Dawn of War 2 was a risky sequel for Relic. It radically changes the gameplay of a series that was already successful for the company. And, as lead designer Jonny Ebbert had feared, I wasn't sure I liked it much at first.

But after giving it a few more hours, and taking a look at the co-op campaign during a long playthrough today, Relic has very predictably proven me wrong. The team has done something I didn't think possible--they simplified their hardcore RTS, and somehow made it more fun in the process.

After wasting a few hundred Orks, I got a chance to talk with Dawn of War II principal designer Jonny Ebbert. A sharp, easy-going guy, Ebbert had plenty to say on Relic's past, present and future as a company, in addition to specific details on the development and future of Dawn of War II.

What sorts of free updates and DLC are in store for Dawn of War II owners? How stable is Relic in this economy? What would a Homeworld sequel look like--and is it even realistic to hope for one? Read on for the full interview.

Shack: Have you been satisfied with the response to the beta? Do you guys have download numbers?

Jonny Ebbert: Yeah, I think by the end of week two we had 100,000 people in the beta. It might be even more, but I remember we cracked 100,000 pretty quick. So we were really excited by the reception we had gotten.

Shack: Dawn of War II has plenty of elements from past Relic titles--most notably Company of Heroes, but also a little bit of Homeworld, with the single-structure base. Was the plan from the beginning to sort of take the best from each of your RTS franchises and combine them into a single, approachable game?

Jonny Ebbert: That's exactly right, we wanted to take the best of Dawn of War and the best of Company of Heroes and kind of bring them together. And yeah, I guess you can also say that Homeworld kind of trickled in subconsciously. [laughs] It had never occurred to me that it had influenced us.

But yeah, on top of that there were some other things that we wanted to try to push into the genre. In our campaign--we didn't like starting over every mission, so we tried to build a campaign structure that didn't force you to do that. We also play other types of games, and we love how other types of games reward you constantly with cool unlocks, cool new abilities, so we tried to build that into the game and add more persistence across singleplayer and multiplayer.

So in multiplayer, when you play a lot of rounds, you'll start getting cool visual unlocks for your troops. And in singleplayer, you have that persistence force that you take from one mission to the next, and they kind of get bigger and better as you go through. We're hoping that adds some real spice to RTS, and kind of mixes up the experience and provides something kind of cool and new to the player.

Shack: Did you find that the complexity of the modern RTS was limiting your playerbase?

Jonny Ebbert: Oh from day one, what we decided was: we need to start expanding RTS to new people. Because our core constituency is shrinking. They're either moving out of gaming, or moving to other types of games. But we're not creating new gamers, was kind of our [problem].

Our goal from the beginning was to maintain the depth, but simplify it. So, make something simple to learn, but difficult to master, to get people into it more quickly. We moved away from the traditional model of controlling a vast army, building a vast base, managing a vast resource structure. We kind of contracted it, and made it so that you focus on less things, but with more depth.

So our thinking was, you do a little bit with tons of things and it looks way scarier, because there's a lot more dials to turn. Having a few things to work with, four or five squads, but they have a lot of depth, and you can do a lot of things with them, and you can slowly grow into it--we thought that was a better model that could appeal to more people. So we'll see. We'll see how players respond to it.

Shack: Do you guys ever worry about the RTS genre going out of vogue entirely, as in the case of flight simulators?

Jonny Ebbert: Most definitely. Like you said, we're an RTS studio, and if RTS isn't doing well, we're not doing well.

Shack: So from your perspective, something had to change.

Jonny Ebbert: Yeah. Dawn of War II, we broke the mold for a sequel. A friend of mine who is another lead designer told me, "Wow, you really changed a lot of things. I wouldn't have done that."

Shack: It's risky.

Jonny Ebbert: We knew it was risky, and it could backfire, but we felt like a big change was needed if we want to start growing a franchise and attracting new types of players. And like I said, we really focused on trying to keep the depth there so that our current players would be just as excited. Initially some of them were a little... skeptical when they first found out what we were doing.

Shack: I was skeptical.

Jonny Ebbert: Were you?

Shack: Yeah. Because on the surface, you don't see the complexity.

Jonny Ebbert: The complexity, right. I've met a lot of players whose first reaction was like, "Well, this game has no depth. They basically pulled all the teeth out of this game." And I don't know if it's wishful thinking on my part, but as I've read the boards, people who started out saying that are starting to complain about the balance of the game. Which to me was a sign that... well, there is some depth. [laughs]

Shack: [laughs] Right.

Jonny Ebbert: It's funny. One of our top players of the original DoW said, "This game [Dawn of War II] has no skill. Day one, I was number seven on the boards." And like, I'm sure the guy who was number seven on the first day of the original StarCraft had it pretty much figured out. [laughs] No new strategies were figured out or anything--everything was determined at that point. [laughs] But no, we know we took a big risk, and we hope it pays off.

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