Relicnews: the definitive source for all things Relic

Hi hi!

Two weeks have passed, and that means it’s time for our bi-weekly forum roundup thing where we discuss threads and stuff. Yeah. Our topic today: “Moe is so good with the words, I wish I could express myself as eloquently as he does!”
However, in keeping with the whole Halloween thing, we also have this scary theme thing going. This is the 13th forum roundup, and 13 is a very scary and mysterious number. Boo!

Diving right into the fun, we have some community-related stuff up first. For starters, our tracker for the Child’s Play is up, so you can start donating money via PayPal or credit card. We expect the Amazon wishlists to appear shortly, so if you prefer to donate toys rather than money you will be able to do that as well.
For those of you who have no clue what the hell I’m talking about: Child’s Play is a charity started by Penny Arcade that aims to provide sick children with toys for christmas. You can either donate money or pick a children’s hospital from a list and buy a toy for them from an amazon.com wish list.
This year the RelicNews community wants to be a major contributor. You can read about our tracker and the project in this announcement.
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There’s a preview from the Toronto part of X05 of The Outfit. Nothing majorly new in the story, but it does have some tidbits about the Downloadable Content.

Through the course of the year, Relic will be having a team that will be dedicated to creating and maintaining the downloadable content. Some examples of downloadable content include maps, skins and weapons. Also, new characters will be available for download, which make the gaming experience that much more intense.

Check out the preview here.

Pssst Gaming Excellence dudes, Relic’s not a small Canadian Developer anymore, they’ve got 175 on staff!

There’s a review of Winter Assault up at Gamezone. It’s not telling us anything new, just confirming what we know. Winter Assault is awesome. 9.0 out of 10.

Winter Assault improves upon the already solid original game, offering up improved multiplayer, a great new campaign and a brand new faction to play as. All things considered, Winter Assault is a great addition to Dawn of War, and fans of the original shouldn’t be disappointed.

Man, I bet being awesome must just totally suck.

Christmas is coming, and with it the next iteration of Child’s Play, a charity started by the folks at Penny Arcade. Here’s how it works:

For the past three years, gamers and geeks around the world have raised nearly a million dollars in toys, games and cash for sick kids in Children’s Hospitals across the globe through a grassroots charity called Child’s Play.
Created by Penny Arcade, no “Administrative Fees” or other nonsense is collected; all gifts and donations go directly to the hospitals for distribution to sick kids.
This year Child’s Play is expanding worldwide to help Children’s Hospitals across the globe.

This year, the Relic community wants to be a part of this charity. If you are interested and considering a donation or if you’re just curious, you should check out this thread for more info on our community effort.

Polls are open to decide which game will make it into the World Cyber Games in 2006. Dawn of War has been nominated, so if you’d like to see it as an official game in next year’s WCG, you should go and vote for it.

The poll can be found here, and you can visit World Cyber Games for more info on this event.

Thanks to Hybris for pointing this out.

As you may or may not know, Microsoft’s X05 event in Europe just wrapped up. Relic had “The Outfit” there and it was playable.

IGN had this to say about it.

With all this firepower you’ll be trying to complete various objectives across the game’s 12 single player missions which generally take around an hour to beat. The mission we played at X05 was called Bocage, a name that should be familiar to any Call of Duty fan out there. Bocage’s setting is a pastoral farmland with small hedges and rickety wooden fences. However, once the game starts up, the map quickly turns from idyllic to wasteland.

Meanwhile, Gamespot also got their mitts on the game.

Speaking of vehicles, one of the coolest aspects of The Outfit’s open-ended design is the fact that practically every vehicle found in the game is drivable. While that might not sound like such a big deal when you’re talking about the piddly trucks and jeeps that dot the environments, it becomes a bigger deal when you throw in locomotives. Yes, that’s right. You can hijack trains in the game and drive them wherever the tracks take you. Locomotives will play a key part in online matches, producers told us, because they let you haul special cars (such as ammo ones) to different points on the map to give your team extra advantages.

Gamespy was also there, and this is what they managed to capture on video.

Quite a few bits of news there for folks to chew on. The biggest bit seems to be that The Outfit’s pushed back to March 2006 rather than a console launch window title. This seems to mean that they’re giving it more love, rather than rushing their first console title out the door in an effort to catch launch day sales numbers. I look forward to getting my mitts on this in the coming days.

What’s up?

As you may have noticed, the weekly forum roundup has become something of a bi-weekly forum roundup. This is due to multiple reasons, many of them revolving around vague and unspecified stuff. Short version: this takes some time, and I’m also busy with other stuff.
I will try my best to post at least one roundup every two weeks though.
So now without further youknowwhat, here’s this week’s roundup.

This week on the RelicNews forums…

Computers, like all other machines, have operating temperatures, and a certain temperature “safe zone”, meaning that they can overheat a little without blowing up. However, those safety buffers have their limits too. What happens when you go too far? Well, you can find out by reading the Fahrenheit 170 thread by Dj. He managed to heat his CPU up beyond all safety barriers, with a final temperature usually associated with pizza ovens. Considering that this temperature was measured at the outside of the chip, the temperatures on the inside must have been pretty insane. In any case it was way too much for that CPU, and it went bye-bye. So if you want to point and laugh… I mean share the grief and express your condolences, head on over to tech assistance and check it out.
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This image got linked on IRC. Good work!

Looks like Dawn of War:Winter Assault is near the top of the heap for PC Game sales (US) during the week ending October 1st. Beat out by the damn Sims!

Maybe Delphy’s a good luck charm? He does run a Sims site as well :-)

There’s another review up at Gameplanet. This one gets 4.5 out of 5 clenched, angry fists!

All in all Winter Assault is a worthy expansion to a great game, and well worth getting if not absolutely necessary. It doesn’t really address the issues that plagued DoW but can be considered basically DoW+, and no good RTS gamer can be without it. Let’s hope Relic brings even more in the future.

He covers off quite a few small but legitimate beefs with the game, but essentially, it’s awesome.

I love Winter Assault by the way.