Eternal Crusade Delayed yet again......

 (Picture credited to Eupackardia)

Some troubling news from the makers of Eternal Crusade surfaced recently. For those who have yet to hear about the delay to Early Access, the article about it can be read here; https://www.eternalcrusade.com/news/398-State-Of-The-Crusade . Originally supposed to be released late last year, that deadline couldn't be met, but Founders didn't mind. It's all to make a better game after all. But now the deadline of Q1 2015 has also been reneged on, all the way till 'Autumn 2015" sometime. Normally I'm not troubled by delays with games as its normal, but here's why i find this slightly troubling...

For those of you who also have been keeping up with this project since it was first announced a few years ago, you likely understand my concern regarding recent changes at Behavior Interactive. The face of the development efforts, and the champion of transparency and community interaction at Behavior: Miguel Caron, is no longer with the company. While changes are inevitable during development cycles, this one is troubling, especially as very recently after this, the further delay to early access was announced - without even an email to founders about it - stating that it would be further delayed till late this year. To be fair, they did give Miguel a small sendoff during the last Twitch stream, while also introducing the new Senior Producer; Nathan Richardsson, but in my experience, most of the time, people are not let go freely and are happy in doing so, even if they are made to say as much.

I wasn't very familiar with him when it was initially announced, but while watching the feed, i began to see a lot of negative comments about the announcement, but I left my opinion open as i had yet to see any of his previous work. EVE is a popular game and i have personally had some fun with that in the past, but the other games; Defiance, World of Darkness, and Dust:514, have all been really poor showing, both in design and in execution and none other than EVE were what you could call a commercial success. This is not a good start to 2015 for Eternal Crusade. I have personally put over $150 into Eternal Crusade as a Founder, and have been patient for the past 3 years while they worked on the game. I didn't mind the first delay in 2014 as its totally reasonable to expect those to happen sometimes in this industry, so Spring 2015 was fine with me. It was only a few more months to wait after all. And now we get hit with this. Another delay, after a long period of relative silence from the company, with the only recent twitch basically announcing the ousting of Miguel and introducing Nathan. 

With over 3 years of Dev time, and little more than some pretty and interesting, but relatively minor tech demos, we have yet to see any real playable setup yet. The last module shown last year was great, and is what we have been expecting to see. My question is this. If that was ready enough to be shown back then, why is it now suddenly not good enough for the early access we were originally promised? You say you want our feedback, but are then again prying it away from us, further shortening our window to give any real useful feedback regarding the game. 3 years is substantially more time than most other developers take to have something good to show, so why have we still not got anything? Its getting frustrating and, while i have fought the feeling and not been irritated about it till now, this new delay has definitely shook my confidence in Behaviors ability to deliver a good product in the end. Extended amounts of Dev time does not automatically equate to a good product.

If I don't start seeing better delivered content within the coming months for this - especially as they have now yet again delayed - I will definitely be scrutinizing things a lot more. Taking advantage of loyal fans with big promises to gain funding and then pissing it away with little to show for it is unacceptable, and is something that even industry pariahs such as EA and Activision are yet to be as guilty of (at least they are delivering something). Hopefully things change, but honestly guys, I wouldn't start holding your collective breaths that this product turns out how we really want anymore.