It's a realistic, near-future war.
We sat down with Michael de Plater, Creative Director for EndWar to talk to him about his latest game, the first Tom Clancy RTS, to see what all the fuss is about.EndWar is a current gen title, which, when it was started 3 years ago, was obviously ‘next gen’ back then. It’s a hypothetical, near future game that looks at what World War 3 would be like if the use of nuclear weapons was made redundant... so forces would have to rely on troops fighting a conventional ground and air war.
When questioned as to why EndWar is a Tom Clancy game, Michael said that EndWar uses the same level of realism and attention to detail that can be found in Tom Clancy books and other games in the Tom Clancy series, such as Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell. It’s that authenticity and attention to detail that the Tom Clancy name brings to a title. But they’ve spent a lot of time making sure that the scenarios within the campaigns are as realistic as the units and tactics you’ll have to use. EndWar achieves this by taking the ‘worst case scenario’ of possible future political, social and environmental issues and projecting them forward to 2020... and then the guys have brought in real life military advisors to tell them how things would happen if a war broke out in that future world.
Click for larger imageSo this a ‘near future’ war, which means that all the weaponry is either here now as the latest gen stuff or is in development and therefore will definitely be in use in the just over 12 years time when the game starts. Now we know the Comanche attack helicopter was canned in real life as the US realised the Longbow was cheaper and capable of fighting in our current areas of conflict, but EndWar sees units like the Comanche back in service as armies realised they’d need something with those abilities after all.
So the storyline goes that in a few years time the planet’s resources start to run low, way, way, way before anyone expected them to. This was due mainly to the large oil companies lying about their reserves to keep their share prices up, (any of this sound familiar... Enron, anyone?). Anyway, by the time the world realises what’s up, there’s little to be done except get aggressive over the few remaining resources.
But here’s the kicker... Europe has now become a federal super-state, similar to how the US is right now. It had no choice if it wanted to compete commercially on a global scale... So EndWar focuses on the war between Federal Europe and, believe it or not, the US... Yep, for once we’re not fighting pseudo-Russians, or see-through pastiche Middle Eastern terrorists... nope, this is war on the Yanks.
Click for larger imageUs UK citizens might be wondering what role we play, given that we’re sort of in Europe but politically friendly with the US... and I’m sad to say that we’re very much the bit-part in all of this with a role more along the lines of how we were back in the Thatcher years... yep, we’re the US missile platform... but I’m told we do come into the story and there may be some development of how that pans out.
But what you do get with all this near future projection is a realistic, gritty and believable game and storyline... oh, and you get to destroy France if you play as US, which is always a bonus.