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UK Exclusive: Dawn Of War II Q&A Feature
Jon Wilcox
06/06/2008
TVG sits down with Relic's Mark Noseworthy and chats about Dawn of War II, and how the 2009 RTS will help drive the genre forward...
Scheduled to hit PCs in Spring 2009, Relic Entertainment's Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II looks set to craft the next stage in the evolution of the action-RTS sub-genre. Promising new features and ideas to push the franchise away from what Relic sees as the '90s-style' of RTS games, such as StarCraft and Command & Conquer, Dawn of War II takes the path set by the first Dawn of War (and its expansion packs), together with another of the studio's brands - Company of Heroes - as it seeks to take the Space Marine gory-splat glory to new heights.
Sat fifteen floors up at Relic Entertainment's Vancouver offices, TVG spoke with Dawn of War II Producer, Mark Noseworthy about the studio's objectives for the follow-up to one of THQ's near-guaranteed cash cows...
TVG: The original Dawn of War was obviously a huge success for Relic over the past few years, culminating with the Soul Storm expansion pack; what were your main objectives for the sequel?
We think that the genre is stagnant, and with sales and popularity, we think it's waning in some ways. It's not providing the same core fantasy that other genres on the PC are. So Dawn of War II is an opportunity to try and do that; try to push the genre.
In the original Dawn of War, we added a greater emphasis on action and getting straight into battle. In Company of Heroes, we added intelligent squads, environmental tactics, and destructible environments; [so] in Dawn of War II we're taking both of those, and we're trying to address these problems with the genre. We're trying to add real long-term rewards through the campaign, where you have a lot of player choice and where your actions on the battlefield have a real impact persistently across the game. Where you control an elite strike force of squads that get stronger with each shot they fire, and where you customise these guys throughout the course of the campaign - the same five squads at the end are the same five you start off with.
We think that doing those things will help us innovate the genre and give it a kick-start.
TVG: So would you say that the innovations help to provide a sort of 'RPG-like' depth to the genre?
I wouldn't necessarily say 'RPG', but we do see it as the natural evolution [of the genre]. We had some level of persistence in Dark Crusade (the second Dawn of War expansion pack), and by taking that and combining it with the intimacy of battle from Company of Heroes, we want to take it to the next level.
TVG: Does the campaign of Dawn of War II take place after the events of Dawn of War or is it completely separate?
There are a few characters that will make some appearances, but in terms of the chronology, it's difficult to say right now where it fits. I know that our lead writer is intimately involved in that, and he was also the writer of Dark Crusade. So some characters will make appearances; maybe you'll get to play them a couple in some 'guest starring' missions or something. It's definitely part of the same universe and the same time line.
TVG: You've spoken about character intimacy in Dawn of War II; how is that developed as the game progresses? Does it come through mission choices along?
Yeah, we think that some of the intimacy you're going to get is through just playing the game, pure gameplay. Things like hearing the guys chatter on the battlefield, the banter back and forth between the heroes; you feel like they're real soldiers. The other side of it is when you're not in battle, and you're looking after equipment and armour, and you look at a mission and ask, "How you're going to tackle this mission? What kind of armour do I want? What upgrades do I want to buy?"
So you're going to look at it in two ways; one side is your actions on the battlefield and the other is your actions on a higher level.
TVG: During the presentation, I noticed that each mission had a limited number of attempts available. How does this play out and affect gameplay?
We're not going into too many specifics over the meta-campaign just yet, but at any given point you're going to have several missions to choose from. Some of them will be mutually exclusive; you're not going to be able to do everything - you're going to have to make your own decisions about which missions you're going to go on.
Taking one mission might mean you get a real sweet piece of loot for your Force Commander, but at the same time you might have another mission to save some critical manufacturing facilities for the Imperium - you can't do that now. But that's a choice you'll make as a player; you're going to have an impact over the course of the campaign.
TVG: Taking that example; if a player saved the manufacturing facilities instead of getting the loot for the Force Commander, how would that affect the campaign - would it impact the resources available to them further down the line?
It's what your actions on the mission are, how you perform on the mission, the things you do, the objectives you accomplish. You could play the mission, I could play the mission, and we'd have completely different outcomes and performance - we both might defeat the war boss at the end, but we did different things. That's going to have an impact of what missions will be available and how you're going to complete them. In turn, that's going to affect what rewards you're going to get, and that impacts how you're going to do the missions. There are several branches that take place based on performance during a mission; it's all goes back to that persistence. We want the action you take as a player to be meaningful, we don't want to just build up a big army, fight over some meaningless patch of dirt, and nothing carries forward. We want everything to go towards something really meaningful.
TVG: Dawn of War II utilises the Essence Engine 2.0; aside from its visuals, can you go into further detail as to what the engine allows you to add to the game?
Well the engine has been developed for multi-core technology. You can have a greater level of detail; the sheer fact that you're having units now that have different pieces of armour, you have so many guys in a battle group now - you just couldn't do that before with the original Essence Engine. War Gear is only been enabled by virtue of us changing the technology, modifying it, so that the soldiers could be built in parts and snapped together like LEGO pieces as opposed to one entire model. We did a lot on that.
Then there's the multi-core, which allows us far better performance. We [also] want you to feel like you're fighting over something meaningful, and not these useless patches of dirt. So one of the things is that the environment you're playing in is majestic; it's dark and grim - it's 40k - but it feels like it's worth saving. By virtue of doing that, the vistas you see are tremendous and look amazing, but we couldn't do that before. But because we're multi-core, because we're re-doing the lighting systems and how we track shadows, everything's changed to give us that chance.
TVG: You mentioned that Dawn of War II is multi-core. With that in mind, are there plans to port it over to the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, given that they're also multi-core? If not, do you feel that there's a future for the RTS genre on consoles?
We're proud to say that Dawn of War II is exclusive to PC. [Regarding] the console question, we thought about ports, especially early in conception. But we really want Dawn of War II to be the best game possible, and fans of the series want PC. We wanted to make an uncompromised game, and felt that PC was the best way to do that.
For the future of the genre on console, I definitely think it's interesting. There are fifty million gamers buying a lot of games on console; the sales on console are a lot higher than sales on PC. I don't think the attempts tried so far have been successful because they concentrate exclusively on the controls - like, the only problem is somehow managing to control two hundred units. The thing is, [while] you come up with good controls like EA has tried, the game design is the real challenge. What experience you have just inches away from a computer monitor with an RTS game, isn't what you want to experience with a joypad ten feet away on your HDTV. There's something missing there; it's not just about the game controls, it's the design.
So if you're ever going to make an RTS for console, it really has to be built from the ground up. Yet, I think that most of the RTS attempts you see on console are ports; they're done from a very traditional perspective. Pikmin is probably the most RTS; it did well. It's not traditional, but that's the kind of thing: we're not interested in doing Pikmin, there's not enough blood or guts in it! Nintendo didn't even realise they were making an RTS probably, but that's much more of the right approach than just saying "Let's take Command & Conquer 7 and through a console SKU up there!"
TVG: And do you think that console development is something that you'll [Relic] have to get into because of the performance of the PC as a platform?
I think the PC platform is actually still very strong. It gets a bad rap because a lot of what we see are PC [retail] sales in the States, and they don't really capture the whole picture. Online revenues are exceptionally strong; people are buying a lot of games digitally, especially through services like Steam. If you look anecdotally at places like Relic, the PC is actually thriving in certain areas. When you look at online like MMOs, the market in North America is $1.6 billion which is larger than the PC retail market. Then you look at pre-played games, and what's happening in Asia, what's happening in South America, what's happening in India. You've got games like Maple Story on the PC, which is doing millions and millions of sales per month. I think the platform is just changing and the content people want on it is changing. I think the PC platform is still going strong if you're making the right products.
TVG: So there's still life in it as a core platform and isn't just for the casual market?
Totally - obviously we think so.
TVG would like to thank Mark Noseworthy at Relic Entertainment and Greg Jones at THQ. The second part of TVG's Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II Q&A with Mark Noseworthy will be coming very soon.
Anonymous
Date Added:Tue 2nd Sep 2008 20:31
Anonymous
Date Added:Wed 30th Jul 2008 23:52
light is now darkness
Date Added:Wed 9th Jul 2008 19:51
warhammer 40k :D
Date Added:Wed 25th Jun 2008 12:28
Anonymous
Date Added:Sat 21st Jun 2008 12:49
DoW 2 is by far my most anticipated game for 2008 & 2009 combinned.
Anonymous
Date Added:Fri 20th Jun 2008 20:53
DOW2 = innovation to the highest degree
Anonymous
Date Added:Fri 20th Jun 2008 12:45
- squads - old
- morale system - old (Cossacs 2 or something)
- resource system - old (Z)
- small scale, macro-less gameplay - old (Ground Control 2, and many others, including RTT titles)
I could go on and on... [ Read full comment... ]
Anonymous
Date Added:Sun 15th Jun 2008 22:17
TheAnhilator95
Date Added:Fri 13th Jun 2008 17:12
Glyndwr
Date Added:Tue 10th Jun 2008 12:11
And that's before you take into account the rest of the stuff Relic is adding into i... [ Read full comment... ]