It’s the final part of our Endwar interview with Julian Gerighty, Ubisoft’s Editorial Content Director.

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We’re back with the second part of our interview with Julian Gerighty, Editorial Content Director of Endwar…

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Ubisoft’s real-time strategy opus is heading to PS3 this autumn. But can an experimental RTS really work on the current generation consoles? Editorial Content Director, Julian Gerighty thinks it can – especially as this one is inspired by Mario Kart…

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Michael De Plater is the Creative Director of the upcoming Tom Clancy’s EndWar game. Three Speech writer Keri Allan caught up with him on a recent trip to the UK to discuss the introduction of speech recognition technology into the console strategy genre arena, and how this technology could revolutionise how we play games…

TS: So how did the idea of the voice recognition in the game come about?

MDP: Basically no-one has successfully done strategy on a console before: it’s like the last big genre that hasn’t moved from PC to console. So we knew we had to do something different on the interface, and also we wanted to make the experience different for the player. In essence we wanted to make you, as the gamer, the General.

Generally there’s been a big trend in games towards more natural inputs, whether it’s motion sensors, steering wheels with driving games and instruments with music games – like the guitar in Guitar Hero. We’re trying to let you play the role of military commander, so if you look at what an actual military commander does, its speech!

So we began to look into it, and started by looking at a game called SOCOM that came out about five years ago. It was a tactical shooter that had a level of voice command that worked pretty well.

We assumed that the technology has got more powerful over the last five years, as had the new consoles, so we decided to take voice control to the next level, solving the UI (user interface) issues whilst making strategy as a genre, work on consoles.

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