Editing Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade (section)

==So what the fuck happened?==
We have nothing official, but the picture is pretty clear: the devs had the money but not the connections or the speed, and they ran out the clock until they had no money either.

When the game was originally pitched the team was headed by Miguel Carron, who promised basically "Planetside 40k". I mean read the above for what he was envisioning. And the team was selling founder's packs. And neckbeards, well they were keen to stump up the cash to help it along, that's what crowdfunding is for.

The first alarm should have gone off about a year later, when Miguel Carron was quietly dropped from the project. We can't definitively prove it, but we're 99% certain that Miguel didn't actually have the open world tech needed to make anything remotely resembling Planetside and was never in a position to buy it, but was taking crowdfunding to try and buy it anyway. The new head of production was a guy called Nathan, who was pretty up-front about the idea that a TRUE open world was now impossible, and instead promised something that was at least technologically possible: a series of lobby-shooter arenas that would link together into larger multi-stage conflicts. Refunds were issued to those founders who weren't willing to take this compromise, so that's one point for the devs at least. Around this time they released the alpha version to test their maps and netcode for bugs.

The second alarm bell would be going off after they picked up a deal with publisher Namco-Bandai for extra funding. Yeah, picking up a publisher who wants you on a deadline when you're already behind schedule is always an amazing idea, though it was probably a Morton's Fork all things considered.

Right around the time the fans were getting really impatient for more content (read: half the factions, and half the content for the existing factions) the devs decided to do an entire engine change, halting production to move everything over to the Unreal Engine. Just about everything that could go wrong with this, did. The new engine couldn't even run the game properly for the first week afterward, and horrible lag spikes persisted for about two months. And ultimately this would prove to be the very same mortal wound that ended up killing Daikatana 15 years earlier.

At this time almost everyone was impatient; Eldar came out behind schedule even more unfinished than everyone else -- missing Howling Banshees and unable to fight in close range effectively -- and Namco was demanding a full release date. The devs were at least able to punt out a beta test build with Orks and Banshees, but the public was not merciful and neither were the founders. Development continued but substantial content like Terminators was constantly pushed back in favor of game-wide sweeping balance changes. Acceptable for a beta build, but the game was supposed to be "finished" and teammate after teammate was yanked from the project to work on other, unrelated games. The cash shop pulled in enough profit to keep the game trudging along, but without anyone to put out proper content updates the few remaining players were left trodding the same ground on the same Amazon-rented servers and complaining about the same balance issues.

"Campaigns" were nothing more than a dare for each faction to get a certain number of wins within nine days; this barely passed muster when it was all four factions competing, and when single faction campaigns were launched the monotony nearly crushed the game's skull. The only good thing about them was, they made a good final sendoff during the 40k Blood For the Blood God Steam Sale; every faction was able to get their required wins in a couple days.

The Steam Workshop for the game has been announced a couple weeks ago back in September on one of the developer's livestreams (Check out the Eternal Crusade youtube, it's episode 166). Who knows, maybe it'll be similar to the Dawn of War 3 Steam Workshop and we'll get some decent content for a change, even if it's not from the developers. Oh, and we're also going to get a no-player capture point map that's infantry-focused. Cool.

And that's the messy launch and the slow glide back down to the ground of ''Eternal Crusade'' in a nutshell.