Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade Revives the MMO Dream

[Megalodon]

Im rather nervous about a 40k or warhammer mmo tbh... Would rather more "conventional" games with the warhammer brand, the universe is brimming with possibilities and settings for rpgs, adventure or even management games as well as the usual strategy stuff.

Yeah, attempting to do an MMO makes me sad, as I won't be playing it, just do some more decent single player titles.

Im already bitching about the sides:

Space marines only for the imperium? Way to shoot themselves in the foot already and ignore the guard, adepta sororitas (aka female space marines if you will) and mechanicus, the mixed arms approach would have been much more representative of the imperium then it just being a side full of marines....

This isn't exactly unprecedented, Guard only showed up with the 2nd DOW expansion. Marines are their poster boys, and tryingto do a fully integrated "Army of the Imperium" would be a massive job and a right bugger to balance to boot.

Same goes for chaos actually, besides having the evil versions of the imperium classes, they also got daemons. Sticking to just chaos marines is...boring.

So probably two of the sides will play in a similar way. Why is this such a bad thing? Planetside 2 (appparently the go-to comparsion for this game) has the same classes for each fraction. Plus it makes the developers job slightly easier, as they wouldn't have the build an additioanl faction entirely from scratch, plus the loyalist vs traitor marine conflict is pretty iconic for 40k.

Also in an mmo its not a smart idea to lock out female players wanting to play female charactets from playing those sides... And if female mmo players atm want to roll chaos or imperium, tough luck sister, you're gonna have to be playing a burly guy ;P

Which leaves orks and eldar, who are both sides that would seem to offer a lot more flexibility in class archetype (hypothetically). I can see those 2 camps being the "cool" ones on account of that and probably the more fun ones community wise.

Why did you give the Orks a free pass from the "can't play as a girl" criticism? If a female player wants to play an Ork they're using the same burly model as everyone else, and only existing 40k fans are likely to know the whole mono-gendered mushroom-people background. Of the 4 faction, only the Eldar have an entirely gender-neutral military Plus, is this really an issue, is beng able to play as your own gender such a sticking point for MMO players? On the table top female players (admittedly a rather extreme minority) play armies other than Sisters. Again, why is this an issue?

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

Cool. Now we need someone who can actually make GOOD games, because lord knows Behaviour don't.

 

[ron1n]

Why are they obsessed with choosing the most boring races?

Both Necrons and Tau haven't even been featured properly in a Warhammer game since Dark Crusade.

Need to think about it from a design point of view.

How would you possibly make necron playable? I mean, they're essentially slaves which is kind of weird from a character creation point of view. Class wise you have little to no variety either. Their heavy 'vehicles' like destroyers are mostly fused to necron bodies and not something you could get in/get out of which would suck from a game mechanic perspective. Plus there's the balance issues around phase technology and regenerating health.

Tau you could make a case for, but again, they lack variety. So much of their army is tied up in long range combat. No psykers either. You could include a kroot carnivore as a class I suppose but the rest of the army would be pretty much relegated to samey fire caste classes. They do have an awesome array of vehicles though.

Imperial Guard could work really well, but you'd need some kind of WoW hunter style 'pet' units of IG soldiers to give a convincing 'feel' to the faction. Could actually be really interesting playing say a Commissar that has 3-4 weaker IG pet units to direct.

Nevertheless, the four race chosen have the best class compatibility. Each faction has a Psyker, a Fast attack unit and a variety of long range options. You've even got potential healers such as the Mad Dok and Apothecary in the mix in addition to sniper units like ranger and scout marine.

Vehicles are also pretty balanced. Each side has APCs, main tank, Bikes, Walkers etc.

Also just because it's a third person shooter, doesn't mean it can't have traditional RPG elements. They might go down a more simplified Planetside route, but I don't think so. 3rd person means the likelihood of a hotbar, abilities and all the other typical MMORPG features. The 3rd person shooter aspect just means the combat will be faster and less clunky (i.e Star Wars The Old Republic)

Providing the developer isn't as terrible as they would seem, I'm cautiously optimistic.

EDIT: Oh and they sure as hell better not pull any Order vs Destruction bs and team Orks with Chaos and Eldar with Imperium. NEEDS to be 1v1v1v1

 

[Frankster]

snip

Not quite as skilled with the multi quoting so just lazily pasted the parts im answering to.

"This isn't exactly unprecedented, Guard only showed up with the 2nd DOW expansion. Marines are their poster boys, and tryingto do a fully integrated "Army of the Imperium" would be a massive job and a right bugger to balance to boot.

So probably two of the sides will play in a similar way. Why is this such a bad thing? Planetside 2 (appparently the go-to comparsion for this game) has the same classes for each fraction. Plus it makes the developers job slightly easier, as they wouldn't have the build an additioanl faction entirely from scratch, plus the loyalist vs traitor marine conflict is pretty iconic for 40k."

I have not played planetside nor had much interest in it, so comparisons to it will fly over my head im afraid.
Its also why im seeing more from an mmo perspective where char creation and personalisation is a big deal, so a side with 2 marine based forces is something i dont see would appeal beyond the core 40k enthusiasts.
This is coming from a guy who quite enjoyed mix matching different armor variants together in Space Marines multi.

Regarding gameplay and how sides play, i didnt mean to comment on that and will refrain judgement until we hear more about the game mechanics.


"Which leaves orks and eldar, who are both sides that would seem to offer a lot more flexibility in class archetype (hypothetically). I can see those 2 camps being the "cool" ones on account of that and probably the more fun ones community wise.

Why did you give the Orks a free pass from the "can't play as a girl" criticism. If a female player wants to play an Ork they're using the same burly model as everyone else, and only existing 40k fans are likely to know the whole mono-gendered mushroom-people background. Of the 4 faction, only the Eldar have an entirely gender-neutral military Plus, is this really an issue, is beng able to play as your own gender such a sticking point for MMO players? On the table top female players (admittedly a rather extreme minority) play armies other than Sisters. Again, why is this an issue?"

If there were female orks id be arguing for their inclusion aswell. But there ain't and based on my experiences from warhammer online (not best example of success i know, but it had a fun community esp at the start)some female players rather enjoy playing gobbos for their gobboish ways, the greenskins have their own appeal. Fluff isnt something to be thrown out of the window.

Space marines dont have this excuse though, they have their distaff versions the sisters of battle. Creativity could have been applied into the chaos side aswell, this is a bit of a missed opportunity in my eyes and will be a minus to people on the fence.

And yes, i believe being able to play with your own gender when applicable is a sticking point for MMO players and possibly even a significant proportion of female gamers (look i dont know...there are enough ppl saying this in related escapist threads that i believe it to be true to some degree) who might be turned off this game just by the fact only 1 faction allows women at all in their ranks. Heck you remember Brink? I do remember was a fuss because it boasted about how awesome its character customisation included billions of unique possibilities, but no female characters.
It seems at the very least eternal crusade will have howling banshees so wont be as bad as that, but seems needlessly shooting themselves in the foot.

As for why this is an issue, i wouldnt go that far but just see it as needlessly restricting the target audience and know that if its trying to be an mmo, its already dropping the ball by restricting female characters to just 1 faction.
Its still early days and a lot can happen, but such are my initial thoughts.

 

[aelreth]

From the makers of...

Spoiler: All these games

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Yea... obviously the BEST people to make a 40k MMO...... ugh...

Killjoy.

I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until your realism entered the area.

Thank you. (I might have considered pre-ordering)

 

[Serbia Strong]

It's a F2P game with P2W mechanics.

Orks are the only race allowed for F2P players. The others are Pay2Play and are P2W as it takes 5 Orks to take down anything else down. I can understand an Ork swarm but it's going to cause P2W problems. F2P! COME ON F2P?! DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT F2P GAMES HAVE SOME OF THE MOST GARBAGE TOILET BOWL COMMUNITIES!

 

[VeneratedWulfen93]

Why are they obsessed with choosing the most boring races?

Both Necrons and Tau haven't even been featured properly in a Warhammer game since Dark Crusade.

Need to think about it from a design point of view.

How would you possibly make necron playable? I mean, they're essentially slaves which is kind of weird from a character creation point of view. Class wise you have little to no variety either. Their heavy 'vehicles' like destroyers are mostly fused to necron bodies and not something you could get in/get out of which would suck from a game mechanic perspective. Plus there's the balance issues around phase technology and regenerating health.

Tau you could make a case for, but again, they lack variety. So much of their army is tied up in long range combat. No psykers either. You could include a kroot carnivore as a class I suppose but the rest of the army would be pretty much relegated to samey fire caste classes. They do have an awesome array of vehicles though.

Imperial Guard could work really well, but you'd need some kind of WoW hunter style 'pet' units of IG soldiers to give a convincing 'feel' to the faction. Could actually be really interesting playing say a Commissar that has 3-4 weaker IG pet units to direct.

Nevertheless, the four race chosen have the best class compatibility. Each faction has a Psyker, a Fast attack unit and a variety of long range options. You've even got potential healers such as the Mad Dok and Apothecary in the mix in addition to sniper units like ranger and scout marine.

Vehicles are also pretty balanced. Each side has APCs, main tank, Bikes, Walkers etc.

Also just because it's a third person shooter, doesn't mean it can't have traditional RPG elements. They might go down a more simplified Planetside route, but I don't think so. 3rd person means the likelihood of a hotbar, abilities and all the other typical MMORPG features. The 3rd person shooter aspect just means the combat will be faster and less clunky (i.e Star Wars The Old Republic)

Providing the developer isn't as terrible as they would seem, I'm cautiously optimistic.

EDIT: Oh and they sure as hell better not pull any Order vs Destruction bs and team Orks with Chaos and Eldar with Imperium. NEEDS to be 1v1v1v1

Well I'm hoping they move as far away from RPG elements as possible.

You can't have an army of champions.

If it really is supposed to be thousands of people fighting each other all at once, then most of them are going to have to be standard cannon fodder.

And where is the balance between a person playing as a Banshee and a person playing as terminator? The eldars strength comes psykers, yea. But they don't comprise their entire army. You're going to need a lot of standard units, not to mention slow moving artillery such as wraith guard etc.

The space marines are going to need to have less players, full stop. Even their scouts have more armour and firepower than most of the Eldars bulk infantry.

Balance will have to come from the amount of players each team gets. How it's decided who's going to be a farseer or ranger, or a scount or a dreadnaught etc... I don't know. But one thing is certain, if it is going to be pvp on the scale they're bragging. Most people are going to have to be standard infantry.

And if they can balance Eldar with Space Marines, they can damnwell balance Necrons and Tau.

Edit:

What I'm getting at is that if given the choice, who's going to be a scout when they can be a force commander? Who's going to be a Ranger when they could be an Exarch? Who's going to be a shoota when they can be a warboss? Or a Cultist when they can be a Champion.

But the armies need cultists and scouts and Rangers and shoota boys. And they need a lot more of them than they need champion classes.

Eldar have mostly 3+ armour on their units, like Space Marines. Scouts have better armour than 2 Eldar units, Guardians and Rangers. Scouts have the same armour as Swooping Hawks, Howling Banshees and Dire Avengers. Every other Aspect Warrior has the same armour as a Space Marine. Eldar are pretty well armoured as a faction, its their toughness that is inferior to Space Marines.

 

[VeneratedWulfen93]

Can I play as Tau? No? Not interested.

...I take that back. I might be interested if I can play as Mechanicus.

I also would love to play as Tau but they are an incredibly close second to Eldar to me. So as long as I get to play as a Farseer, laying waste to everything in sight with crazy phycic powers I will give it a try.

Tau gets so very little love. Still, I'll probably keep an eye on this one just in case...

"Tau get so very little love..."

Clearly you havn't read the 6th edition codex. Tau went from the laughing stock of 40k to hyper-brutal and punishing.

I haven't read it actually. I was just referring to the video games (though I never did play uhm... Fire Warrior, was it?).

Fire Warrior was a bit weird. It made no sense that a single Fire Warrior could run through Guardsmen.

I never understand the love for the Tau, everything is good for them and everyone loves them. Eldar get shafted way more often than Tau, which as an Eldar player I can't stand.

As soon as a Tau unit becomes something that is killed in every book/story/game to show how tough someone is then complain about the Tau's lack of 'love'.