Dawn of War 2

“We felt that the RTS genre lacks real long term gameplay goals. You lack attachment to your troops; you carry nothing with you from one game to the next,” Jonny says. “We want to give players a steady stream of rewards, as well as attachment to and ownership of their elite troops.”

If some elements of the gameplay sound familiar, it’s with good reason. Relic has taken a lot of cues from the success of another of its Game of the Year grade strategy titles – Company of Heroes, which itself was directly informed by the first Dawn of War.

“Whenever you played CoH you’d hear your squads call out to each other, often by name, and when a named character died, it was a real moment,” says the game’s producer, Mark Noseworthy. “For DoW2 we wanted CoH-style simple missions, with simple objectives, with low unit counts, and to deliver an intimate experience. DoW2 is based around controlling an elite company of five or six units that you take to the end of the campaign.”



To that end, gone are the faceless squads and units of the original. Every squad leader now has a name and personality, and a face for players to get attached to. We asked how unit loss would be dealt with, but an eloquent shrug from Jonny suggested that that was an issue the designers were still tackling.

Mark then went on to talk up the elite nature of the warriors under your command – the finest soldiers the world has ever seen, bred for war and part of a dying breed. There is a quote from the table top game that came to mind as Mark and Jonny delivered their vision for the game – “There is less than one Space Marine for every planet in the Imperium of Man; and yet, they are enough.” It’s a quote that, even if the devs are unaware of it, seems to have been taken to heart.

“It’s like the movie 300, right?” Mark says, “But Space Marines are so bad ass that it would just be called 30.”