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Ubisoft has reassured gamers that upcoming voice command strategy game Tom Clancy’s EndWar won’t suffer from the voice recognition problems that led to a BBC investigation into the DS and UK regional dialects.
In February this year Nintendo came under fire following a BBC Watchdog programme which told of Manchester-based Michelle Livesey’s struggles with Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training.
In the programme Michelle said: “Basically you have to say the different colours that flash up on the screen as quickly as possible. I’m saying, blue, blue, blue and it’s saying no, even though it was blue. Then it got to yellow. I’m going, ‘yeller’ and everyone’s saying to me you need to be a bit posher. You need to say, ‘yellow’ and as soon as I did, it picked it up.”
However, speaking to VideoGamer.com at Ubisoft’s annual Paris showcase Ubidays last week, Julian Gerighty, editorial content director at Ubisoft Shanghai, said that development team had been able to hone the recognition rate for the voice commands by limiting them to approximately 40.
“We actually test this game 24 hours a day,” said Gerighty. “We’ve got a test team in Romania, China and Montreal. You can’t get more different accents than that. We’ve found that limiting the amount of words in the voice command helps you hone the recognition rate for all of them. And you’re talking about a microphone on the DS which is tiny, bad quality that you can’t hold up to your mouth. With this it’s right there, it’s much better system. And it’s a 360 there’s much more processing power and everything compared to a DS.”
EndWar, which is scheduled for release this “October or November”, will also be coming out on PS3. At Ubidays Gerighty told VideoGamer.com that the development team didn’t think the smaller number of headset-using PS3 owners would hinder the game’s popularity on Sony’s console, and revealed plans to bundle a headset with the Collector’s Edition of the game.
“It’s true that on Xbox 360 you’ve got 95% or more people who have a headset,” he said. “On PS3 we’re going to bundle a headset with a Collector’s Edition or something. I don’t know if they’ve decided whether it’s going to be a blue tooth or a normal headset but it’s definitely planned. For 360 we’ll also have branded headsets.”
Don’t forget to check out our hands-on preview of Tom Clancy’s EndWar right here.
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