Now
Dawn of War II has finally shipped worldwide, we at
GameReplays.org managed to catch up with
Thunder,
Relic Entertainment's community manager, for a few post-beta questions about the state of the game and it's future...
GR.org: Are there intentions to improve the UI which many players have had complaints about? There are many standard features missing (like combat notifications using the space bar to auto-zoom) and many annoyances (like very small unit icons and resource readings). Or is what is in the beta what we get?
Relic: I’m sorry I’m getting to these questions answered so late but we just shipped a game so things were pretty hectic around here. We’re certainly going to be taking a look at player feedback on many aspects of the game including the UI. I don’t want to make any big promises but the UI is one of many parts of the game we’ll be taking a look at for future patching.
GR.org: Are you willed to redesign the server browser? To add a global chat and a redesigned server list such as in CoH where you've seen the people who are in (name and rank) before you joined and a refresh button?
Relic: We received a lot of great feedback about the multiplayer lobby and features during the BETA and got to experience those features ourselves for the first time with thousands of players. The multiplayer community is a big focus for
Dawn of War II and we’re always looking at new and better ways to present information to our players. We received some good UI feedback and we will be evaluating the issues that you mention as well.
GR.org: Does the gameplay in the beta surprise you from a design standpoint and meet your expectations in terms of units used, pacing, etc.
Relic: There are always things that players come up with that we don’t anticipate, which is the real value of a BETA. I want to just throw out a huge THANK YOU to everyone who participated, especially to those of you who took the time to post on our forums on the DOW II Community Site. The amount and quality of the feedback that we received on balance, bugs, pacing and all other aspects of the game was amazing and very helpful to us.
I’m not on the design team so I’m mostly speaking for myself here but i don’t think there were overall strategies that particularly surprised me though the use/effectiveness of some abilities did, such as grenade spiking.
GR.org: Will you add a "push-to-talk" button? The idea to add VoIP is fantastic and really gives randomly matched teams a fairer chance but the lack of a "push-to-talk" option makes this feature extremely cumbersome and almost worthless.
Relic: Annoying, yeah we agree. We’ll be looking into it.
GR.org: Will you be reducing/changing impassable terrain due to the pathing issues for the larger characters/vehicles?
Relic: Changes to impassable terrain are a possibility.
GR.org: Are there any intentions to improve the skirmish AI? It seems to be worse in terms of skill than that of most games.
Relic: Our AI could do with some improvements and the team has been looking into that.
GR.org: Do you have any plans for new game modes? You are introducing some in
Company of Heroes:Tales of Valor and some of those could work quite well in
Dawn of War II.
Relic: I’m completely addicted to one of the new Tales of Valor operations - which is what we call the multiplayer modes - so yeah I’d agree with you that these might be a cool addition to
Dawn of War II. That being said however, this isn’t particularly something that has been talked about a great deal at this point.
GR.org: Does Relic have a price range in mind when it comes to their paid DLC?
Relic: One million dollars! Hehe, kidding of course. We’ll price it accordingly based on what is being offered but since that hasn’t been revealed/created yet, I can’t really give you a ballpark figure.
GR.org: What are your current plans for adding in campaigns for existing factions (such as the Orks, for example)?
Relic: We’ve talked about doing campaigns for other races as it’s certainly something that quite a few fans have requested or said that they’d be excited about. We don’t have specific plans for doing this right now though.
Discuss this topic in the Relic Q&A - February '09 discussion topic.
