On our second day at the GamesCom we met up with the Studio Head for Online Games at Behaviour Interactive, Miguel Caron to speak about Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade. After taking a cup of coffee with him, we began our appointment, and although we didn’t expect more than a brief interview accompanied by a short look at the game, we had the luck to attend a very complete presentation of the game.

The game is still in a very early alpha test phase and although there are not many contents available, according to Caron, the guys from Behaviour are selling the idea of what is going to be the game. He only showed us a couple of gameplay videos and a few screenshots, but he spoke to us about the game for an hour and a half, time that flew as he talked about the anecdotes of how the fans visited their offices to try the game and even some of them went to his hotel room to try the game on his laptop, and about his opinions about the industry.

Miguel spoke mainly about was what the game was going to be like, describing in detail the technological capability of the game, which can support large concentrations of players in the same place, so the stunning scene that many of us imagine of 500 Space Marines protecting a base of a tide of Orks is going to become real. We also spoke about the squad system, with which we can form groups, which, in turn, may be part of a bigger squad led by a squad leader, who can give them orders using the built in Razer Comms technology, being the first game to do so.

He made us imagine a scenario in which a player enters the game for the first time, riding a bike and going to an unknown installation, when suddenly he hears an in game voice message informing him that he must go to an area controlled by the Eldar, because the scouts have identified some dangers and they need support to attack a base in the South. There the Commander appears riding a huge tank, giving orders to his troops. Once the victory is achieved, the Commander will harangue his troops: "You have done it well soldiers. You have fought bravely. If you are interested, get in touch with our leader and he is going to propose you to be a permanent part of our squad."

In fact he managed to sell us this idea, which we really liked. It is clear that Miguel is a fan of the game, and even if the game is at a very early stage, he’s very excited about what the team is doing. When we spoke about the game background, he told us to that they a team of experts helping them work out where their game could fit in the 40k universe, as well as a lot of fans aware of any failure of the team. The developers work very closely to the players, who offer a constant stream of ideas, suggestions and opinions about all the game's features and mechanics. The truth is that it is very good to see that there is so much communication between the developers and the fans.

Below you can find a gameplay video of the game’s alpha:

Developers have big plans for the game and they are constantly adding new features to it. The game has currently four different playable factions and they intend to add more races in the future. The main complication to make races is that there are many different factions, with lots of subfactions, and although they may allow players to change the color of their armors to represent this subfactions in the game, each of them has different weapons and playstyles, determined in part by their lore, so they prefer to make few factions very well done than a lot of soulless factions.

In the gameplay video we saw an attacker firing from afar to a player, using his heavy bolter to shoot suppression fire to the player, which caused that the player were suppressed, making his targeting reticle larger, which makes harder to hit their enemies. We also saw players assaulting enemies with enormous chainswords, gutting them and kicking them to the floor and throwing an extra bolter round to their fallen victims head to finish them off. The combat is bloody and brutal, but is the type of combat expected in an MMO of Warhammer 40 k.

The game´s graphical quality can’t be judged now it is, since now it’s in a very early alpha stage, although we have to say that the current models are pretty amazing as far as we were concerned. Is the game going to have cutting edge graphics? It is too early to tell, but we expect them to be able to bring the impressive list of features that they have promised. We know that the early stages of a game’s development are a hell full of problems, games come and go all the time and as it stands Behaviour Interactive is definitely working up the hype with Eternal Crusade, we just hope that it lives up to it when we start to see some more concrete developments underway.

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