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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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THQ on everything

Dawn of War III, UFC 3, Guillermo del Toro and more.

Eurogamer But it's two years out.
Danny Bilson

It is. But you know what, you know how those betas come really early? Just keep in touch and you could be one of the first in.

Eurogamer Moving on to Dawn of War II: Retribution, what can we expect to see from that?
Danny Bilson

Multiple races all in the same game. This is the one that brings them all together. In multiplayer you can choose them all. But in the single-player experience you encounter them all.

You can play single-player experience from each race through the game. So whatever your favourite race is, you can play that, and then you can play it through again from another race. And it does go halfway back to... I'm not going to say there's base building in there particularly, but you do have the ability to build and grow larger units.

It's not just the four units on the screen thing we've had in the last two games. There was a lot of demand for that from the players of Dawn of War I. We've come halfway back.

This one is really cool in the fact that I can play it as the different races, and go up my tech trees on each race and all of that.

Eurogamer Any new races?
Danny Bilson

You'll see at gamescom.

Dawn of War II expandalone Retribution.
Eurogamer When are we going to see Dawn of War III?
Danny Bilson

Retribution's going to ship in February, and then we start laying out Dawn of War III. You can probably expect it between 18 months and two years after that.

It may be a more digital free-to-play experience with all the depth and quality of a Relic RTS.

Company of Heroes Online is another thing we're showing at gamescom, because we're going to be bringing that to North America and Europe very soon in the fall.

We're taking company of Heroes, and we've added all kinds of things to it. It's now going to be launched as a free-to-play micro-transaction, where you don't have to buy anything. It's just time versus investment.

You can play the heck out of it and unlock and earn certain things. But at the same time, we'll be selling little pieces. Little bits of the game to enhance your game online. Leaderboards, you can have an avatar and a screen that shows how you're doing in the game.

We've invested years in bringing this to free-to-play, and a lot of money to make it a cool free-to-play. I haven't seen everything in the world, but it has to be the biggest budget, biggest blockbuster free-to-play game that's gone that way yet. It's coming this fall, and I think winter in Europe.

Eurogamer So Dawn of War III may be like Company of Heroes Online, then?
Danny Bilson

Could be. It all depends on how COHO does, and how it works and how people respond to it. If they do that would definitely drive us to... Now Dawn of War III, either way, is going to have a much larger strategic component to it, more of a global battle going on with little tactical things, sort of MMO-like.

I'm just giving you a lot of preview. We haven't announced anything about it, and it's still in its early formative stage, but I'm just talking to you about the brainstorming going on around it. I'm excited about it. I'm a big fan of that, obviously.