Relicnews: the definitive source for all things Relic

Has it been a whole week already? Hardly seems like it. I haven’t accomplished anything of value, although I did throw something at the road worker who managed to cut through my phone line when attempting to redo the pavement. On the bright side, peer is back in the saddle and has already resumed normal moderating operations in the tabletop forums. With his patented reign of terror style I’m sure we can look forward to lots of hilarious complaint threads in Forum Issues, which is good because I’m really running out of material here.
Anyhow, enough chit chat. Let’s get down to business.

This week on the RelicNews forums…

I have always suspected it. We are overrun by a bunch of not-yet-pimply preteens and even more old geezers. Someone started a how old are you thread, and the results are surprising. A lot of people who were around to witness the first world war seem to enjoy playing Dawn of War. Others apparently went straight from the cradle to the computer desk and are now happily spamming “ZOMG IMBA” all over the forums.
If you always wanted to know how old your fellow spam- I mean posters are, pay the thread a visit. I have to disappoint you though, my age is a closely guarded state secret. To find out more, you must be female, over twenty and extremely hot. I am looking forward to your application (with pictures).
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Since there has been some confusion regarding this topic, I’ll attempt to clear this up.
Patch 1.4 will apparently be released with Winter Assault. Here’s how it works:

• If you don’t have Winter Assault, you will be able to download 1.4 for the vanilla DoW game like any other patch via Gamespy (and we will mirror it and provide a .torrent download)
• If you bought Winter Assault, you won’t have to download the patch. Just install the expansion, patch 1.4 is included and will be applied during the installation.

According to IGN and Amazon, Winter Assault will be released as follows:

• United States and Canada: Amazon says September 19th, Gamespot, EB and Best Buy claim Sept. 20th
• United Kingdom: September 23rd
• Australia: September 30th

If you have confirmation on other release dates, please let us know either by commenting on this post or by using this thread on the forums.

IGN put up their preview on the Outfit at GC Games Convention. It’s pretty general and mostly repeats all the points from the Gamespy review. One of the points that is repeated is the March 2006 release date. I’m hoping that it’s the European release date. Here is a quick snip.

While Relic is best known for their PC RTS games, The Outfit is pretty much a gritty, balls-out action game set in Europe during World War II. There are a few RTS elements, which we’ll get into in a bit, but for the most part it’s run and gun and gun and gun. Because The Outfit focuses on military action, firepower, as well as thousands of bullets, play a big role in the game. Luckily, instead of running out of ammo, guns just overheat. It’s not so bad for most types of guns — you just can’t shoot for a while — but if you overuse the flame thrower when it’s hot, bad, bad things are bound to happen, especially to your hands, face and any other bits of exposed flesh.

You can check out the article here.

Come check it out boys and girls! It’s pretty nice. Here are some mirrors, 3dgamers, Filefront, Gamer’s Hell, Gamespot, and Worthplaying. We should have our own bittorrent mirror up whenever I get CJ’s attention.

Thanks to Bluesnews for the heads up.

Tranj has posted a note about Gamespy’s outtage last night. It was emergency work, and should help solve the stats issue.

News Corp has purchased IGN Entertainment!

Errr what you say? Well, let’s put it this way. News Corporation owns all things Fox, and a huge number of other media sites.

IGN encompasses things like Rottentomatoes.com, IGN.com, gamespy.com and fileplanet.com. Some members of the community will see this $800,000,000 transaction as evil purchasing evil.

Why does this matter to Relic fans? Well obviously because some of Relic’s games are “Powered by Gamespy” which is part of IGN. How much will change? Probably nothing much on the surface.

Thanks to Evilavatar.com for the heads up.

Looks like the official Dawn of War site has finally been updated with some new screenshots of Winter Assault. Have a gander at the new units, including Ogryns, Khorne Berzerkers, Sentinels, Basilisks and more.

There’s also an Imperial Guard entry in the races list, and some Winter Assault concept art.

Thanks to Vijil for the tip-off.

Hi folks, welcome to this week’s forum roundup. I have been informed of a grave error on my part - I forgot to mention the fact that ceejay became old last week. Well, it was his birthday last week anyhow. So here’s a belated “happy birthday” from the whole forum roundup team. I also promise never to forget an important event such as this ever again. CJ’s birthday, people!

This week on the RelicNews forums…

The restless science division of the forums has started a poll thread to settle a dispute that has been plaguing mankind for centuries. What is better - pirates or ninjas? Pirates have guns and cool birds, but ninjas have cool clothing and know martial arts. You can see the dilemma here, it is not surprising that our top scientists have not been able to answer this question. However, this much is obvious: There can be only one, and you can decide who. Cast your vote now! Yarrr.
Also: CJ’s birthday!
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RPG Vault put up their interview with Relic’s Andrew Chamber about the upcoming Winter Assault expansion. Here is a quick snip from it.

Jonric: When did the idea to make an expansion arise, and what considerations most influenced its underlying concept and high-level design?

Andrew Chambers: We always knew we were going to be doing an expansion for Dawn of War. Everyone had such a great time working on the original that it was a no-brainer for us to continue working with the license, the people, and the product.

It certainly wasn’t hard to find inspiration for the expansion. There are so many races for us to choose from! Rather than just grab a random race though, we decided we really wanted to pick one that contributed in a very strong way, supplementing the original. Looking back now that we are in the final stages and able to play the game, we definitely made the right decision to go with the Imperial Guard.

Accompanying the interview are 4 exclusive 1280×1024 screenshots. You can check out the interview here.