Not every scribe can remain in the comfort of the hive indefinitely. There are those who must travel between the stars to gather the reports. In this case we have travelled to that far and distant place on Old Terra…Cologne, Germany.
It is Gamescom 2014 and your liege, Head of Studio for Behaviour Interactive, Miguel Caron has made his way to that Mecca for gamers.
There are glad tiding ahead my friends, especially any of you intending to travel to the land of Seattle.
To put the schedule in perspective, Montreal is six hours ahead of Germany and the flight similarly long. Wednesday morning may have been early for me it it was earlier still for the staff of Behaviour Interactive who made the trek over.
It is always gratifying to meet a dev in person, even more so when they are as personable and approachable as Miguel. It is also the good old human bias towards seeing the person you are talking to. Video and Skype are fine for communication but the real conversation always happens in person where you can judge body language and the other subtle clues.
Each of those clues said to me that I have nothing to worry about. Not because of being starstruck or because I could (probably rightly) be called a fanboy. There is an honesty in the Behaviour staff that comes through clearly without trying. It helps that they are all passionate about the project they are involved in. Hype is the thing to fear.
I got my start in writing about games after taking up blogging about another Games Workshop property. Hype is the nature of the games industry a sometimes and I don’t blame them for talking up a game in a tough climate against hard competition. Later though, after the fact, it is the broken promises and missed goals that people recall, not the victories. This has left me wary of exuberant developers as well. . . it is easy to be excited over something that is still on the drawing board. Something that hasn’t yet seen the light of day.
We Crusaders though don’t have that issue. Each week more is shown, more is shared. Twitch, always a useful tool, has been used week in and out now to show us true things. Real things. They may be unpolished, it is alpha after all, but they are there in front of us.
Don’t mistake a lack of hyping for a lack of enthusiasm. As usual when I have had the pleasure of talking to Miguel, he has shared what details he could of things that we can look forward to.
Eternal Crusade is in an interesting place at the moment because of these behind the scenes bits. Any question I would have liked to ask, and some I asked anyway, are all a bit early or subject to announcement.
Evasiveness much like deception doesn’t come easily to Miguel. Anyone who has talked to him or asked things can say with honesty that answers poured forth. This time the joke was the studio had his dog captive against his good behaviour. If you’re reading this in Behaviour Interactive, you can release the pup.
Most of our conversation at the tie was taken up with two parts that I can talk about. The recent trailer drop and the technology behind the support structure of the game.
No game can stand alone in a multiplayer space if there isn’t the technology there to allow people to communicate and co-ordinate. A good example on how to co-ordinate armies can be seen in Planetside and Planetside 2. After all if it’s a game based upon the idea of massive battles, you have to make it easy for people to get to that battle and have an idea of what they are doing to try and win.
Eternal Crusade of course wants combat to be fast paced and the old traditional solutions, Teamspeak and Ventrillo, could work but how do you arrange for anything outside of your own battle brothers and sisters? In game integration was clearly the way to go and so we can all look forward to an intimate arrangement with Razer Comms.
The two stand out benefits to me are the intended voice modulation and the integration generally with Razer technology.
Using Razer Comms people can instant message you or your group. What if you’re not at the computer? Well do you have a Nabu? Keep an eye on the screen and check messages coming to you from the battlefield to wherever you are. Failing that a text message to your phone is also an option.
Do you have a brutish Ork Warboss who really gets da boyz riled up and want to talk through the battleplan? Are you also someone like me without a deep voice or perhaps just not comfortable being heard? They’re working on bringing the voice modulation together to make sure that when Da Boss speaks, he sounds like someone ready ta crump a git.
(Personally I think all Chaos voip channels should just be insane wailing on a loop, sanity after all is for the weak.)
It’s easy to get excited at such news because if nothing else it shows how things are moving forward. Between Razer and the other comments out of NVidia it’s clear that Behaviour is working to give us the best game they can.
How do you promote a game trailer then when you’re not just in pre-alpha, but obviously so because you keep sharing details of that with the community? How do you pretty up your footage to help sell the product?
There Is Only War, Not Marketing
Easy. Slap a servo skull together and send it off into the battlefield. Talking to Miguel about the trailer we got to find out how it worked. Suffice to say, a skulls eye view of how the game is progressing can be good fun to watch.
As ever I am your humble scribe and servant from the Adeptus Auctores. Until next time Crusaders.
Adeptus Auctores: Site Report Battlefield Koln
