When Behaviour Interactive announced the other day that they were working on an MMORPG set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, your first thought was probably a party of Space Marines bounding across an Ork-infested Forgeworld, off on a quest to kill 20 warp-mutated rabbits to help some poor foreman keep his Titan production facility in check. That’s about as far away from Behaviour’s vision as you could get, so you can sigh your relief now.
The studio gave a brief outline of their vision in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and it may come of a surprise to you. “With Eternal Crusade we’re creating a game where players tell the story to us rather than the other way around, and it means a very different set of challenges from a development perspective than those faced by others in the genre. The game is an MMORPG, but not in the sense that it’s a content- and quest-heavy theme park – ours is more a system-driven virtual world in the vein of Planetside 2 or EvE Online. “There Is Only War” is our mantra, so for the most part the players ARE the content, and what PvE gameplay we have is procedurally generated. We’re taking a lot of inspiration from what Diablo-style ARPGs and co-op games like Left 4 Dead do to create infinite fun.”
It’s good to know that they’re taking the “Only War” element of the Warhammer fiction as a starting point, since that’s something that a traditional MMORPG couldn’t convey. Just the mere mention of Planetside suddenly makes the whole project make sense, so even if Behaviour are an unproven studio in the MMO space, at least we can rest easy knowing they’ve got a plan worth pursuing.