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Tom Clancy: Endwar to Change the Face of Console RTS?
Ubisoft's Julian Geright is apparently quite confident in the power of the next installment of the Tom Clancy series with Tom Clancy: Endwar . Designed specifically for the PS3 and Xbox 360, Geright hopes that this is a breakthrough for console RTS play similar to Goldeneye's FPS breakout. "This is the first game of its type and I don't think that games on console will be made the same after Endwar, [...] It's kind of boastful, but I really do think that this is a watershed type of game."
"I don't think that games on console will be made the same after.."
I'll believe it when I see it.
As someone who bought into the guff being spouted by Free Radical (cheers Haze, that's forty notes in the bin), I'm not going to pay attention to anything apart from metacritic from now on.
There is a small snippet about how "this game is going to be different". The article doesn't even bother expanding on _how_ it's going to be different! This is not news at all!
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First off, console RTS - cue the guffaws.
Second, it's 'innovative' as it uses voice recognition to command troops, so while you can manually tell your little soldiers to run here; kill there - you can also bark at them for the same result, and in fact it will be required. It is a interesting way to bypass the control problems of console RTS.
Hard to tell if it will be good - Tom Clancy has Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, but also Politika.
Am I the only person who finds that this degree of arrogance, particularly in the video game industry, is unfalteringly correlated with horrible failure? John Romero, I'm looking at you. (Among many others)
It's worth mentioning that the first RTS game was published for the Sega Genesis.
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What I don't understand is why more consoles don't come with a keyboard and mouse, given their obvious superiority in these hugely popular genres.
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"This is the first game of its type and I don't think that games on console will be made the same after Endwar," he said in to CVG. "It's kind of boastful, but I really do think that this is a watershed type of game."
EndWar is a real-time strategy game made specifically for the PS3 and Xbox 360. When asked about other RTS games that have been ported to console platforms, Geright said: "I hate saying bad things about other peoples games, but when EA ships Battle for Middle Earth on PC and then goes 'okay, that's going to take a team of forty/fifty six months to get it out on 360'.
"They can do a really great job in terms of UI, they can great job in mapping the controls and making it accessible, but it remains a PC game. The difference in PC games and console games is huge, even in first person shooters. Think of before GoldenEye - people didn't play first person shooters on console. It wasn't that fun."
More on EndWar as UbiDays kicks into top gear. So some marketing guy says that this game is going to be uber l33t, and nothing will be the same afterwards. Nothing going to be the same? Reminds me of that old dialog in Ghostbusters:
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
The big deal with the game seems to be the voice commands. In theory it sounds like a great idea.
But then I just finished Rainbow Six Vegas 2, the most recent Ubisoft/Clancy release. It had a very simple voice command system, and it was almost completely unuseable. Saying "hold" five times before my teammates eventually walk into a crossfire is not an advantage over just hitting the "hold" button.
No. And when did Ubisoft hire Peter Molyneaux? This "EndWar will change console RTS" rhetoric sounds like his kind of propaganda.
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Just port a version of Spring and include a mouse+keyboard hardware bundle. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
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I've had a 360 for about a year now and I still prefer the mouse and keyboard interface though I concede that the thumbsticks are far better for a "lean back on the couch and play casually" control scheme. I'm impressed with the complexity of control scheme that can be worked into all those buttons and triggers.
That being said, I still like mouse and keyboard more for serious shooters and strategy games. I tried out the demo for Universe at War. I'm impressed with the level of control they worked into the thumbsticks but it still ultimately feels extremely cumbersome and counter-intuitive. Click and drag with a mouse, right click, bang a few keys on the keyboard, all seems more natural.
I'll give the demo a whirl and see what it's like. I gave up on Universe at War because I thought of what the uglier battles were like in classics like Total Annihilation and realized that the cumbersome interface would make me through a controller through the TV when things got heated and serious.
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I will say, and this is my opinion only, that if anyone can pull of a successful RTS on the console, it will be the Halo Wars team. The core of their team was responsible for Age of Empires 1 & 2, and they have both superior technology and game design people.
Actually, they should have both console and PC in the same multi player. Then after all the PC guys have fragged the crap out of the console people, and the console people catch on, they will switch to PC gaming and the free market would win.