Thanks for the clarifications on Eve, I don't think anyone else who worked on Eve at that period clarified how many worked on what project so it's sometimes easy to make assumptions due to a lack of information. I do appreciate your openness and suddenly frequent communication here and hope it continues provided you have time.
No, systems are content, that gives far more bang for the bucks, longevity and replayability, than a map. Creating systems which propel our current maps to new heights, is most certainly "content". In Enemy Territory, the engie had a role. Quite a few actually. In EC the main functional role is capturing. The rest is just there to enable the capture. Enabling other classes to have roles on the map, when expanding the game modes, is even more content. Add slates with new abilities for each match on top of that, and woah. What a glorious dream. I and I can't see anything stopping us from achieving that, as it's almost all systems! Every. Single. Player. Affected. (Oversimplification for the purposes of explaining why systems are content, this would take months and months, but as many are individual changes, they can come in bit by bit.)
I've actually always been a frequent communicator, all the way back since EVE. But with a smaller team, there is less general time for everyone to communicate. It's why I'm going to switch Twitch to monthly now. More meat (I'm fat) and more interesting. Everyone, including us, are disappointed in the last twitches.
@Oveur As far as customisation goes, why not adopting the same method as Warframe? Open up a Steam Workshop for Eternal Crusade, allow players or indi-modelers to make their own contribution to the game by releasing Cosmetic for the game in the Workshop and implement them on the monthly trough votes and quality. This is just a brainstormed idea. I'd like to see more armor variants for all races and as far as vehicules goes i guess its all up to how it would be approached by the Devs.
It's already in the works but as we aren't moddable and our problem is not assets, but the process of integration into the game, it's not solving directly any problems for us. We have a ton of 3D assets which haven't been integrated yet. More 3D assets will just increase the backlog. But selective, super-cool, stuff like our Ranger, that's worth putting ahead of the queue. Hence, a curative, player voted workshop, which we then approve for integration, does make sense to me.
Warhammer 40'000 is a Games Workshop indelectual property and they keep a very tight grip on content. They insist on approving almost anything before it gets released. So no, player made content will not happen like in other games. Any player made content would have to jump through a lot more hoops than in other games.
Absolutely correct, it's not just us that need to approve, GW as well. Then again, the approval process has always been a refining process, rather than a binary yes/no.
So the work you are currently doing on these "systems" has nothing to do with making the game more modular and widening the implementation-bottleneck?
Alright! as for your reply Ostrum, I'd like to say this is why it would be up to the Dev's and GW judgement to implement or not.