Warhammer 40K: Eternal Crusade is moving closer to that fall access marker, and Brent Ellison, Lead Game Designer for WH40K: EC, has a few plus a few more words to say about how to join, battle, and end matches. I can give you a quick 30 second simplified run down of how things work.

You'll login, make a character, and be in a hangout social zone. From there you'll look at the map and have a variety of buttons to click to get you into the action now or setup action yourself. Maps rotate through attackers / defenders, with the winner determining how the map will look. At the start of the map, commanders decide various settings and the map concludes depending on the battle that was fought and the victory conditions.

The battle for Arkhona’s territories is ongoing and involves thousands of players. So how does the player experience this? When you login and pick your character you appear in the faction-specific social zone. From there you can approach the Strategic Map and view the state of the war for Arkhona.

While this is far away from the original Planetside 2 approach, I don't see anything immediately wrong with it and initial feedback from the fans seems positive. While it's not specifically Team Fortress / Halo / Battlefield / whatever styled quick join, this is a merry mix between dedicated focused battles with objectives and an ever growing map. This reminds me A LOT of Shattered Galaxies and the way they handled the various maps and ownership of such.

One critical thing to look at is how the battles will actually be very, very dynamic and week to week, as campaigns change, your objectives and the various scenarios will change with it. While there isn't a ton of detail clarifying how much everything changes campaign to campaign and what the real impact will be; it will be refreshing to have variety and a reason to login each week versus playing the same modes over and over.

Anyway, the full article goes over all of the gritty details. You can currently purchase a founder's pack that will enable early access to the game sometime this fall.