From David Ghozland, Creative Director
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade
Jun 12, 2015Hello Crusaders,It has been a long time since the first State of the Crusade I wrote in June 2013. In this newsletter I was announcing the game, the promise and the experience we were aiming for. During these 2 years we went through the classic development roller coaster with tech issues and variations in team size. Lots of emotions, lots of pain but also many joys and we advanced. The scope reduced a bit along with the number of players per battle, but overall the promise didn’t change much. We are still delivering a war on a planetary scale focusing on PvP conflict, with PVE Tyranids invasions and horizontal progression. We’ve delayed the release of some features and content, but the experience remains: “Be an Elite Warrior of the 41st Millennium”.Today’s subjects are the open world and massive battles. There were a lot of worried posts in the forum about this matter, especially since a well known Icelandic Viking raided our production with an axe yelling some obscure threatening Nordic gods names such as “Rescop”, “Reduss” and “Cuth”. At least, this is how some of you seem to have seen Nathan.

The reality is very different. Nathan is actually a great producer doing his hardest to make this thing work. With a scope reduction, changing engine and network tech not delivering, hard choices and difficult decisions had to be taken and I salute Nathan for his courage and persistency. Also you should know that “Cuth” is actually the name of the Norse God of Pushing: the one who pushes features for after launch. So When Nathan is yelling “Cuth”, he actually means “Push”, summoning this ancient power for the strength to push things around…

Joking aside, here is the reality of Eternal Crusade:

1. Nothing has been cut, it has been pushed at worst or adapted to our current constraints
2. Because of the choices we’ve made, Founders will have access to the game sooner than expected.
3. We will release features progressively and regularly starting from Founders Access until we deliver the entire promise and beyond.

In the past months my main duty has been to find a solution or a way to preserve the experience despite the new constraints. Sorry for being absent from the forums and Twitch streams but this was THE priority. Nathan gave me all the support he could and after weeks of pulling my hairs and growing a beard I finally hatched a plan, something that was achievable but allowed us to still fulfill the promise of a massive war and a truly 40k-worthy experience.

I present to you the ROAD TO THE OPEN WORLD:

The World:

The game starts with one of the four Arkhonan continents: “Malcadia”, named in the honor of Malcador the Sigillite, first lord of Terra. This is a massive 16×16 km open area bound by the red seas.

This continent has been built with the idea of supporting an open world experience – we can currently walk seamlessly from one side to the other. Unfortunately, the tech issue we have limiting the number of players per instance makes the open world PvP experience currently impossible. The new tech will be developed but not in time for launch.

Match-based massive warfare with 120+ Locations:

To address this issue in the meantime, we divide the continent into ~120 locations or “points of interest”. Each point of interest is unique, built directly on the continent and taking into account the terrain underneath. This result in many instances: potential PvP matches hosting dozens (between 10-100) of players each but active only when a battle is in progress. That way, each server still delivers a persistent war across real territory shared by all players of a same region.

PVE missions and Tyranid invasion zones are not considered as points of interest, they are separate maps which can be instanced as needed. The training and social zones work the same way, meaning that several instances of them co-exist at the same time.

For each match, these locations are loaded with their surrounding environment. The limits and map boundaries are artificially created to keep players in the combat area. Outside of the playable area there is no war… so go back to the fight, warriors!

The continent is divided into 28 territories containing 3 outposts and a stronghold each. The Stronghold determines ownership of the territory and in order to attack a stronghold, a Faction must own at least 2 outposts. It is also possible for a commander to spawn a Command Vehicle to accelerate the process. Since each outpost provides a bonus for any battles in that territory it is crucial to conquer and hold as many as possible.

Evolution Post-launch:

With the tech reaching maturity next year our first intention is to increase the number of players per battle. Once the tech offers a stable 100 person battle we will start regrouping the outpost maps together into a single match across a wide space.

The obvious step afterward will be to regroup the outpost and Stronghold battle together into a single Territory battle with more than 200 players. To give you an idea of the size of the map, we are talking about 2×3 km for a single territory.

As a stretch goal for the year after, we can imagine regrouping several territories together into a single match with 500+ players.

We hope to be able to push farther than that, but now we’re getting quite a ways into the future. The idea here is the progressive evolution of the game from match-based warfare on smaller maps to a more open sandbox experience. There will be a limit to what we can achieve but we are pretty confident that we can reach the territorial match stage, where an entire territory is a match, in the first year. After that everything will depend on how you play the game, what you like and dislike and also how successful our R&D efforts are.

Now that we have a plan we will focus on executing it – with a chainsword if need be. I have Nathan word on it! So yes this is our direction and yes the Terminators are confirmed for the first add-on after launch.

Until next time, sharpen your power sword and beware of the perils of the warp.

Source: Eternal Crusade State of the Crusade