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

This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. It’s time for Founders to get early access into Closed Alpha. Not just to play and drool on your keyboards like we’ve been doing for months, eagerly awaiting this moment, but to participate as Founders in the development of the Eternal Crusade, becoming an integral part of the team and giving us the feedback we will use to iterate and evolve.

That it has been almost 9 months since I joined this team is surreal. The Warhammer 40,000 universe is massive and an inspiration to all of us and it’s an honor to deliver to you, the first massive online shooter experience in this universe. It will be amazing, especially because of you.

On Monday September 14th, the people that have Captain’s packs or higher in terms of RTP and were the first to buy, will start to enter the Closed Alpha. We will start slowly with admission in the 100s, with the eventual goal of getting all Captain’s pack and higher in by October.

If you want to get in as part of the Captain’s wave, you can still secure your spot in it by buying, or upgrading, to a Captain’s pack before we start the Sergeants’ wave. I know; shameless plug but more Founders means more war. In the grim darkness of the far future, there can be only more war.

So you might be wondering what’s in this Closed Alpha and what you are getting early access to as Founders?

Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade is far from complete. It is still in development, will evolve and will be updated weekly. We are a Massive Online Shooter and the Closed Alpha focuses only on creating a great Shooter experience, before becoming *Massiv*e.

The persistent world, meta-game, continent, territories, theater of war, campaigns, character progression, thousands of items, customized loadouts, visual personalization, more game modes, commanders, PVE and other MMO aspects, as well as the last factions will gradually be added to the Closed Alpha and well into Beta.

It’s true; we once said we’d have individual modules of these available, then we changed focus and scope to a full vertical slice available this Fall. Then we got Unreal, good people left, good people joined, things changed, designs iterated and optimized, playtesting lead us in new directions and voila, we were confident we could move Closed Alpha, a vertical shooter slice from Fall to Summer.

And here it is, still technically Summer.

How is it different from what I’ll experience when we launch, you ask?

Besides many of the core systems mentioned above, what you will find is a very traditional entry into individual maps basically. These are individual outposts or fortresses with various game modes. Soon there will be different biomes like snow or lava and “mutators” as we call them, like a warp storm or night mode, which highly affects the factions abilities to fight on the same map. You will enter a queue and jump straight into the fray.

This will evolve over time when more core systems are added. Culminating in the larger theater of war on a continent with territories which have outposts and a fortress, mutators and instanced PVE encounters. This moves us more and more away from the “map” mentality, to the “open world” territories and massive battles.

How that evolves and how long that takes is entirely dependent on our progress, feedback, technology and of course, you.

We are excited that you want to help us develop the game in this early state, give us feedback, test and be able to have a great impact on its direction. We will be with you, shooting you and on the closed Founder’s forums. The first rule of Closed Alpha is: you do not talk about Closed Alpha. You will be under NDA, which we hope we can lift as soon as possible, so you can spread the gospel as evangelists, leading the masses to the light.

Nathan Richardsson
Senior Producer

Discuss in the Eternal Crusade forums!