Tom Clancy's EndWar Online

» see endwar.ubi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Tom Clancy's EndWar came out in 2008 as a console real-time strategy game with a feature almost nobody had shipped properly before. You played it by talking. "Unit one, attack hostile two" into a headset and unit one went, with a fixed grammar of numbers and verbs that was accurate enough that people used it by preference rather than as a novelty. Reviewers liked the voice recognition and the game sold poorly, which in 2008 was normally the end of the matter.

Ubisoft announced a return in 2013. EndWar Online was a free-to-play tactical strategy MMO for Windows and Mac, built by Ubisoft Shanghai and running in a browser instead of off a disc, and it carried the post World War III setting and the faction-based conflict forward from the console original. The strategic layer was the part the revival was betting on.

Open beta opened on 3 December 2015. The game never left it. On 25 August 2016 Ubisoft posted that EndWar Online would close on 31 October, blaming underperformance and a shift of attention to other projects, and in-game purchases stopped well before the date arrived. The forums and the social accounts came down with the servers.

Eleven months is short even by free-to-play standards, and the arithmetic is the thing to sit with. Announced in 2013, so roughly three years of development, and under one year of being available to anybody.

~ the record ~

~ the voice commands ~

What people actually remember about EndWar is the 2008 original, and specifically that the voice control worked. That was rare. Voice features in games of that era were demo material, and this one let you run an entire engagement without touching the controller. The game wrapped around it was a thin RTS with too few maps, which is what sank the thing commercially.

EndWar Online inherited the brand and the setting from a game whose one famous feature belonged to a headset and a console. Whatever the revival was going to be remembered for, it was not going to be that.

~ the fall ~

Ubisoft ran a batch of free-to-play web and mobile experiments in this window and closed nearly all of them. Ghost Recon Phantoms, a free shooter with a longer run and an audience that actually formed, shut down on 1 December 2016, a month after EndWar Online. Heroes of Might and Magic Online went the same way from the same publisher.

The common thread is a publisher treating the browser as a cheap way to keep a dormant brand in front of people, then finding out that the browser audience did not want a tactical strategy game with a Tom Clancy license bolted to the front of it.

~ the day it died ~

On 31 October 2016 the servers went off and the client could no longer connect, which for a browser game means the product simply stopped existing. There is no disc and no offline mode to fall back on. Everything anybody built inside it went at the same moment.

By late 2015 I was a working engineer with a decent connection and no interest in pledging a faction allegiance to a browser game. EndWar Online's whole public life fits inside a year I remember well for other reasons, and I never once heard the name while it was running. That is not a regional gap, it is a game that opened and closed without reaching anyone.

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