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The guys from the Horus Heresy Campaign mod team have just released a demo version of their mod. What sets this mod apart from others is the fact that it has a single-player campaign. The demo contains the first level.

This is the first mission of the Loyalist Campaign, “Flight of the Eisenstein”, fully playable. It has the new pre-heresy armour for the marines, Captain Garro, and new close combat marines. In its current stage, it does not have models for the two Primarchs featured - Horus and Angron, thus we have models standing in for them, an Obliterator for Horus, and a Force Commander for Angron.

Also, we don’t have voices in place for the cutscenes, so we give you permission to read out the lines in whatever voice you feel appropriate. The final product will include full voice acting.

This Demo contains three difficulty levels, I fully recommend Insane for the full experience of the Horus Heresy.

You can find more information and discuss the demo in this thread. A list of download locations follows below. The team is still looking for mirrors to help with the traffic.

Primary download location
Mirror 1
Mirror 2

Bittorrent link

THQ has teamed up with Quazal. The publisher announced that they will use Quazal’s Z-net and Rendez-Vous technology for use in online efforts being developed for 2007.

Net-Z and Rendez-Vous include advanced lobby features more quickly than ever before, and also include an option to use Quazal’s Expert Services consulting division, meaning developers can offload their lobby and networking development, lowering implementation times, and hence lowering risks.

The Quazal/THQ partnership starts with several internal studios, including Rainbow Studios and Relic Entertainment, as well as several externally developed games. The first titles in this agreement will be announced soon, and will be available in 2006.

Note that Relic is explicitly mentioned. Whether this means that Company of Heroes will use a new online service rather than Gamespy is unknown at this point, as is whether this will affect Dawn of War.
For more information check out the article on their site. There’s also a discussion thread on our forums.

Howdy!

It’s been… a while. I would say I was busy, but then again that seems like such an obvious excuse. So instead of making crap up, I’ll just say that I haven’t updated the forum roundup because I’m a lazy bastard. Ha.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into the fun once again. A bunch of cool threads await.

This week on the RelicNews forums….

You may have heard of Sword of the Stars and Sins of a Solar Empire, two 4x games that are currently under development. I would link you, but my dog ate my google, so you’ll have to search for yourselves.
Anyhow, Sword of the Stars (SotS) is made by Kerberus, a new outfit with a bunch of oldschool Relic developers. Sins of a Solar Empire (SoSE) is not made by Kerberus, but it has a name that sounds similar. Both games are somewhat similar in concept, so Squid had this awesome idea - why not combine the two?
The result is SofTits - Sins of Things in the Stars. SofTits is much more than a funny acronym however; it is a call to pens, keyboards, tablets and paint brushes. The combined creative powers of The Studio launched on a holy crusade to create concept art and background stories for what will one day be the best game in the universe. You can check out awesome “screenshots” and cool stories in the official thread. Everyone is invited to help out of course, if you have an idea for a race, technology or historical background, go and post now.
Reading through this part I realize that you may not be that enthusiastic about clicking, so let me just mention three words: “tentacles” and “schoolgirls”¹.
Read the rest of this entry »

First online reivew up for The Outfit at Team Xbox.

Do you remember the time before the kung-fu grip? If you’re that ancient, then you surely dabbled in the original G.I. Joe - A.K.A. plastic army men.
THQ’s and Relic’s The Outfit is the digital version of the original plastic army men wars. The Outfit is chock full of grey versus olive drab battles, featuring the units you both loved and loathed back in those simpler times. And yes, you can set the enemy ablaze, but you won’t need a lighter fluid to start this fire; Mr. Flamethrower packs his own flammable liquid.

You can check out the article here. Many <3 to Soul for bringing this up. You can discuss the review over at this thread.

The Outfit, Relic’s first console title, and THQ’s first Xbox360 title ships to stores today. Email from THQ indicates it will be widely available by Friday (March 17th).

I look forward to learning how to lay the smack down on people online. But as you can see from my GamerCard, I’m a newb. Had my 360 for a couple of weeks now.

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Spotted on Evilavatar.com a link to an Interview with the producer of The Outfit, Adrian Crook.

What’s the multiplayer like for The Outfit? The Outfit is a squad-based game, so every time you re-spawn, you start with the hero you control and 4 squadmates. That said, the 4 squadmates you left behind on the map somewhere when you died are still fighting for you. Add that to the fact that you’ve probably laid down a ton of emplacements, ordered a couple vehicles, and air-striked someone’s base and you can imagine the level of frenetic chaos multiplayer is. I’ve seen some forum threads talking about “The Outfit is only 8 players over Live - waaah” and nonsense like that. Hopefully now that the demo is out people will realize that 8 players means 8 HUMAN players… As well as all the stuff you can call in and your AI squadmates that fight alongside you as well. So each one of those 8 players can have a small army of 40 or more units fighting with him/her. That’s a unit count way beyond anything you’ll see in current 360 multiplayer games and our programmers had to pull plenty of late nights to make that happen.

Check it out here.

After watching Mok, Mecha and Pike playing The Outfit on Saturday, I’m stoked. I had no idea the game was going to let you throw down that many units in Multiplayer!

THQ sent out a Press Release today outlining their strategy after The Outfit is live.

In addition, THQ and Relic Entertainment announced plans today to develop and release downloadable content to The Outfit players post launch, utilizing the full potential of the Xbox Live Marketplace. The content, which will include a series of multiplayer map-packs, will allow gamers to continuously extend their entertainment experience. New multiplayer map-packs are scheduled to be release periodically over the next 12 months.

Read more here.

The Dawn of War:Winter Assault international ladder hosted by the Electronic Sports League (ESL) is looking for new players. Newbies and experienced players are both welcome.
If you’d like to try out this ladder, sign up on their site. There’s also a discussion thread on the forums that you can visit.

I think everyone has been driven to the edge of their patience today waiting for that Outfit demo. There is some good news and bad news. Good news is that the demo is out of THQ and Relic’s hands. The bad news is that Microsoft is in control of the code and up to them when to upload the demo to the Marketplace.

gg microsoft

Source: IGN