Dawn of War 2 - Retribution Multiplayer Beta Detailed
The beta is intended to help balance multiplayer, plus test the new Steamworks networking and matchmaking which replace the Games for Windows Live features of previous DoW 2 titles. It'll contain all six races--Eldar, Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Orks, Tyranids and Imperial Guard--plus the new multiplayer maps.
The first wave will kick off on January 31 for members of the press and "key Dawn of War community members," followed by everyone who's pre-ordered Retribution via Steam on February 1. Finally, on February 8, invites will be sent to all who have bought a Dawn of War game via Steam or registered any version of Dawn of War 2 on Steam--that's anyone who owns it, as the game requires Steam activation. There'll be no open beta
The beta will wrap up on February 24. Feedback collected will then go towards making a balance patch due on Retribution's launch day, March 1.
Retribution comes in six $30 'Race Pack' editions and a $40 Collector's Edition--only available as a boxed edition direct from THQ--which contains all Race Packs plus a poster, art cards and fancy box. Each Race Pack has the full game and all six races, they simply offer a little bonus wargear for the single-player campaign of one race.
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Nation
replywill the old ones be patched to remove the games for windows live?
I have never played multiplayer because I could not get it working-
[deleted]
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Yes. Relic said they will end up transferring their games over. Not sure how far back that extends to but I assume all of them will at some point. I know they did a Steamworks patch for DoW2 and CR for stat tracking. So it's eventual for those.
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This is not true. Over at the Games forum at SA a member of Relic's development team has been a regular in our past two Dawn of War II threads. We actually encouraged him to post the OP to our new Retribution thread a day or two ago.
He has said that multiplayer (including Last Stand) ranks will be transferred over via that Steamworks patch, but aside from that all the previous GFWL-based Dawn of War games will remain GFWL games and probably stop receiving patches altogether. Exact post is below.
"We are leaving LIVE in the previous two titles since removing it would also kill the achievements you can earn. Some people would be really unhappy if we stopped them from earning all their gamerscore. The steam cloud add-in was prep so we could import ranks from MP and TLS forward. "-
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ah, that's unfortunate. People should stop caring about achievements and gamerscore :I
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I completely agree with you. I would love to see Retribution do for the previous games what Chaos Rising did for vanilla DoW2, but it is not to be. I know Relic really values the multiplayer community simply by looking at how they designed Chaos Rising so as to not fragment the playerbase, so this decision must not have been taken lightly!
Here's to hoping that this latest expansion (which might as well be considered a $30 standalone game, really) will result in better matchmaking for multiplayer!
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