Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade Interview

The folks at Ten Ton Hammer have published an article-style interview with Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade's Miguel Caron, covering subjects such as the MMO's sandbox structure, the game's four races, the chain of command system, its free-to-play monetization model and more. Here's a snippet:
A typical day in the life of your character might play out something like this. You log on and create your character. From there you load into the game, and will spawn on your ship, which serves both as a form of player housing and flying trophy case all in one. If you decide to permanently join a squad with other players, the group of you will even be able to combine your ships into one massive vessel. If that happens, you'll each retain your own individual compartments, but will effectively have a guild hall for your squad, making it easier to connect and dive into the action together.

With that squad, you might get voted by your friends to become squad leader. As such, you'll have the ability to issue objectives for the rest of your squad, in effect creating content for them.

In terms of the overarching chain of command and how it fits into the game, Miguel explained, (When you start the game, the objectives that you have are not given by us, they're given by other players. We have three ranks of hierarchy: squad leaders, chapter leaders, and then the war council for the whole race. There will be requirements you'll need to meet to become a squad leader and above, but the players will vote for you to become one of them.

We have a whole system where players can nominate their friends as their squad leader. And then all the squad leaders will nominate someone to be chapter leader. Finally, all the chapter leaders will nominate and vote on who they want to be part of the war council for the whole race.

So when you start as a new player, the objectives that you'll have will be coming from that war council, chapter leaders, and squad. If you decide to follow these objectives, you'll gain an XP bonus. So you don't have to do those objectives, only if you want to get the bonus XP. But the purpose of the game is to make sure your race wins; you're there playing to win the war. But what this system does is it allows players to invent gameplay for their race.)