Hail all, xenos, infidels, heretics, demi-gods and assorted immortals,

It’s been some amazing weeks leading up to this day. No, amazing months. After I arrived in January, we’ve gone through a wealth of changes, changes which are all with the purpose of creating the most amazing Warhammer 40,000 massive online shooter. The first too.

While being fully aware that many of these changes were not what was talked about almost three years ago, they needed to be done. For a great game to emerge, we needed to get the full vertical shooter slice into your hands, as soon as possible.

For this to happen, we did the following:

• We changed the scope and roadmap to a more realistic, iterative approach, instead of “modules”, this fit our goal of more rapidly delivering a shooter experience
• We switched to Unreal Engine 4 in record time, so we had a solid next-gen shooter engine to fuel the war
• We re-prioritized our work to deliver the shooter, before anything massive. If we don’t have an awesome shooter, “massive online” doesn’t matter
• We aimed to deliver this in Fall of 2015, because we had a lot of work to do
• We worked like Khorne himself was after our blood and skulls
• We got a ton of servers and a TURBO button to invite everyone faster
• We found some fun, increased quality, and we’re not crashing servers or clients all the time

Now here we are with 6,000 Captains and above in the Closed Alpha. They are having awesome fun; judging by the feedback in forums, surveys, private messages, social media and my phone. So what happens next?

First, we press the TURBO button and get all Sergeants into Closed Alpha by end of October. Then we get all Warriors in by November. That’s right. If you want to get in now, get your Captain pack and you are in immediately. Shameless plug? Sure. Does it create more fuel for war? Most certainly.

There is more to come; we aim to update every week. This will range from balancing combat, bug fixes, general improvements, Steam features and items, to new weapons, maps, new game modes, new features and even a fortress or maybe two, and it’s all being molded with Founder feedback.

This will also bring us to adding the “massive online” systems, one step at a time. The things which will affect the shooter directly. Think of things like small iterations of our character progression, your personal loadouts, variations of weapons, the weapons you buy in the Rogue Trader Store, the warlord and his battlefield powers. This affects the shooter.

Because when we develop, iterate and add new features and content, it ends up delivered directly to Closed Alpha.

We’ll be in there with you, shooting you, molding this experience.

Join us as we spill blood all over the battlefield!
Nathan Richardsson
Senior Producer
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade

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