Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade Switches to Unreal Engine 4

Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade will be developed using Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, developer Behaviour Interactive announced today.

“After evaluating our engine options we decided that Unreal Engine 4 and the team at Epic offered the type of support and the best toolset to make the Warhammer world come to life,” said founder and CEO of Behaviour Interactive Rémi Racine. “The sheer amount of productivity tools we get right out of the box have helped the game’s development progress significantly faster, allowing the team to ensure the highest quality at a rate we couldn’t have achieved before.”

This marks the first time the developer will be using Unreal Engine 4 in developing a game.

Eternal Crusade is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online third-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe made by Games Workshop. It features four playable races/factions (Orks Space Marines, Eldar, and Chaos Space Marines), but only playable character available for free will be the Ork Boyz character (a basic soldier of the Ork faction). Players can purchase the full version of the game with all classes and factions unlocked or buy individual ones ala carte via a microtransaction-based marketplace.

While much of the game will revolve around persistent online multiplayer with each of the four factions competing for resources, Eternal Crusade will sport procedurally-generated dungeons called “Under worlds” and a survival-based game mode called “Hives” for those with player-versus-environment inclinations.

Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade will be available in early access form sometime this summer. Players can pre-order the game through “Founder’s Packs” that contain various in-game items, some of which were revealed last year, depending on which pack you pre-purchase.