French publisher Ubisoft has confirmed that a small team it its Shanghai development studio is currently hard at work at a sequel to last year’s voice-controlled Tom Clancy RTS offering EndWar.



The main development priority, according to creative director Michael De Plater, is improving both the depth and narrative of the single player experience.

“You can compare EndWar to World in Conflict or Company of Heroes, where they invest a lot in the storytelling,” De Plater told Videogamer.

“There’s no mysteries about how we could do that and apply it in the game – it’s just something we didn’t give attention to. Giving more attention to the single-player is straightforward to address and will make the game a lot of fun.

“After the first one, now we have a really good understanding of what to do, and we’ve solved lots of the hardest problems, which are accessibility, camera, controls, rendering that many characters, having that game work in 3D, our online as well, having persistent campaigns, having persistent player armies, so we’ve kind of done the hard stuff. There’s a really clear path forward there.”

The dev also revealed that EndWar has to date sold 1.5m units – not bad (particularly considering it’s a console RTS) for a new IP.

“We still sold more than Red Alert 3, sold more than Company of Heroes, sold more than World in Conflict,” De Plater added. “It’s still, along with Halo Wars, the biggest new RTS in the last four or five years. Even with those faults it’s still up there.”

There’s no word yet on a release date, but H1 2010 seems like the likeliest option.