http://www.dawnofwar2.com/

Whoo! Perusing Wikipedia last night, I ended up on the Company of Heroes page. At the bottom, they have a little box listing each game in each franchise Relic has developed, like Homeworld and their Warhammer games. That's when I noticed Dawn of War II listed!

It seems the announcement was just a few days ago and I don't have my finger on the PULSE so it was just by chance that I noticed it now. It's currently set for early 2009.

For those that don't know, Dawn of War is a very popular series of RTS games set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe which is a tabletop RPG with stupidly expensive playing pieces I guess. The first game has recieved THREE expansion packs up to this point, Soulstorm, the most recent, being released just a few months ago. They are very fun, featuring a high number of playable races and very gory, fast paced gameplay. However, the engine is aging quite a bit now, the graphics looking dated and it lacks a lot of the cool physics and destructible environments that Relic's other flagship series, Company of Heroes, has through its Essence engine.

But Dawn of War II will change that. It uses an upgraded Essence engine, CREATIVELY dubbed Essence 2.0. This means you can probably expect to see a lot of the cool stuff you see in Company of Heroes - tanks breaking through the corners of buildings and walls sending rubble flying, fields turned to bombed out husks, and very detailed unit physics and animations.

Stuff that is confirmed:

-Space Marines and Orks as playable (though I would bet my entire savings account that Chaos and Eldar are playable too)
-A non-linear campaign, similar to the metamap campaigns in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, EXCEPT with a lot more story focus (ie you don't just randomly attack territories and fight generic skirmish battles)
-A CO-OPERATIVE MULTIPLAYER CAMPAIGN (this is what sounds really cool to me - I love playing RTS games with friends against the computer, having an actual campaign for it would be ACE)
-People who buy/bought Soulstorm will be able to participate in an upcoming multiplayer beta

The story/setting, such as it is:

It's the 41st Millennium in the Sub-Sector Aurelia - a cluster of worlds on the edge of the Galaxy - where a battle of epic proportions is about to commence. Ancient races will clash across the planets that dot this section of space, battling for the greatest of stakes - not only the claim to the land and its bounty - but the fate of each race.

(Yeah it's not quite Shakespeare yet!!)

The video on the website (it's just like a 20 second teaser trailer) shows a Space Marine Force Commander battling an Ork Warboss. The Force Commander executes the Warboss fairly easily and looks exactly like the hero from the original DoW campaign, right down to the hammer that he recieves in the last mission. As people may remember, DoW's campaign ends in a really shitty cliffhanger... one they NEVER followed up on, so I'm betting DoW II will cover that somehow.

There are three screens on the site, but pubaccess is still down so you'll have to go there to check them out!!!


So yeah, maybe I posted the topic a bit early but I wanted to let people know in case they are interested like me and don't subscribe to the IGN NEWSFEED or whatever.

I love dawn of war, and I'm pretty stoked for this (I hope it still has army painter... I need my Cobra legions). Soulstorm was kinda a letdown, so maybe finally we'll get the tyranids this time.

Yeah I thought the graphics were a big strange at first too, but after looking over them a little more, I like it. The SHINE might be a bit over the top, but the unit texturing and weapon effects look smokin.

The ground textures look in need of some serious anisotropic filtering though. You've also gotta consider that it's an RTS though, and very little time will be spent zoomed in, admiring each individual unit as the screenshots on the website are. The important thing is that it runs fast and looks good zoomed out while the action happens.

I can't put my finger on WHY, but company of heroes was always more polished to me. I guess to be fair, dawn of war can never really go down that path, as they have to keep it somewhat like tabletop game, but it was pretty amazing when it first came out.

But yeah, I enjoyed holing up a bunch of ragged grenadiers in an old warehouse or taking potshots at tanks from hedgerows more than just throwing a bunch of marines and a bloodthirster and waiting for the battle to end. I guess there's little emphasis on the individual soldier in 40k, as opposed to say Necromunda, whereas CoH seemed to make the individual feel more important. Plus, the retreat command is an awesome thing to have in a game

Mind you the one thing DoW has going for it is the campaigns. I'm really hoping they eventually pull off something like Vogen from the cityfight rulebook.

Were the Necron in any of the DoW expansions? We really need some Necron up in these games.

They were in the second last expansion, and they were done rather well since most of their troops had a slim chance to revive themselves. Also the monolith acted as their HQ and in the final stage just floated around blowing shit up.

they were? oh wooooooooow. i played the original game, then started winter assault but got bored really fast. i hope they are in this one so i get to see them~.

Man, when are they going to let us play as the Zerg uh, I mean Tyranids!

Man, when are they going to let us play as the Zerg uh, I mean Tyranids!

Man, Warhammer 40000 has been around since the 1980s and I'm pretty sure that Tyranids were added to the Warhammer universe way before Starcraft was like even proposed to Blizzard or perhaps before Blizzard even existed.

You are correct maladroithm, games workshop is old, and so is WH40K. This looks so much better then DOW and i don't think the graphics look weird, it even looks like it has a sense of realness, like i could actually hold the characters in my hands.

Man, Warhammer 40000 has been around since the 1980s and I'm pretty sure that Tyranids were added to the Warhammer universe way before Starcraft was like even proposed to Blizzard or perhaps before Blizzard even existed.

I was being sarcastic.  When Starcraft came out the first thing I said was "What is this, 40K for the computer?"  Then I got jumped by a bunch of Blizzard fags.

Seriously, 13 year old me gets PUNCHED in a department store for thinking the game was Warhammer.

I was being sarcastic.  When Starcraft came out the first thing I said was "What is this, 40K for the computer?"  Then I got jumped by a bunch of Blizzard fags.

Seriously, 13 year old me gets PUNCHED in a department store for thinking the game was Warhammer.

Well you know how sarcasm is on the internet. 

Also Blizzard is serious business man.

Will it have the good parts of Company of Heroes (though I only played the demo) like destructible environments and that nifty cover system, that was my favorite part of Company of Heroes that seemed to be missing from DoW.

All my experience from these games come from watching someone play DoW and playing the CoH demo. I liked CoH but not enough to buy it. (also not little enough to pirate it)

Tau Ftw. The graphics do look way more realistic than the first DOW.

Systers of battle are hysterical though. You can't really fault an army that has an organ mortar unit.
Soulstorm is a joke. it was leased to some third party, the engine was already showing it's age. the big difference was "flying" units (I mean... landraiders with hover graphics instead of onfloor graphics). the two armies we got we such fantastic choices for it. We had the dark eldar who seem to play into every "evil" cliche around (whores on a skiff... whatever next? Skull gun turrets... oh wait) and fucking angels with an organ mortar tank. The fact that the special ability of which the game was titled after is so unbearably weak and ineffective really shows that this is a game not to be taken seriously.
Tyranids would have just been so out of place.

Also I hope they don't make DOW2 too much like company of heroes. That game started out fun but for some unexplainable reason it gets boing way too fast.

Systers of battle are hysterical though. You can't really fault an army that has an organ mortar unit.
Soulstorm is a joke. it was leased to some third party, the engine was already showing it's age. the big difference was "flying" units (I mean... landraiders with hover graphics instead of onfloor graphics). the two armies we got we such fantastic choices for it. We had the dark eldar who seem to play into every "evil" cliche around (whores on a skiff... whatever next? Skull gun turrets... oh wait) and fucking angels with an organ mortar tank. The fact that the special ability of which the game was titled after is so unbearably weak and ineffective really shows that this is a game not to be taken seriously.
Tyranids would have just been so out of place.

Also I hope they don't make DOW2 too much like company of heroes. That game started out fun but for some unexplainable reason it gets boing way too fast.

Yes... I hope they avoid whatever inexplicable niche mistake they made that bored you and only you after a short period of time....

It's just an upgraded version of the engine. Company of Heroes was already a lot like Dawn of War, but with better graphics and obviously more realism. You cap points, build squads, outfit them with heavy weapons..