By Alec Meer on July 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am.
Does anyone under 50 even read Tom Clancy books anyway?
So, “your voice is the ultimate weapon.” I’ll be honest – while I’ve no doubt all that Ubi money can make something that (unlike the horrible Will of Steel) works, I’m finding it hard to believe that Tom Clancy’s voice controls will be anywhere near as slick and forgiving as the below Tom Clancy’s trailer for this Ubi-RTS suggests. However, Tom Clancy’s walkthrough beneath the cut has me genuinely anticipating Tom Clancy’s Endwar.
Tom Clancy’s Michael Deplater was formerly a bigwig at Tom Clancy’s Creative Assembly, and the thought of all that Tom Clancy’s Total War experience brought to bear on a tanky RTS is dead exciting. There’s some really neat stuff in this vid – the glossy picture-in-picture shtick seems to evoke generaldom much more than yet standard animated unit icon, that zoom-in to appreciate the destruction gimmick with the artillery is something I can imagine rejoicing in, and tank-pimping inspired by Tom Clancy’s Need For Speed is hilarious.
17/07/2008 at 10:26 james b says:
Have to say the stage demo on gamespot looked very good – the voice command stuff -looks/sounds excellent… seems to me it will make a big change to an rts- even if you may feel like a bit of a dick…my wife would laugh her arse off at me saying all this stuff….
17/07/2008 at 10:33 Nick Halme says:
I would read more of his books if he still wrote them anymore, just like how he MUST have had some involvement with this game.
It’s like saying that ‘Japan’ is a theme; ‘Tom Clancy’ implies geo-politics. That’s not a license. That’s real life!
17/07/2008 at 10:46 Okami says:
So, is Tom Clancy in any way involved with this?
17/07/2008 at 10:55 El Stevo says:
I’d find it more appealing if it didn’t have “Tom Clancy’s” in front of it. And if, you know, I liked RTSs.
17/07/2008 at 11:17 Chris Evans says:
I read the Tom Clancy books and am under 50 =D
Only the early ones, the latest ones really suck!
17/07/2008 at 11:40 Man Raised By Puffins says:
I read most of his books during the period of my youth in which I devoured any scrap of war porn I could get my filthy hands on. Haven’t touched them in years though.
As for End War, it’s certainly an interesting control concept but I can’t say it floats my boat.
@ Nick Halme: Yeah, but it’s a certain brand of geo-politics where, for instance, the Israeli/Palestinian situation can be neatly resolved by shipping off Swiss Guards to Jerusalem.
17/07/2008 at 11:43 rekki says:
is this for the PC or the 360?
17/07/2008 at 11:44 Jim Rossignol says:
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, and PC.
17/07/2008 at 12:04 Richard says:
“Commencing ****ing ourselves, sir!”
17/07/2008 at 12:28 Joe says:
I played this back at Ubidays and finally put my Linguistics degree to good use by grilling some of the designers, and I have to say that though it isn’t the finished article it plays incredibly well and the team really did know their shizzle.
Of course, whether the game iself is any good is a different matter.
17/07/2008 at 12:29 K says:
Odd. I’d have thought a Tom Clancy’s Tactical Squad Shooter thing would be more suited to voice control. I don’t have much Tom Clancy’s enthusiasm for it.
17/07/2008 at 12:55 MetalCircus says:
This voice control nonsense looks silly.
17/07/2008 at 13:00 Ginger Yellow says:
Funnily enough, all the previews I’ve read say the voice control is totally solid. It’s the rest of the game I’m worried about. This could be the first RTS to really work on consoles (Dune II apart, of course), but it’s not like Ubisoft have much of a track record in the genre.
17/07/2008 at 13:31 Jim says:
I was in the beta which has now ended. I found the voice controls to be really good, it understood my Manc accent although some Welsh people were having problems in the forum.
17/07/2008 at 14:18 Turin Turambar says:
How is going to work in the non-english versions of the game?
17/07/2008 at 14:19 sigma83 says:
I WOULD PAY MONEY TO SEE SCOTTISH PEOPLE PLAY THIS.
yoonit thoo, atthack ehnehmee tahnk squahdhron with meesyles, nuu! Blahst thuuse bahstards!
17/07/2008 at 14:51 18Rabbit says:
I hope you can play without voice because my wife already looks at me funny when I talk to the screen now, she’ll give me no end of harassment if I start barking orders at it.
17/07/2008 at 14:56 Ging says:
No, Tom Clancy hasn’t got anything to do with this – he sold Ubi license to use his name without his involvement in a project a while ago.
But the voice stuff works really, really well – some really heavy accents have issues, but they were fairly few and far between.
17/07/2008 at 15:25 propanol says:
Couldn’t they make Endwar a neat acronym for something? They seem to be on the ball with acronyms lately given the fantastic one they came up with for their flight sim game.
17/07/2008 at 15:28 Dave says:
“The Hunt for Red October” was good, and the original “Rainbow Six” novel was… kinda okayish. I started to read something else with his name on it about 5 years ago and gave up.
Wouldn’t mind playing games with “Neal Stephenson’s” or “Neil Gaiman’s” or “Sean McMullen’s” or “Charles Stross’” in front of the title though.
17/07/2008 at 16:18 FreezerBag says:
Enforcer Corps? :S
@Dave A Neal Stephenson game would be simply amazing.
17/07/2008 at 17:53 The Shed says:
Most of the gameplay videos for this game I’ve seen don’t feature the players going “Move tank’s to flanking position!” or the like.
It’s usually *player points camera at a street corner*, “Team Alpha move to cursor”, and the A.I. Make It So. It does seem pretty fricking functional.
EDIT: Holy shit Sigma83- good job almost offending me. There’s several names for people who speak like that in Scotland, and those people are in the minority. If you’re Scottish yourself that only slightly makes up for it.
17/07/2008 at 18:40 Dread says:
I was in the beta and I can say that, yes, the voice recognition demoed in the first video is that good. Even with my unique accent it picked up everything I said, even when I said “normally” (without trying to emphasis anything). The first video is definitely accurate.
As for how good it is during actual gameplay I’d have to say that once you get used to it you can execute commands with your voice 2, maybe 3 times faster than you can with the controller.
17/07/2008 at 19:20 Jahkaivah says:
@Richard
“Right…. my tactic is working, the enemy is moving into a single location, then ill take em out in one hit. I have too be patient and only launch the kinetic strike whe- SHIT!”
“Commencing Shitting ourselves, sir!”
17/07/2008 at 20:50 Razor says:
The big problem with voice control is that you can’t help but sound like a dork to everyone around you as you use it =P
17/07/2008 at 21:10 Erlam says:
I can see it now:
“MOVE THE FUCK FORWARD MOTHER FUCKER!”
“Roger, retreating.”
“Fall back into flanking positions.”
“Roger, attacking our flanks.”
“Team, we’re victorious”
“Roger, taking cyanide pills.”
18/07/2008 at 00:23 compuguy1088 says:
I’m way under 50, and I have read plenty of Clancy books. Though at the moment I’ve only read the earlier ones like Debt of Honor, Executive Decision, and such. For me though it is hard to get through them with the decent amount of details in them.
18/07/2008 at 03:34 DSX says:
Clancy’s early books are great, but then he started fleshing them out with endless one sided socio-political diatribes, makes me feel like I’m reading a war porn by Rush Limbaugh.
Hopefully there is still a keyboard process for giving orders. Doesn’t anyone else sing with their mp3′s when they play games…?
18/07/2008 at 03:44 Novack says:
I use to read Tom’s adventures. Then I grew up to discover that the mentality behind the Jack Ryan’s actions were the same behind the Bush family actions.
Then I couldnt read Tom Clancy anymore.
…
Still enjoy some of the games though, so I guess Im guilty in part of the worldwide yanky slaughtering.
18/07/2008 at 16:48 Fumarole says:
Couldn’t see playing this at a LAN.
Looking at the official site, I don’t see anywhere that this is actually coming to the PC. I see conflicting info all over the rest of the intarwebs though. Anyone have a link to an official stance on this?
19/07/2008 at 00:41 rekki says:
if your going to read a tom clancy book read red storm rising