Some new info, so decided to make a thread about it.
Trailer:
Translation on article from Gamestar.de:
Quote:
A brave (german wordplay on waagh i cant translate) Expansion:
Developer Relic on the gamescom presented “Retribution”, the 2nd expansion to Dawn of War 2. For the first time this expansion offers an Ork campaign as well as one more campaign.
Finally no more Space Marines ! After you could only play the Emperors finest in the singleplayer campaign of DOW2 and its first expansion Chaos Rising you can now finally play a different party in the 2nd, stand-alone expansion “Retribution” – and the first one to play will be the Orks!
You can chose your new missions on a star map but just like in Chaos Rising there wont be skirmish but story missions. One of them we were shown by Relic during gamescom.
The Heroes: Four against the Eldar
In our gamescom mission of DOW2: Retribution the developers were fighting with the Orks against the Eldar. In this mission they are using the 4 orc-heroes you will be taking into battle in the campaign.
Kaptn Blutflagg is the leader of your troops and a mighty warrior.
Mister Nailbrain is a Mekboy and knows all kind of mechanical special skills.
Spookums is an elite soldier and can cloak himself to attack enemies by suprise.
Brikkfist is a great melee fighter who jumps into the fray by jetpack and beats down the enemies with his hammer.
As before you have to combine the skills of those 4 heroes. If the Eldar are for example taking cover in a building you can have the tough Kaptn Blutflagg drawing their fire while cloaked Spookums sneaks behind and smokes the Eldar with his flamethrower.
Brikkfist on the other hand takes down whole squads of dangerous Elite-Eldar when he uses his jetpack to jump on and level them with his Hammerblows. And Nailbrain can destroy enemy vehicles with his rocket launcher – preferably when Kaptn Blutflagg is drawing their fire.
The tactical important heroe-teamwork has always been a strength of DoW2 – and of course they will also gain levels, new skills and will be able to equip new looted weapons and armor.
The Orks: new game mechanics.
Other than in DOW2 and Chaos Rising the Heroes in “Retribution” are all single-fighters. Remember the Space Marines apart from their Force Commander always had a squad with them.
But the orks make up for that because they may recruit infantry and vehicles on the field of battle. For this you have to take control of neutral production-buildings, for example Teleport-platforms from which orkish tanks can roll. But those reinforcements aren’t free of course: you pay for them with requisition points. Those just like in MP automatically get added to your account when you conquer and hold resource-controlpoints. If you hold other controlpoints you can also increase your unit cap you that the orks towards the ending of a mission can field sometimes huge armies.
Because of this the heroes have special skills which affect nearby ork troops. Kaptn Blutflagg for example can motivate his minions with a Waaaagh- Battlecry so they ll temporarily fight harder and cannot be suppressed.
Just like in MP killed enemies also mean more Waagh-energy for you. With that energy you can activate particullary strong special attacks – for example a meteorite strike.
After completed missions you can chose between 3 different rewards: Those rewards can be new pieces of equipment for your heroes (like a power-claw for the waaghboss) or new types of units like tanks or stormboy-nobs.
The campaign: more races.
The orks however aren’t the only party you will be able to command in the single-player campaign. Relic promises for Retribution a “multi-faction-campaign” but so far didn’t want to talk about the other races.
But at the end of the gamescom mission a female eldar farseer said “The Inquisition is comming!” This could mean that the imperial inquisition will be the 6th playable faction:
Space Marines, Orks, Eldar, Nids and Chaos Marines. Maybe even as playable campaign-choice.
Our summary:
Thanks to the campaign with multiple faction DOW2: Retribution should be a lot more varied than the vanilla game and its first expansion – at least if relic provides us continually great missions to play. The orkish unit-recruitment I think is nice but not that special -the corruption mechanics in chaos rising were more original and more interesting because it led to difficult moral choices. But whatever, I look forward to Retribution. Because the Hero-battles in typical DOW-way combined tactical depth with bombastic graphic effects.
As you can notice from the trailer, the I in Retribution is that of the Inquisition.
well, for the campaign (if it follows the same system as the first two campaigns) i imagine one of your four 'hero squads' being a grey knight terminator squad with psycannons and nemesis halberds, with the holocaust special ability. that would be awesome.
That's not necessarily how it may end up. Read the translation above, the Orks, for example, will not have many units with the bosses, but bosses will be able to summon more from buildings. Could be similar here.
Worms and other Steam MP reliant titles have work arounds as well however as far as I know so it'll probably be the same here though I guess LIVE (Without SSA and that new ZDP stuff that is.) was easier to manage.
Tactical variety and heroes with RPG-elements made Dawn of War II the hit it was.
This expansion lures you in with new building choices and races in the campaign.
How conservative does realtime strategy have to be? Blizzard needed twelve years to put out a new starcraft hat didn't shake the foundation of the game. Get ressources quick, gather lots of units and rush into the fray.
Relics Dawn of War II is a successful opposite of that concept. The focus is on few but characteristic heroes that gain experience and can be equipped like in RPG games.
Tactical decisions, quality over quantity. This recipe is found in Retribution, the new expansion, the second after Chaos Rising.
At the same time, Relic caters to the traditional fans of the genre. "Alot of people still want that common kind of experience in a game. They love to build hundreds of tanks and utterly crush their opponents with them." comments the lead designer Dan Kading.
Because of that, Relic wants to make both sides happy this time around. The production of units is introduced in the campaign, heroes stay.
Retribution is also more diverse in the amount of races you can choose to play the 16 mission long campaign.
Before Retribution, you were limited to the Space Marines, now you can choose 6 races. Space Marines, Chaos, Eldar, Orks, Tyranids and the new Imperial Guard, take your pick.
Every race has exclusive units, their own story and charm.
Even though every race has to accomplish roughly the same tasks, the mission design changes according to what race you play.
"It would have been ideal to have a completely unique campaign for every race, but it just wasn't possible to make it, and make it good, in the amount of time we had."
says Dan Kading, admitting that they didn't have enough time to do that with the quality they expect from themselves.
The main game, Dawn of War II was plagued by a flood of very generic and repititve missions. "We learned from that" Assures Kading "That's why we wanted to build every mission in Retribution from the ground up and include unique events that stay in your memory.
Playing trough the game more than once pays off even though the campaign missions start on the known maps.
But the story changes, depending on what race you chose, you clash with different opponents."
The initial position where the story starts from is equally critical for every faction:
Ten years have passed since the events of the last expansion, Chaos Rising. The Imperium of Man is annoyed by the persistent unrest in subsector Aurelia and orders the Exterminatus.
That's as dangerous as it sounds: A fleet of space ships arrives to completely destroy one planet after another with orbital weaponry.
To stop this method of cleansing the Imperium practices, your army jumps from one planet to another, using old teleport facilities (Most likely webways), to unveil the dark secrets of Aurelia.
Dan Kading explains why, out of all races, they chose the Imperial Guard as new playable faction. "Unlike the Space Marines, the Guard consists of 'normal' humans, which you can easily relate to. It's the most beginner-friendly race we made yet, due to the defensive capabilities it has ingame."
In comparison to the crazy aliens and superhumans, the Guardsmen feel almost 'tame'. One could think they made a jailbreak from Relics WWII game "Company of Heroes". Advantages in the vehicle department make sure that the guys don't end as cannon fodder. The Guard has the heaviest tanks and artillery in the whole game.
so, all that we are getting from the inquisition is an inquisitor embedded in the IG.
while IG is a cool race to play with, i was really looking forward to an inquisition faction with a grey knight 'tank' squad
I am dissapoint, especially after saying that the race would be an unseen before in the DoW universe. They had the opportunity to fuse the Malleus and Hereticus Ordos to achieve a very interesting mix, but instead opted for the cheap cop-out of IG. Shame.
Signature/Avatar nuking: none (can be changed in your profile)
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
They had the opportunity to fuse the Malleus and Hereticus Ordos to achieve a very interesting mix, but instead opted for the cheap cop-out of IG. Shame.
