WH40K: Eternal Crusade - Enjoying an Awful Game

Once upon a time there was a crowdfunding campaign, which promised a large-scale Warhammer 40K shooter. Literally hundreds, if not thousands of players were supposed to be fighting over territory on gigantic maps. Planetside 2 in the 40K universe, they said. Then the lead designer quit his job halfway through the development process and people got an arena shooter with a maximum player count of, um... was it 40? 60? Something considerably less than a thousand per map.

The new game director said this was just work in progress. Work out the combat mechanics, get the shooting right, then they'll scale things up a bit. Except that never happened. In fact, most of the stuff they promised for this game (large persistent world, meaningful campaigns, proper pve content, thousands of items) never happened. Which didn't stop them from showing gameplay that didn't actually exist in one of their launch trailers. They also promised non-existing features until literally hours before release:

Immediately before release they changed the infographic for something far less impressive:

There is still no "persistent" world and the alleged "campaign" was added months later and boils down to "win 5 matches in a day for a reward". There are no 1000s of weapons. Not even close.

A week after launch, the game had a peak player count of something around 1,300 players, struggling to maintain 800 users at prime time. They charged 60 Bucks for this game and people felt ripped off, lashing out at the developers. The community manager responded in kind:

We were all a bit stressed. We are all better people now.

Add constant lag, performance issues, messy graphics and complete and utter lack of balancing to the game and I've bashed Eternal Crusade with a well-deserved 40/100 over at GameStar.

I kept an eye on the game over the following month or two, occasionally firing it up here and there to see if there were any interesting changes. But apart from a rapidly declining player base and tons upon tons of promises by the new lead developer, there was really nothing going on. Until now.

2D sun prite, ultra settings.

I checked the game's stats on SteamDB and suddenly, Eternal Crusade had a peak of 2,800 players, as well as over 1,200 active players in the past 24 hours. That's still abysmal, but it's considerably more than I had ever seen on there before. What happened?

As it turns out, the game is getting a F2P option. Or "Free 2 Waagh", as they call it. You can now play the game without paying anything, albeit with a bunch of restrictions. Progression is slowed down to 1/3 of its normal speed and you only get to play orks. Once you've unlocked the full version by spending 20 Bucks in the cash shop you get full access to all content and features. Meanwhile, people who purchased the retail version get 40 Bucks worth of premium currency to spend as they please. On top of that, they get an extra retail version of the game, which they can freely sell or gift to an unsuspecting victim on Steam.

Main menu looks a lot nicer now, too.

'Campaigns' are a thing now, though they hardly deserve their name. Basically, if you manage to win five matches within a certain amount of time, you'll get a bunch of premium curreny. If your faction outperformed everyone else, you get a bonus. That's it. For what it's worth, you can now earn premium monies for the cash shop without actually spending anything and there's a bunch of cool-looking new customizations. Check out my wolf priest above. I think he's adorable! ♥

I played for a few hours and actually had fun. Balancing is still chaotic, but in a good way. I've been one-shot by guys with plasma cannons and orks with claws and rocket launchers. With that said, you simply shouldn't try punching somebody who aims a missile at you. And the clawy ork had such a massive windup time on his heavy attack, I should have seen it coming from miles away. Teamkills are extremely frequent and players aren't shy to throw grenades, rockets, plasma and other shit into a room full of enemies and friendlies alike. Ingame chat rarely reached CoD-levels of toxicity, but things are only about as friendly as you'd expect in a competitive shooter.

Cutting a guy up in an execution attack is still very satisfying.

The game is so chaotic, I had some genuine laugh-out-loud funny moments, where I tried to heal a wounded team member and accidentally threw a grenade instead. Such happy little accidents aside, I actually enjoy playing a healer, which is something I've never done in any game, ever. I don't even consider rolling one. But in Eternal Crusade I get to poison enemies (or friends, if I'm not careful), beat the piss out of them, revive fallen comrades and shoot people's heads off with my unique bolt pistol, which comes with a really handy burst mode. I've unlocked it through a reward crate, which you can frequently claim just by playing the game. 90% of the stuff I get from there is useless for my class, but it feels great when you finally get some good new shit that makes your character feel more powerful.

The game awards points just like Battlefield, so you get rewarded for defending objectives, supporting other players, spotting and highlighting enemies and just about every other useful thing you could do on top of killing stuff. And I won't lie - throwing a grenade to take out three players (on the enemy team, for a change), then chopping another guy up and finishing him off with an execution whilst reviving the occasional fallen brother in the middle of things did make me feel like a total badass. Squad mates follow me, I get to keep them alive, but at the same time I'm powerful enough to kick some serious ass. Granted, I won't be blowing up tanks or sniping enemies from halfway across the map, but I can hold my own in a mid-range gunfight or a melee encounter.

Friendly fire is a thing. Imagine what a grenade could do here.

I've played against orks, chaos and eldar as a space marine and won and lost matches against all of them. Faction balance seemed much better than it was at launch time, where eldar dominated absolutely everything. Map timers and spawn tickets were well-balanced. If you check out my video on top, you can see the space marines narrowly winning a match at what's literally the very last second. We would have lost, had the orks managed to interrupt the final capture one last time, but they ran out of lives just a few moments too soon. It doesn't get any more close and exciting than that.

Performance is still a mixed bag. On the plus side, you now get to choose whether you want to play on EU or NA servers. And the game now actually shows a ping of 200ms and up when things get laggy. In the past, you'd never see your ping go above 40, even with players visibly rubberbanding and teleporting all over the place, so things were clearly considerably worse than 40ms. And what do you know - said teleporting and rubberbanding never happened once when I gave the game another go, so there's that.

Now I get to hammer these bitches before they magically appear behind me.

Actual game performance still ranges from playable to shit. On smaller maps with 16 or so people on both teams, things remained smooth and relatively stutter-free. On some of the larger maps I get stutters and freezes. You can see it in the tank gameplay starting at 3:26 in the video at the top of this article. Freezes, hitches and hiccups, making it almost impossible to aim at a moving target. At its worst moments the game froze when I came across an enemy, remaining frozen until I was greeted by the death screen. These moments were rare for me and only happened on the larger maps with lots of vehicles and 50 or so players, but they happened. It may not be as awful as it was, but it's still a problem.

If I had to rate this game today, I'd probably give it a mid to high 60, based solely on my most recent experience with it. And, obviously, ignoring all the broken promises and blatant lies made by the developers. If they ever manage to eradicate the annoying performance problems and stop pretending there was actual fun PvE content happening (I didn't get to try it, because it's completely dead), it could even be a 70. It's still a somewhat ugly, small-scale Battlefield clone set in the 40k universe. It's a chaotic, violent clusterfuck, where the next death is just one stupid plasma cannon wielding teammate away. I'm not proud of myself, but I'm enjoying myself on there. For the first time.