EndWar 2 In The Offing News

Although he's not working on the EndWar series anymore, having been whisked off to Ubisoft Montpellier where he's now working on a different project, Michael de Plater has indicated that a second EndWar game is currently in development at Ubisoft Shanghai.

De Plater, who was the Creative Director behind the first game, was asked by Videogamer.com whether a sequel was in development, to which he replied: "Yeah, it's a smaller team, and still Shanghai."

According to the report, the team is working on two specific areas of improvement for the sequel: the single-player game's story and depth. De Plater suggests that these are key areas of expansion for a game like EndWar in order for it to compete with its rivals.

"You compare it [EndWar] to World in Conflict, or Company of Heroes, where they invest a lot in the storytelling," said de Plater. "There are 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."

However, given the small size of the development team and the improvements being undertaken, de Plater couldn't offer a timeframe for the game's release. "I couldn't put a time on it," he said. "Basically the thing is stepping back and looking at, in particular those two issues that we can address, and wait and see."

The former Creative Assembly developer also revealed that EndWar was more successful than the Christmas 2008 charts may have initially indicated. Although it was swamped by a wide range of high-profile titles at the time, EndWar still managed to sell around 1.5 million units in total.

"We still sold more than Red Alert 3; sold more than Company of Heroes; sold more than World in Conflict," said de Plater. "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."

While the sales figures are big for an RTS by today's standards, they're not huge for a triple A console game in general. "It's just at break even, which isn't that exciting," de Plater explained of EndWar's sales compared to the larger videogame market. "Us; Crackdown; Mirror's Edge - we're all in that same situation, which is in that same thing of where it is very hard to launch a new IP."