Warhammer: Eternal Crusade. What you need to know!

I'm playing semi-regularly. They have made leaps and bounds from where I left off in the spring and they have a clear short term vision for completing the "game" aspect of the game. I'm excited with what they are doing and would recommend doing a night where everyone who has the game could get on and play together.

While the game still has flaws I feel the devs care and will continue to work to bring out the potential this idea has.

 

Ya, hate to be the Word Bearer of bad news... i could give a more indepth review of whats going on. But unlike Chaif, i am not optimistic.




edit; Going to hold off for now, seeing as i just noticed a 4gig patch downloading >.>

 

Ooooook. Where to begin... We're only a few days left before official launch, and i've sunk another 12ish hours in.

Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade
What is it? : ... a bog standard 3rd person shooter with control point objectives scattered around small environment based arena maps.
It is NOT: Anything like PS2, there is no open world, no massive multiplayer, no multi-faction fights, no quests, no procedural generation, no randomized environments, no command structure, no guild/clan stuff, no progression... Eternal Crusade is NOTHING that you were promised on page 1.

List of Issues:
3rd person shooter camera: This thing is terrible... its position cannot be changed, i would be fine if it was closer and more over the shoulder like Gear of War, or even closer 40k Space Marine. In normal motion, you have 100% view of your character and a good 6ft behind you... but your character is on the left half of your screen making it constantly feel like your running at odd angles. What happens when you aim? you get a good 70% view of your character "kinda" over the shoulder. This is where a huge problem exists... not only is it off center, it never shifts, never alternates, never moves, and never opaques. What happens when you want to AIM at something and track it moving LEFT across the screen? ... you target generally gets obscured by your body/gun (or fucking FLAG ... god damn it Dire Avengers)

Crosshairs: Plays into the above issue, your crosshairs are NOT static... it actually MOVES around the screen based on your characters present position, and your shots will follow said crosshair. I'll explain it like this... Lets say i am in cover, i peak out and aim around the corner, if i track a target from left of the screen to the right, perfectly horizontal, my crosshair will have shifted from its initial position, down and to the right about a quarter inch. The reason for this is odd gun design/physical objects touching in the game... i LOVE this type of thing in Arma, but Eternal Crusade is an arcade shooter.

Cover: Cover system... comes in 2 variations. Full cover, ie. Press button, receive cover. Hide behind box or wall etc etc. "Half" cover, approach any object, wall, railing, tank from any angle at anything less then full sprint and your character will "attach" himself to said cover. Walk to slowly and to closely to a wall and your character leans into it a bit and might even shimmy... real sweet looking. To bad its murder on both the above issues of Camera control and crosshairs.

Auto-aim: ... Yup... literally a push of a button, 3 variations. 1. The standard Halo console aim assist. 2. The specific weapon "Smart" pistol and 3. Melee!
Now this is disgusting on every level. But by the Dark Gods... auto-aim melee makes me want to puke. Hold down the button, press melee and your character instantly spins to the nearest enemy and attacks (also levels your crosshairs on their midsection in case you want to shoot them after a failed swing) This means your dodge function is fully useless... but wait, it gets even worse. A standard melee attack is a 7ft step swing on Astartes, and can be pumped out fast enough that you cannot get away unless you are eldar or jump assault, and even then if you got hit before you started your escape you wont live long enough.

Melee: Might as well continue on with this... Melee is rock paper scissor for the most part.
Lights attack, Heavy attack, Parry. Light attacks clank ineffectually off one another, heavys break through lights, parrys block heavys but are to slow to stop lights. Back damage is pretty much instant kill (and its a generous god damn hitbox)
Weapon type plays a role, but it only determines how fucked the none melee class is. ( Combat knives dont stop Power Axes -_- but only melee classes get anything above a knife, so... )

Time to Kill: is always a one sided thing. To you, you just sprayed 30+ bolter round into an unmoving guy to kill him and yet someone else can 2 shot you for peaking your head out the door. You stab a guy 6 times in the back with a power sword before he falls yet any jabronie can swing a chainsword twice to wreck your shit. I dunno what to say... the servers and the tick rate are abyssmal and i doubt will ever get better.

Servers!: Ya they suck... makes you think your on some peer to peer console game >.> hmm just like some OTHER game that Eternal Crusade totally didnt steal everything from. Previously mentioned tick rates, lag, server drops that can wipe away half a team (Most matches arent even half full to begin with ffs) Terrible servers plays a huge role with something that i mentioned previously...

Enemy animations!: Or lack there of... the farther away or the faster an enemy is moving, the more of a chance there is for them to "disappear" . Extremely pronounced in Jump Assault classes. We're talking 56k teleporting Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 style.

Look, i... i dont feel like doing this anymore, the more i think about this junk the more depressing it is.
I've got 26ish hours logged, maxed out chaos and eldar, never once felt like i was having fun... no matter how many people i killed. Always felt aggrevated by the bullshit i was seeing or experiencing. I might be a 40k fanboy, but an optimist i am not.

 

And now after that depressing news... cheer up a little 40k fans! THIS might actually get released >.>

 

In all honesty the only thing that they can fix is the servers... better servers would aid in fixing alot of issues. Everything else is literal design decisions that would require a complete revamp. Although Melee targeting and autoaim could be straight up deleted >.>
As for vaporware... this game is nothing like it was advertised to be initially. I dont see anyway for this game to come close to that plan. This isnt a game you bring a clan into, most people wont touch this again after the first month.

 

So for all those actually jumping in, what race got decided upon?

 

I've been playing this game on and off since "alpha". It's another "If it wasn't Warhammer it would be tossed in the trash and shat on."

 

Free to play race has been removed. Gotta drop the money if you want to test it.

 

anything new on warhammer 40k?

 

Kind of.

The devs are getting Free to Waagh! (Orks) ready for sometime in the future. Terminator equivalents are supposed to be coming in a few months or something (there was an issue with animations that caused them to be delayed, I believe). Otherwise the game is still progressing. Balancing is being done at a reasonable pace and new items and cosmetics are being added.

New elite-type classes are coming soon as well. Some of them will be real-money only but I'm not sure how they'll differ from the current veterans - whether they'll be fixed loadouts or just be new skins for veterans. This isn't as bad as it might sound from a Pay-to-Win aspect as campaigns will give players RTC (the real-money currency) for playing, so it's more of a pay-to-skip kind of situation and they'll probably be closer to not worth the money than stupidly overpowered (at least at first). There will also be in-game currency (requisition) only elites as well. These ones I'm pretty sure will be more than just reskins (Librarians and the like).

You can watch a development update on Fridays at 2 PM EST at https://www.twitch.tv/40kcrusade but I'm not sure if there will be one this week.

 

Why is this stickied?

 

Had a copy of Eternal Crusade dropped on my steam account, anyone want a copy?