Yesterday, the development team at Behaviour Interactive hosted a livestream for their upcoming game, Warhammer 40K: Eternal Crusade, which is now available on YouTube. The team covers new models, updated radar, better vehicle controls, character customization, grenade arcs and ends with a community Q&A. They aim to have a livestream every Friday, even if they don't have much details to give out. Between now and December, they will add four new items to the store each week. While they have twelve items ready currently, they only showed the four they are adding. This week, ranged weapons, one for each faction. The team not only shows off the four new weapons, but gives a good overview of what each faction is getting. I like that they left the Ork flavor weapon for last, since it's definitely the coolest looking of the bunch, in my opinion. Next week will be heavy weapons. Speaking of the store, later on in the stream, they discuss balancing having a store versus pay-to-win, as the pre-alpha community is worried of the store offering some sort of way some could buy their way to the top. The devs understand this and are working on a system where this will be fair to everyone.
Early on in the video (it's over an hour long), a comparison video is shown to compare placeholder models with new models. The teaser also shows a texture pass. Not everything has been upgraded, yet, but they've made remarkable progress so far. Personally, I like the way the buildings look in the placeholder video, because they seem more detailed and the new version seems very dark. At the ending, where the new side has what looks like sheet metal bricks, looks far better than the old side. This is to show off the new lighting and the new shaders they have.
The livestream also shows off new customizations. There are glitches in the demo, but they're very aware of it and plan to have them fixed soon. As they show off “time to kill” based on a community question, the player being killed oozes with blood, which is a nice addition. Eternal Crusade is pretty gorey, which the B-horror fan in me enthusiastically enjoys. We get a very quick preview of the full loadout system for classes they plan on having, such as basic versus medic (they point out that the Tactical Field Medic might be phased out shortly, to be replaced by something else). You'll be able to choose what you take with you onto the battlefield within certain limits. They have horizontal progression with PvP balance in mind.
Lately they've been working on the core of the game, after working on branching out the game for so long. It'll be awhile before we see Eldar or Orks models, because they're working on core right now. This is because they're a small studio, so in order to bring different areas up to the level of polish you would expect out of a AAA game takes longer time than a larger studio could put out. Right now, they're working on making the game feel better, working on better camera angles, making character models go invisible to your view when your camera is up close, and more.
The minimap is actually a radar, where you can see enemies. They will not automatically show up, though. You or your friends need to mouse over either the enemy or enemy tanks in order to make them appear. This is to give you a feel of your surroundings, but only after you or a friend have encountered them first.
Driving tanks in the game will be based on real life, where, if you're using a game controller, you'll need to utilize both of the controller's joysticks. Each stick controls one side of the tank's treads. They're working on a solution for camera panning with both sticks occupying tread control. They're working on coming up with bringing this type of control to a keyboard and mouse combo. Currently, using a keyboard and mouse will operate as players would expect them to. Vehices currently obey proper physics, and ramming them into each other makes them take damage. Additional physics tweaks will be added throughout the development process. Physics also works with grenades, as we'll see with sticky grenades on one of the tanks.
To learn more about yesterday's livestream and to hear the community Q&A session at the end, check out the video! If you make it to the very end, you'll even get to meet the entire development team.
