Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A gory torrent of footage and commentary on the upcoming Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising expansion pack awaits below. Seems as though this one’s building upon the admittedly limited scope of DOW2 in a whole bunch of ways, not least in terms of environments. There’s even a little Space Hulkiness in there…
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There’s been rumours around, but it’s finally been confirmed in our old comrades at the PC Gamer* podcast. Talking about their forthcoming issue where they reveal that the first Dawn of War 2 add-on pack will feature chaos. And it’s called Chaos Rising. It’s welcome, but not exactly an enormous surprise – I thought Chaos would be one of the most-likely factions to be in the original game. There’s little more in the podcast – expect more to come when the subs copies arrive with their readers shortly.

*UK. As in, the original one. Yeah, you heard.

Friday nights are for playing Champions Online for far too long with Messrs Gillen and Cameron while waiting in vain for grumbly John Walker to join us, instead of getting my posts for RPS done and packing for a camping trip in the wilds of Sussex. Sigh. At least I am cheered by news of an impending update for Dawn of War II, which adds a promising-sounding new mode to the game. It even gets its own chest-pounding WAR IS NOBLE AND MANLY CGI video…
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The latest update for Dawn Of War 2, There Is Only War, is now up on Steam. Instructions for how to activate it are here. The update comes with the “world builder” level editing tools, and there’s a PDF instruction document for that here. We’re totally expecting an RPS community map. The full list of other changes included in the patch is here, and boy, that is a lot of changes. The beta runs to 14th July, when it will go live for the retail game.

Balance issues have been making DoW II players frown and cuss, and Relic have been busying themselves making a super-patch to fix it all. It’s almost ready, and the guys have released a battle report (below), narrated by designer Jonny Ebbert and balancer Clint Tasker, to demonstrate some of the fundamental changes. You can keep an eye on further developments over on the DoWII devblog. Even more interesting, perhaps, is this in-depth report by Game Replays, who went out to visit Relic to check out and report on the 1.4 update. Yep, they’re taking it that seriously.

Thanks to RPS regular Sub Edii for the tip off.
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The shootiest RTS of all time, Dawn Of War II, has just had a monster update, and should patch automatically when you start the game up. The update includes the 2v2 game mode we were all clamouring for when the game originally came out, as well as a bunch of other surface stuff such as new death animations. There’s also two new four-player maps, a benchmarking app, and push to talk for voice chat. There’s also some serious bug fixing and an overhaul of the AI. Full details of patch below. We’ll probably have a poke around on those new maps later today, but let us know below if you have any thoughts on this update, or the current state of DoWII.
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Well, this is terribly gracious. The complete score for Relic’s divisive RTS sequel can now be had for no pennies. I can’t say it struck me as either wonderful or terrible whilst I played the game, but the track names are certainly spectacular – f’rinstance “There Is Only War“, “They Come In Waves And We Push Them Back” and – oh yes – “Show Me What Passes For Music Among Your Misbegotten Kind“. The world would be a better place if all songs were called that, frankly.
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I mean you can download it from other sources, but you’d still need Steam to play it. So you might as well download it on Steam. Of course that only really matters if you haven’t already bought and played DoWII anyway, which I know a few of you haven’t, because at least one of you has been asking me whether the single player is really worth full-price game money. You’d have hoped our extensive judgments on the game might have counted for something, but this demo now means you can decide for yourself with 333mb of Marines vs Orks.

What do you think, RTS veterans, should Andrew buy Dawn Of War II? (If he hasn’t already.)

As if more proof were needed that Febrooairy and Marrtch were months made of strategy, we hear glad tidings of little army men achieving great commercial success. Across the world (including the US, UK and Oz) last week, Dawn of War II hit the top of the PC charts like a, er, Space Marine hitting a pile of Orks with a powerfist. Or something. God, it’s too early for tortorous similes.

However, come this week in the UK, DOWII’s down to number 3 in the PC charts, below the latest instalment of perennial UK man-magnet Football Manager. In the all-formats chart, it places a mere 29th. DOOM! PC GAMING, DEAD! DEAD LIKE MY ABILITY TO DEVISE FUNNY SIMILES! Except… we have a new champion. One that achieves even greater success.
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I tend to think it’s a hallmark of a game being a wee bit special if I carry on playing it after I’ve filed a review of it. Because what I think is so terribly important and always 100% right, you see. Such has been the case with Dawn of War II, which has successfully managed to keep me from away from other, more pressing work for the last couple of days. One big reason for this has been wading back in on the Primarch difficulty setting (that’s ‘Ultra-bastard-hard’ in proper English), where my concerns about how relatively tactic-free the Sergeant setting was have been given a gentle shoeing.
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