MMORPG.com is announcing that Behaviour Interactive’s Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade is getting a full free-to-play mode in the very near future and has an interview with Producer Nathan Richardsson to go with the news.
(It should be noted that the interview talks about “today’s announcement,” but other than on MMORPG.com, we can’t find any indication of the news — not on the game’s Steam page, website, social media … nothing. Given the depth of the interview, though, we’ll assume it’s legit news and hope that a full, formal announcement is forthcoming.)
According to Richardson, the “Free to WAAAAGH!” version of WH40K:EC will allow players to play a limited set of classes from all four of the game’s factions. Free players will advance at 1/3 the rate of paying players. With a $20 purchase, they can unlock a fuller version of the game — though not with as many features as the full $50 game. As a bonus, when you do buy, you’ll get that extra 2/3 XP you missed out on while you were playing for free.
Richardsson says the F2P rollout will come as a soft launch in February — which ends tomorrow. So … soon(TM)?
Long-time MMOBomb readers might remember us talking about Eternal Crusade a long time ago, when it was still in development and the original F2P version only allowed you to play as a limited, weaker subset of the Ork faction. I heavily criticized that move for a couple of reasons — first because it would unbalance the Ork faction against the other three factions by boosting its population and second by not letting F2P players who were interested in one of the other factions test drive those. We raised the issue in an interview with Behaviour, who said, “we haven’t ruled out limited trials for other factions. We may allow free access from time to time if a given factions’ population is low.”
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