Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade Update

Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade Update

If you do not know it by now, I am a huge fan of Warhammer 40k by Games Workshop. It’s a table top war game that features various factions fighting in a grim dark sci fi setting just to try and survive. Giant space bugs, space elves, dark space elves, a legion of human soldiers, aliens focused on advanced technology, robot zombies and so much more. The price of admission to even play the table top is close to $100 for just the starting units alone, if you throw in dice, measuring tape, rule book and paints(Of course) then it goes well over $100. However, we are not here to talk about the plastic crack that is Warhammer 40k table top, we are here to talk our the game we’re most excited about: Warhammer 40k Eternal Crusade.

I wrote an article a while back about Eternal Crusade and my first impressions, while I had fun writing it and getting my fanboy for the game out of my system I could not help but feel that I need to do an update on the game and it’s development. A lot has happened since then. Let’s go ahead and jump right in!

Miguel Caron no longer with Behaviour

This was the most shocking bit of news for me, I watch their streams every Friday and was present when they announced his departure. I, along with many others, were heartbroken with him leaving. A lot of the fans and I chatted about conspiracy theories as to why this occurred. Did they sell out and Miguel could not stand by? Did Miguel give out too many promises and secrets that they needed someone else to take over? Was Miguel simply yearning to do his own thing? A lot of questions were raised but all the while everyone was incredibly kind during this whole process. There was even a stream where Miguel showed up in good spirits via chat, the devs greeted him with open arms and everything seemed all good.

 

Miguel Replaced By Nathan Richardsson

Who could fill the very large shoes of Miguel? Nathan Richardsson steps up to the plate to take on this challenge. Admittedly, I was skeptical of this transition. I assumed Nathan was put in place by some publisher to ensure the game went the way they wanted it to go rather than staying true to the fans. As the weeks rolled on  we, the fans, got to see more of Nathan on stream answering questions, interacting with fans and just being apart of the team. Although quite odd at first, he grew on me and I can tell he has good intentions for both the game and the community.

Open World Not An Option

When Eternal Crusade first began rolling out their streams and talking with the community, they told the fans “We’re going to have large scale warfare in an open world.”, pretty much saying that they were taking the Planet Side 2 style but throwing in Warhammer 40k themes every which way. Of course the fans and I were both ecstatic by the news and could only dream of such an incredible game being released with our favorite IP.

Once Nathan took the reigns and began appearing on streams, he started admitting some hard truths to everyone. Now having been in customer service, you have to break the bad news to a customer for two reasons: Something happened and it was your fault or Someone is forcing you to do something you don’t wanna do and you have to be the messenger. Whether or not there are big wigs in the background who’ve made decisions for the game or having a total open world was a nightmare from a technical stand point is unknown. What is known is that their new model, keep in mind it’s all a work in progress so things could change, are skirmishes. You take a set number of troops and throw them in a limited size map and have them battle. Benefits that the developers gave and I can see are: Less over all lag due to finite amount of players, better quality of matchmaking, better chance for players to have a chance to help out in a big way due to the set amount of units and hopefully less stress on the servers.

My concern with this aspect is the fact that there are four factions: Eldar, Orks, Space Marines, and Chaos Space Marines. If they set battles to 30 man fights, would it be 30 men from each faction or simply 30 over all and who ever arrived first on the battle field gets to fight while the excess gets thrown into their own 30 man instance. In Planetside 2, a major draw is that everyone fights together so you can recruit from your base and then march down to enemy base and lay siege with overwhelming numbers. Having set instances may hinder the experience to a larger scale Space Marine Video Game multiplayer match.

Granted, this is all up in the air and my expectations could be far from what the actual game play will be like.

Fans Get To Vote In the 5th Sub Faction

Being the awesome people that they are, the guys and gals behind Eternal Crusade are giving the option of which 5th sub faction will be playable in their game. To recap, there are 4 factions and within those factions there will be 5 to choose from. The Orks for example are a faction but they have 5 clans that can be played: Goffs, Evil Suns, Bad Moons, Deathskulls and the recently voted in Blood Axes(I voted for em!).

The team behind Eternal Crusade have always been nothing short of wonderful with their community and continue to show their love and affection for the fans. My only hope is that Tzeentch is on the list to be voted in for Chaos because there needs to be some Thousand Suns in this battle! However, Nurgle is also not currently on the list and is a huge fan favorite. As long as either one is on the roster to be voted upon, I’m a very ALL IS DUST. PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE. BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE happy camper! DEATH TO THE FALSE EMPEROR!

Katie Is Still The Love Of Our Lives

Ah Katie Fleming. Tomb Raider fan fic, wonderful personality, generous with Twitch giveaways and has an awesome sense of humor. Seriously though, Katie(We’re totally on a first name basis)is the community manager for Eternal Crusade, participating on the fourms, talking with fans on Facebook, Twitch, Twitter etc. She pretty much keeps us all entertained and happy knowing that they care about us, the fans, every week.

I’ve followed other games in the past with terrible community managers or ones that have none at all and the feeling can be very cold. Like ordering a snack from the vending machine cold. Katie is great at her job, making us all feel loved and adored and most importantly, she always plays chaos.

 

That is all I have on the top of my head regarding the major changes or updates to the game. Minor updates include better overall design of armor and characters, updates to combat, weapon balances, prototypes for Tyranid models, orc models, eldar models and chaos models etc. All of it looks great and I can’t wait to see what is coming next! I highly recommend following their work, I wait on the edge of my seat every Friday watching the updates!

You can check out Eternal Crusade by clicking this awesome link!  

If Katie ends up looking at this, click here.