Rock Paper Shotgun got an interview with the creators of the new 40k MMORPG: Eternal Crusade. Read the full interview here, excerpts below.
RPS: It’s fair to say that people are a little surprised at the appointment of Behaviour to the project. Without previous MMO experience, and perhaps not the best reception to recent self-developed games, what is it about your team that makes you the right fit for Eternal Crusade?
Behaviour: Behaviour is a solid developer and a very healthy company that recently made the choice to invest in the online space. To that end, we acquired the best specialists available here in Montreal – the core team for Eternal Crusade is actually made up of former Funcom Montreal developers quite familiar with the challenges of working with MMOs. With its 20+ year history, Behaviour has a huge amount of experience in game development and is well-positioned to give the project the environment and support it needs succeed. Behaviour has made games in the past 12 months for large publishers out of which we have a top-three performing game in ALL the different stores (XBLA, PC MMO with 14M install, Facebook, iTunes, Google, etc…) We can send the list to you. We have not bragged about it since we made it for our customer. Now with our new online studio we are making a game for us… no actually for YOU. Naturally, everyone working on the game so far is a huge 40k fan and has at least two armies each!
RPS: 40K is a daunting enough licence just based on its enormous history and extremely dedicated fanbase. Add to that the recent struggle of Vigil and it would seem like pretty terrifying products prospect to me! How have you gone about approaching the project such that you can keep on top of things, and protect yourselves from making the same mistakes as those who’ve tried before?
Behaviour: 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. In addition, with the very recent explosion of the greater online space, there are also a lot more demonstrable technical solutions for creating games in this genre – hopefully we’ll be able to talk about them soon!
