. Chris Stead: So looking at the whole every-game-type-in-one end goal, is that realistically something for this generation of gaming? Vinh-Dieu Lam: Well I think the next set of games will have a few more tie-ins and we’ll see how long it takes to evolve from there. Chris Stead: Rad. Rad indeed: we must admit we’d been wondering about the potential to merge the various perspectives of combat that the Tom Clancy range offers into one all encompassing experience but doubted that it could actually happen. Early days yet, but from what Vinh was saying that looks to be the plan. How could it work though? Clearly Ubisoft needs to keep each individual Tom Clancy franchise as a separate entity to ensure five separate revenue streams, yet Vinh talks about allowing one game to open up paths in another. Surely, coercing gamers into owning all five games isn’t the way to go either without getting some major backlash, tending to suggest that what is described above is more related to bonus missions or perhaps to facilitate branching narratives. Ultimately each game will need to stand on its own merits. Unless, that is, there is some sort of subscription service. Buy the one game and then pay to unlock the other experiences hidden within – probably alongside a huge download. It would be like the perfect match of DLC and MMO… well perfect from a revenue point-of-view anyway. Sony has already been testing the waters with this kind of business model with SingStar and Gran Turismo 5. The other possibility that comes to mind is tuning EndWar into an MMO outright - a persistent conflict where five different game experiences co-exist within the one, globe-spanning war. It would be combat gameplay like we have never enjoyed before with each class of character completely changing the gameplay. And the user could be restricted to only playing the game type that they have bought - as in if you own only Splinter Cell, then you can only do recon missions – to protect the revenue streams. It all sounds a little outlandish though given the current limitations in tech. That said, look how far we’ve come this millennium: perhaps sometime in the next decade consoles, technology and bandwidth may be capable of facilitating such mind-blowing action. Damn, what an awesome gaming future that would be! Sign this Tom Clancy fan up right now, where’s the beta?
