Poor Ubisoft Shanghai, stuck for years with hand-me-down ports and clean-up work on the bigger projects that their brothers in Paris and Montreal got to headline, Ubisoft is finally giving them the chance to prove themselves, not with a sequel to something else but their very own next-gen real-time strategy game. A next-gen RPS exclusively for consoles.

If the very concept of a RTS on consoles gives you pause, it's probably for good reason. Sure, the 360 has had games that met with marginal success in condensing the 100+ plus key configurations of PC keyboards down to the limited buttons of a console controller, but a better idea is just to assume that the 10 or so buttons on PS3/360 controllers are all you'll be able to use, and go from there. Or at least that's Ubisoft's approach to things, and they're betting that it, along with the lofty premise of World War III in a not-too-distant future, will be the first honest-to-goodness console RTS. Not a port, not a compromised re-imagining, but a console game through and through.

This was the basic spiel that Ubisoft gave us at their Ubidays event, but even as they went about explaining the game (by way of former Total War creative mind Michael de Plater), there was no way to actually see the concepts in anything but an absolutely awesome -- but entirely -- CG trailer playing on a screen next to us (you can see the very same trailer by scrolling up and clicking on the Movies link, and we highly recommend that you do as it's stunning).

Though they weren't really ready to talk about the specifics of gameplay beyond stating that this would not be a traditional top-down affair but rather a presentation influenced in part by -- of all things -- the Madden games in terms of how the battlefield is viewed. The game is meant to be a low-unit, strategic trudge through the worldwide battlefields in the game, not a 100 unit swarm with utterly dispensable units that are manufactured en masse. That's all we got, though, as the conversation transitioned instead into how the whole conflict -- which takes place in a persistent always-there worldwide multiplayer conflict between factions that you choose at the start of the single-player game.

With natural resources dwindling to near nothing, Russia suddenly emerges as a global superpower because of their vast stores of oil. Meanwhile, the nuclear stalemate between the remaining superpowers effectively comes to an end as the US develops a system to easily shoot down any incoming missiles (guess Reagan's Star Wars program was ahead of its time). Without the threat of nuclear strikes, American pours more money into exploring things beyond our planet, igniting a race to own space. And they just about do it too, but as they plan to launch the Freedom Star Space Station with the rest of the world just itching for a reason to explode into full-on conflict, terrorists scuttle the launch by blowing up the landing pad, thus kicking off the first global conflict in almost 100 years.

EndWar is all going down just an unlucky 13 years from now means sci-fi can be blending with fact and existing tech with just the lightest futuristic spin put on it. We'll no doubt see some form of super soldiers and, we hope, maybe the start of mechanized or even unmanned combat, but right now only de Plater and the rest of the Ubisoft Shanghai team really know what will happen. With a believable premise and an insane amount of potential to say we're finally excited about a project coming out of the Shangai studio is something of an understatement.

They have an uphill battle on multiple fronts, but if the team can make EndWar into what they're pitching to be, it could finally give rise to the world of legitimate (and legitimately different) real-time strategy games on consoles. Dig on the screens and CG trailer, and once we've seen it all in motion (and can confirm that those screens are even real), we'll let you know.