Oh, cheeky. The The Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II multiplayer beta is now open to all, not just those who bought Soulstorm.
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DoW2 Beta Now Entirely Open
Posted by Jim Rossignol on January 28th, 2009 at 8:26 am.
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Teth: since when is xfire online game networking middleware, and when have gamespy hosting & browsers ever been any good? GFWL is getting flak because it still acts like its designed for a console (the custom game listing is really awful), and is basically superfluous. DoW2 also requires Steam, so why not just rely on it? The back end game servers could run on anything anywhere without needing an extra GFWL (or whatever) signup.
All that aside, the game itself is quite fun once your learn how to play. It’s really more of an action game with lots of tactical options than an RTS. Don’t overspend (income is biased by your unit cap), keep your hero and units alive, use their abilities and upgrade your stuff, and don’t walk into bad situations blindly or fight losing battles when you don’t have to. Also, find a hero you like and stick with them to learn their upgrades and abilities.
Relic’s PR have played this beta nonsense perfectly, check out how the staggered release of access for it has generated far more press exposure than just going ‘oh, demo’s out guys’.
Although given how powerful some units are right now, I’m starting to think ‘beta’ is kinda appropriate.
@Jeremy:
Sure, but how will the market expand if developers only target existing PC gamers?
I don’t agree entirely. As a primarily PC game developer, scalability should be top priority for Relic. There’s no reason why a game couldn’t be made to work on a range of videocards. It’s A LOT extra work of course, but it’s nowhere near impossible. And just think about the marketshare benefits, Valve have made a fortune thinking this way.
I disagree. All laptops (with the exception of netbooks) ship with Core2Duos these days. I’m not convinced games are pushing the limits on a dual core CPU. And we aren’t at the stage where devs are offloading logic onto GPUs. So yeah, the GPU pulls some load off the CPU, but I’m not convinced the CPU couldn’t handle it anyway. RAM is a good point though.
I wouldn’t mind them using GFWL if they stuck with one download managing thingy. I already have steam. That’s enough for me. Even if GFWL was great, I only want to deal with one.
Relic won’t get my money.
@Mo
Honestly, I think at this point the responsibility should be placed on the shoulders of companies like Asus, Biostar, etc to produce mid-range integrated options. The easy accessibility of consoles makes hardware targeting a non-issue for companies making console titles, and it makes it impossible for companies, especially PC only companies, to not alienate gamers in some way or another.
I do agree that scalability is a very important factor, but at some point you have to draw a line in the sand because you really can’t please everyone (the longer a game is in development, the more gamers will be potentially alienated anyway), and I think they’ve drawn a fairly reasonable line to both maintain their vision as well as target a broad range of users.
Companies like Valve and Blizzard are pretty lucky though, you have to admit. They were creating games during the Golden Age of computer gaming, consoles couldn’t even touch what PCs were capable of and scalability wasn’t as much a part of the discussion, they created vast amounts of money during that time and now have the resources to scale games to a ridiculous degree. Look at WoW, you can practically run that on a 386 dx.
As for GPU offloading, that’s a fair argument, I can’t say which companies do or do not offload onto the GPU (I do remember reading a dev article about this very thing however, I think it was a Stardock or Ironclad article). Those guys are magic though, so if anyone would do it, it would be them.
It’s not as bad as I’d heard, but does feel like a simplified, not to say consolified, version of Company of Heroes.
Strangely, it’s not the absence of base building that bothers me the most. The absence of doctrines or tech tree (the heroes are a highly simplified, less interesting version of this) is bad, but still not the thing that I miss most. I’m disappointed by the tiny scale, which contrasts with the epic-over-the-top setting. I’m disappointed by the absence of ability progression to go with the level progression on your hero units (and here I’m thinking more of BFME than WC3). But that’s still not the worst.
I miss area control. The maps in CoH all felt different– the areas you had to grab, and the environments that would enable you to do so meaningfully differed. This is a step backwards to the DoW map style; cover exists, but it doesn’t seem as important in an environment that lacks MG fire. They’re all dull, open, often symmetrical spaces that involve just running around like an idiot trying to cap as many points at once as possible.
Despite their visual differences, because of their economic and tech-tree similarities, the sides seem much more same-ish, and the unit differentiation is both murkier and less pronounced. I don’t seem to be able to tell one huge gooey swarm of Tyrranids from another, but it doesn’t seem to matter because I’m winning easily anyhow. It took me a long time before I could consistently beat the CoH AI on its harder settings; I don’t think I’ve lost to the DoW2 AI yet.
I find myself in the strange and infuriating position of playing what is honestly the best RTS I’ve played since Opposing Fronts, and all I can think about is how much better it could have been, and how dismayed I am that future Relic games (to say nothing of the rest of the genre) may follow in this direction, rather than following the path laid out by CoH.
In coh a deployed mg or at gun “wreck your face” if you don’t pay them the proper respect. That there is player defined terrain. So to, a string of wire a sandbag and a pair of land mines and you’ve customised that area in a way the other player can’t know til he arrives. Not to mention driving a tank through a wall/bush. The battlefield was liquid in coh, a burned out tank is cover. So is the hole left by an artillary shell. Can you use this shifting world better than the other player? Thats coh. Shame to hear dow2 doesn’t live up to that.
@ Anthony Damiani
Couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. The lack of scale and the fact that the cover system just got worse since COH just blows me away. And no area control unless you go tech marine, i mean come on! You get like 7 units and you are supposed to be all over the map. It just feels so stretched
I never said you could make a new account in Steam, I said you could change your name. GFWL does not allow me to have a separate account name and player-name(the label ‘gamertag’ is very misleading). This means having played a GFWL multiplayer for the first time I found my real name displayed for all to see. I immediately set about changing the name and it turns out I must pay for this, so I just made a new account. Unfortunately after jumping through a thousand hoops it insisted on doing everything possible to link my new account to my old one if I even gave the slightest hint that it existed.
Sombrero Kid; it’s not ill-informed when this bollocks happens right in front of my eyes and I’m spending hours trying to get round it. I didn’t hear it second-hand so where the fuck do you manage to draw that conclusion from?
MY cousin had as much trouble as Walker getting the Fallout 3 DLC. It is a rather simple fact that Microsoft know and care bugger all about gaming (and only a little more about software in general). Their design skills are really poor.
@Gorgeras
Home -> Profile -> Name
no need to set up a new account that’s why you are ill informed.
I could have written the Anthony Damiani or Heliocentric post, as I feel exactly the same ( but I lack the english skills to write it properly ).
But In defense of DOW2… DOW is tryiing something different. COH is better, but is another different thing. Is good to have different games, that try different things. Now what I want, is more games like COH. Maybe is unfair to compare DOW2 to COH.
@TheSombreroKid:
Except, that doesn’t work. All that appears to change is some random “name” field, not your actual player name.
Your login and in-game names are forced to be the same as each other, and like Gorgeras, I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to work out how the hell to change it. From what I can understand, the only way to do it is by buying 1000 “Microsoft Points”, then spending 800 on a name change.
Not only is this completely stupid and irritating (why can’t I just pay the exact amount rather than sodding about with “points”, ignoring the fact I shouldn’t have to pay at all), it’s also going to cause massive problems with the likes of clan tags and such. Imagine if you were locked to a single player name in, say, Counterstrike, and every time you wanted to change your name, or change a clan, or just have a laugh without people recognising you, you had to pay ~£10. Stupid, isn’t it?
You can argue that we’re the ones at fault here and not GfWL if you want, but most sensible people recognise that it does have major shortcomings when compared to other similar services.
when using steamworks you can force your game to use the steam id instead of their nickname as the username if you like, this is what relic have done with GFWL, gfwl does allow you to change your name like steam does it doesn’t let you change your gamertag for free, the same what steam doesn’t let you change your steam id at all
@ Catastrophe & Lucas
Xfire is a server browser with limited player matching system just like gamespy. http://www.xfire.com/games/ any game with a joypad icon on the left most column uses it as its default ingame browser. I’ve been asked / required to install it numerous times in order to play games online.
Steam to my knowledge but I’m not 100% about this has not included server browsing and matchmaking services for any non valve game so far. The only games I have ever joined using it are Left 4 Dead, TF2, HL2 DM and their asscociated mods. Games I own on steam from 3rd party developers such as CoH use Gamespy or Xfire matchmaking despite being delivered by steam.
Maybe I was quietly brainwashed by my xbox360 over the last 3 years but I find the GFWL interface intuative and at least on my main gaming system quick. My only complaint is the default “invite a friend to game” option when you are host requires you to type the gamertag of the person to invite. This is easily bypassed by instead opening the GFWl UI and clicking a friends name in the friendlist and clickign invite. Or forming a GFWL party with VOIP and just tellign your friends “game is up. join me”. They can then pick you from their friends list and select “join session in progress”.
Trueskill matching is unique to the xblive / GFWL systems and should hopefully encourage new players like it does in Halo 3 by matching them with other new players not rank 12 Vets. Steam and Gamespy don’t offer that.
In a choice between GFWL, Gamespy and Xfire (steam not being an option because it doesn’t seem to available to non valve games) I prefer GFWL. Shoot me :)
Meaning even Relic can’t get their heads around the fecal waterslide that is GFWL.
I honestly had no problems getting GFWL, so that isn’t so much the issue for me. I just wonder what kind of nefarious plans these “Microsoft” folks have in store. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, the only reason it bothers me is because I know I’m going to jump through all these hoops to play the games, because they will be good games, and I’m not young enough to reject things on principle anymore.
Ah, You can’t find DoW2 games through Steam? That I didn’t know.
Ok, well GFWL is poop and shouldn’t be needed and Steam should get their finger out their asses and support server browsing for non-valve-games.
Teth: Xfire is an IM client with voice, downloads, game tracking, server listing, video recording, lobby hosting, in-game utilities, and instant joining (which is what the gampad icon means).
Not a single game anywhere requires you to install Xfire for server listings as far as I know, and I’ve been using it for 5 years. None use it as a back end service like Gamespy or GFWL or Steam. It simply does not do that.
The fact that it is frequently bundled with installs or presented as though you need it does not make it unavoidable like the Gamespy hosted master server listings (games like BF2, 2142, UT3, recent C&C titles, etc). This is MARKETING ONLY.
Hmm… anyone know if I’m going to need a GFWL account to play DoW 2 single player and LAN multiplayer. I won’t play online, as I don’t care to play with complete strangers, and I am not going to use GFWL period.
Catastrophe: word is Empire:Total War will be using Steam matching for multiplayer, and it isn’t a Valve game. We’ll see how it turns out in about a month though.