Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade Shuts Down

Remember Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade? If you don't, that's understandable. The session-based hack-and-slash-and-shoot title from Behaviour Interactive limped through several years of development before finally launching in September 2016 to a mixed (putting it kindly) reception. It had a poor "free trial" mode that seriously gimped free players before finally going fully free-to-play just a few months after launch.

I'm choosing to draw attention to its being a "session-based" game with a long development time because it was originally slated to be a persisent, open-world game in the vein of PlanetSide 2. Maybe I'm still salty over the decision to change that, but it allows me to once again raise the question of why -- nearly a decade after PS2 came out -- has nobody attempted to reproduce that kind of game?

In any case, nothing is eternal, not even Eternal Crusade. As Massively Opinionated noticed, the announcement of the game's shutdown was all the way back in June, and it came to pass just this past Friday. That "WAAAAAGH!" you hear? It's not a battle cry, but a sad lament from the game's remaining players.