And they shall know no fear

Earlier, I've outlined the single-player squad play of the Imperial Guard player. Today, lets move on to the profession that would control only one avitar; The Emporer's Finest - The Space Marines.

As will all the other professions, advancement in the Adeptas Astartes is based on growing recognition. Players will again start as an initiate, working their way through the introduction to the game. Once we're passed the basics, the player will be a full fledged scout. Yes, a lowly scout - it will take a bit before our player can don the armor of a true space marine. Part of of this is to stay true to the lore, part is to keep players from jumping right in and being advanced killing machines with only a few hour play while the other professions spend days or weeks reaching the same level of destructiveness.

As the scout gains more recognition, he'll advanced up to the point where he will be fully initiated into the chapter and be a Space Marine. Using the nearly 2 dozen transplants that occur as a human is transformed into a Space Marine would probably be good check points for the player.

As an aside, without levels, a lot of MMO'ers are going to have trouble latching on to a sense of accomplishment. Or more than feeling that sense, they will have trouble articulating it. It's easy for players to compare levels, but what will it mean when players try to compare a Gunnery Sargent in the Guard to a Ork Nob. It may be difficult, if you want to break new ground, eliminating a 30 year old concept is a good place to start.

Once our intrepid player has amassed sufficient renown and passed the requisite trials, they will be a full fledged Space Marine. Space Marines, like Guardsmen would be able to use the recognition they earn to continually advance and to purchase new or different equipment. While the lack of loot means that we don't need a complicated inventory system, Marines should be limited in the amount and nature of equipment they carry during a mission. Marines should be able to carry a variety of lore appropriate weapons (Bolter, grenades, knifes) but should not be able to cycle through ten different weapons to find the right one for the given situation. Either you carry the Multimelta or you carry the heavy bolter, not both.

Marines can continue "advancing" through rookie designations (10th company, pup, etc) through veteran and to elite. At some point they should also be allowed to look into specializations that would take them out of the normal advancement tree, like Librarian, Tech Marine, Apothecary, or Chaplain.

A quicky side note: It's also intersting to consider that, unlike the Imperial Guard, Space Marines are often equally at home bringing home the Emporer's wrath at a distance or up close and personal. After I cover my suggestions for the factions and professions, I'll dive into how the combat system could / should work.

Vehicles are important to the 40K world and our perfect MMO shouldn't be any different. Marines would start by gaining access to motorcycles as scouts. Later, assault bikes and Rino transports would become available. This, of course, could lead to a player population that specializes in taxi services. It used to be fairly common in EQ1 and in SWG (i think, i really didn't play SWG for more than a couple weeks before getting bored and wandering off). Rino's would be followed by Land Speeders, Demolishers, and Razorbacks. Land Raiders should be left to a future expansion.

On the topic of vehicles, there is one that I still have not determined how to deal with. Dreadnoughts. Dreadnoughts are iconic Space Marine features, and it should be a huge thing for a player to choose to be encased in the armored sarcophagus. Maybe that's not much different than choosing to be a Librarian - it just feels bigger. Either way, Dread's should not be treated like any other vehicle that players could hop in and out of.



As with the Guard, origin is an interesting problem. Should Marines all start out in the same Chapter? Should they be allowed to choose a chapter? I think initially, all marine players should start out in the prototypical Space Marine chapter - the Ultra Marines. Maybe later we could introduce a few non-codex chapters that have different strengths and weaknesses like the Space Wolves or Black Templars. We could even let players form their own successor chapter if they can get X number of other players to go along - let them pick their own colors and maybe strengths and weaknesses.

Next up well round out the Empire with "You can't spell empire without I"