There Will Be Space Marines In 40k MMO!

Now this is a surprise. Everyone was expecting the forthcoming Vigil 40K MMO to focus on the ever-commercial Zoat vs Jokero battles. But it seems that, at least in some small way, the game will feature the obscure "Space Marine" characters, as shown in the new gallery at Kotaku. As you'll probably be unaware of, these are heavily-armoured genetically-modified space-fascists. It's certainly a surprise that they'll feature so prominently in an MMO - with the enormous development costs, you'd have suspected they'd have played it safer. Let's hope the risk pays off.

Some less sarcastic commentary follows...

Okay. Details of the 40k MMO have been sparse. This basically is all of them. But even in these in-game models, there's clues to its focus. Forget about the Space Marines and bolters and similar. Forget about the various Rhino-derived tanks. Have a look at this bad boy.

That's a Warhound Titan. Without a sense of scale, you don't really get what that means. Here's some models from the game showing the size difference between a soldier and a this smallest of Titans.

Warhound Titans are, in the properly approved Imperial Language, fucking enormous.

Now, there's lots of reasons one could be in the game. They could be hefty old scenery. They could be the equivalent of raid-bosses. They could be anything. What most interests me is that they're in these group of images. In fact, there's more sorts of vehicles modeled than there are actual individuals in these bunch of images. That implies - at least to me - that it's a game which will operate on this larger scale more often than we would expect from the worst-case-scenario space-marine-hunting-5-squigs-to-level theories. The three-40k-heads at RPS all really hoped for something more Planetside than WoW out of Vigil's game, with armies of marines stomping across vast plains in the shadows of Titans. While the game is certainly going to be more RPG-esque than we were hoping for, with these renders, the possibility of that grand vision actually coming into being seems a fraction more likely.

Expect the teasing to continue for another twelve months, of course. See you next year, Vigil.