NOTE: Please refrain from making this a PGI/MWO bashing contest. This is information about a NEW game with no real content and 2 years left before release.
Eternal Crusade
Ten Ton Hammer
MMORPG
MuchDifferent - PikkoServer
Summary - A quick update with bullet points:
- NOT RELATED TO DARK MILLENIUM!!!
- The camera angle is over the shoulder (similar to Space Marine)
- Contains finishing moves and is supposed to be rather bloody
- It's being developed by Behavior Interactive Montreal
- It is using the Unity engine
- Uses PikkoServer and claims up to 1000 players in a single, active battle
- Has a development team of 275 people
- 4 Races are planned for launch - Orks, Eldar, Space Marines, Chaos
- Tyranids are a PVE, non-playable 5th race
- Each playable race has 4 unique factions
- Announced factions so far are Dark Angels, Ultramarines, Blood Angels, and Space Wolves
- Each faction has unique bonuses within it's race
- Each race has unlockable "classes" I'm guessing this means tactical marine, assault marine, devastator marine, etc.
- Deep and extensive custimization and advancements
- Players who don't pay any money at all can only be boyz
- It will take 5 boyz to kill 1 marine
- There WILL be player usable vehicles
- Each player gets their own space ship that is fully customizable
- Players can form squads and vote on where to attack
- Forming a squad puts the players on a single, shared ship
- Each faction has a player elected council that creates objectives
- Completing assigned objectives gives you lots of experience and a requisition token
- Players and the council have overland maps with friendly and enemy forces displayed, and the council can make strategic decisions about where to place objectives based on enemy movements and captured resources.
- Requisition tokens are the only form of currency
- Tyranids are a non-playable PVE race
- All "dungeons" are procedurally generated and filled with tyranids. You'll never get the same "dungeon" twice
- Each race has a number of classes that can be unlocked, with their own skills, armor, weapons, etc that they can use
- Players will fight over a planet for 3 months, after which a winner is declared and everyone moves to a completely different planet
- The pay model is currently focused on unlocking a race and buying cosmetic items. Classes are unlocked with XP (if you bought the race).
- Your ship has a world map that shows objectives and where friendly units are attacking. You can drop pod into battle with it.
- Terrain is destructible.
- Taking a building may damage it, so your faction must repair it before it gets a bonus from it.
As far as I know, this is Unity's largest game developer by far. It's a AAA MMO style game with 2 years of development using an extremely popular IP. As someone who uses Unity myself, I'm very interested in seeing how this pushes Unity to develop more features (especially those features that we've been demanding for a while). This may shoot Unity up in power and ability closer to that of Unreal 3/4 and out of the indie only box that it's been stuck in.
I kind of like the voting system, but it's very easy to troll. It only takes a single person getting voted in and doing nothing to ruin that whole faction. Anyone who has played games with a voting mechanic know that it can be hard to kick or remove someone when 99% of the players don't vote. That said, if the developers take an active roll in this player elected council, much like CCP does for EVE, then it opens up all kinds of potential for war councils and very deep strategy. Moreso if these leaders have special insignia to denote who they are on the battlefield (such as very ornate armor, cloaks, huge power claws, etc). Suddenly you have something that looks and feels VERY much like 40k.
I'm interested in seeing how the "freeloaders can only be boyz" stance will work out. I get their take - that they want a lot of orks and they need to do something with the free players. But how many people will be interested in that? To be honest, it may be in their best interest to make both cultists and boyz a free faction. This allows people to play both the alien and the human where large numbers are expected. I imagine Imperial Guard will work in a similar fashion, with many guardsmen required to kill one space marine. My fear is that not enough people will want to bother being an ork at all, and just skip out on the game.
I don't like the "everyone gets their own ship" philosophy though. I think squads or units should get ships, individuals should get a room on the ship. Upgrades and cosmetics should come though the entire squad helping out (similar to guilds in Guild Wars 2). I know it's a money making feature, but they could add something like loyalty points for every time a player spends money. They can add these loyalty points to the squad to speed up or outright buy upgrades for the ship. This encourages spending without forcing it.
I'm very interesting in the procedural dungeons. I think this could potentially change the entire face of MMO's, where the world is completely static with every player performed measured movements to move from x gear to x gear until they max out. This means no more mindless speed runs or monotonous grinding for gear. It also saves on development time and allows the team to focus on adding more factions that people want instead of making sure there is a dungeon for each race of the proper level that gives the proper reward.
I've been a Dark Angel player since the tail end of 2nd Edition, so I'm eager to see if there will be unique advancement trees for unique factions, like becoming a Deathwing terminator or Ravenwing biker. I'm also wondering how the rank system works in conjunction with professions - a devastator sergeant doesn't use any heavy weapons, so would you advance and lose that ability, or is being a sergeant an advancement path of its own?
The size of the game is rather interesting. 1000 players in a single battle is larger than almost any game of Warhammer 40k table top you'll ever play. Note that this is players per battle, not server. The difference is that planetside 2 can handle 2000 players per continent, but not in a single battle. That breaks down when you have more than a few hundred, so this should be interesting. It's a huge claim, and a lot of people are going to be eager to see if they can make good on it.
Edited by S3dition, 01 September 2013 - 09:32 AM.