DOWII Retribution beta announced

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 15 September, 2010

Steamworks support confirmed.

A beta for upcoming real-time strategy game Dawn of War II – Retribution will launch "in the new year", Relic's announced.

The game is the first in the series to use Valve's Steamworks networking and matchmaking to provide cooperative and competitive online play. Dawn of War II and expansion Chaos Rising use Games for Windows Live.

"This new back end will allow players to invite friends into matches from their Steam friends lists, and take advantage of the full set of Steam community features including groups, achievements, and Steam overlay chat channels," Relic said.

"We are also going to include an all new matchmaking and ranking set up, built specifically for Dawn of War II – Retribution.

"The move to Steamworks will also allow us to provide features like guest passes, free multiplayer weekends, pre-loading and the ability to provide fast turn-around on future patches and updates."

DOWII and CR will continue to use GFWL "in order to preserve the owners of those titles ability to earn Live achievements as well as their established friends lists", Relic added.

But in a change from Relic's strategy with previous expansions, the developer will not patch new units for each of the existing five races back into DOWII and Chaos Rising.

"More details on the beta will be announced at a later date," Relic promised.

THQ core boss Danny Bilson told Eurogamer last month that the decision to switch from GFWL to Steamworks for its titles was a difficult one.

"We've done a lot of research here," he said.

"Microsoft is a fantastic partner of ours. For us to make a decision to go to Steamworks over them required a real deep dive on the part of some of our team."

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (18) Latest comment 2 years ago

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  • cianchristopher #1 2 years ago

    Good move, but have they ever clarified why DOWII and Chaos Rising required both Steam and GfWL?

    It was the oddest decision, honestly...

  • Spekingur #2 2 years ago

    Well, it has achievements. XBL account can be used for GfWL as well so you can actually get more GS on your profile that way. People playing on an XBox and logged into XBL would also see that you were playing DoWII and might thus be interested in it.

    Theoretically.

  • Gnort #3 2 years ago

    That's bad as it will split the playerbase. Currently, people with just DoW2 can play against people with CR, they're all in one big pool, but if Retribution doesn't use GfWL or DoW2 and CR aren't retrofitted for Steamworks, you're going to have two separate groups of people looking for games.

  • cheeky_pete #4 2 years ago

    THQ core boss Danny Bilson told Eurogamer last month that the decision to switch from GFWL to Steamworks for its titles was a difficult one.

    "We've done a lot of research here," he said.

    "Microsoft is a fantastic partner of ours. For us to make a decision to go to Steamworks over them required a real deep dive on the part of some of our team."


    HA HA HA Seriously that was all for Microsofts sake to save their feelings for some reason. The reason they switched is 99% of the gaming PC players hate GFWL and having to use it for a game that is locked to steam when steam has vastly superior features is just stupid. I hope more developers jump to using steam so we can finally get rid of GFWL once and for all.

  • Hunam #5 2 years ago

    About Fucking Time - Live

  • cairbre1977 #6 2 years ago

    Reading through the niceties GfW is a big steamy turd. I feckin hate it so much. It's just utterly pointless.......

  • Whizzo #7 2 years ago

    I would have thought they would have waited until DoW3 but I can't say I'm unhappy to see the back of GFWL (apart from the achievements on my Live account of course).

    GFWL (but not the quite good GFW standardisation) has been such a huge pointless exercise for Microsoft and to think they wanted PC gamers to actually pay subs when it first started too!

  • Zaiz #8 2 years ago

    Relic might install a retroactive patch thing, they did it in Company of Heroes so they could release expandalones and still let the community play together.

  • Hunkyjim #9 2 years ago

    Glad to see some devs taking action rather than just going with the flow.

    Kudos, and good fucking riddance GFWL

  • Paper #10 2 years ago

    Splendid.

    Awesome news. GFWL is terrible and Microsoft screwed the pooch.

  • Der_tolle_Emil #11 2 years ago

    I don't get all the GFWL hate. Granted it does not enhance the games that much but it also does not get in your way at all so who cares if it's running in the background while playing a game? There have also been a few times where it was a nice feature being able to chat up my friends on XBLA.

  • Whizzo #12 2 years ago

    subedii, a poster at RPS summarises what's wrong with GFWL very well here.

  • bad09 #13 2 years ago

    I did like GFWL then I heard about their limit on how many times you can activate your own game that you paid for. Steamworks is a much better solution. No limts to worry about at all, you still get achievements if you care about them and you can even use retail discs to unlock the games on your Steam library.

    I would prefer if more used Steamworks for their DRM (epsecially when numpties like Ubiscum are trying to kill the PC platform by pushing always online DRM) and was quite gutted when SEGA jumped the Steamworks ship.

    Edit - reading that awesome post Whizzo linked has reminded me of another reason I now dislike GFWL.

    "- GFWL encrypts savegame files from supported games, so that you’ll never be able to migrate them to a different hard drive, or back them up and then restore them, if you reinstall your OS. Basic Windows file portability is essentially destroyed by MS’s own GFWL, in other words."

    Having to stuff a new drive in my PC this weekend only to discover all my GTA saves I backed up were useless was not pretty :(
    Edited by bad09 at 15/09/10 @ 21:18

  • Der_tolle_Emil #14 2 years ago

    Is this savegame issue also happening when you bought the game on Steam? I definitely moved my savegames because my old machine died pretty soon after getting the game and I did not notice any issues getting my savegames to work. The only thing I had to was re-download the DLC but I'm not even sure if I tried to copy those over.

  • Hunkyjim #15 2 years ago

    We couldn't play DOW2 vs AI for months because of a well known bug that stops teh AI from often capping points. It's unnecessary bloatware for the current generation of dribblers. It's (clearly) not needed for PC games.

  • SAMagic #16 2 years ago

    GFWL served as little more than another hoop to jump to get into the game for me, I completely agree with everything subedii said.

  • xenoss #17 2 years ago

    Bad because they split the player base? Perhaps.

    But the GFWL + Steam method was wrong to begin with. It is a wise decision for them to finally get rid of GFWL. Very honestly, GFWL provided nothing of value; everything it does, Steam does better. The only things GFWL did were all negative, making the experience more troublesome.

    eg.

    Game is not playable if GFWL isn't update. And for me there is some sort of bug that make me unable to update GFWL from within the game, or from GFWL. I have to download a patch to apply it manually everytime.

    It is toublesome to have to log in to GFWL everytime.

    Its matchmaking is slow.

    May be this is of some value for 360 users. Because friendslist from the console is so important right?

    I am so glad they got rid of the horrible GTFO GFWL.

  • Syon #18 2 years ago

    Hell, it's about time... for another mission pack. This game is awsome.