Relicnews: the definitive source for all things Relic

There’s lots of translations for a Belgium PC Gaming magazine floating around with info about Dawn of War 2.

Here’s a shamless copy and paste of the info I found over at www.evilavatar.com

- Uses the Essence 2.0 engine with Havok physics, all optimized for DX10 and multicore support.
- Units also use CoH-like unit AI for awareness and pathfinding to find cover and such.
- While DoW 2 shares the same (upgraded probably) engine as CoH it won’t be “CoH in space”, while soldiers in CoH will ask themselves if flanking the enemy is the right option, in DoW2 it will be more like Space Marines asking themselves if they should use their jetpacks to jump over an Ork squad to attack them in the back. Different settings, different kinds of warfare.
- Preview only showed a destroyed city landscape, akin to DoW (but more detailed), other tilesets will offer deserts, jungles, mountains and other cities.
- Only the Orkz and Space Marines were revealed, more races on the way obviously and to be to revealed later this year (though how many isn’t known).
- Co-op campaign for both the Orkz and Space Marines, apparently not for the other to-be-revealed races.
- Relic wants to give players rewards at the end of a mission like wargear (armor, weapons, rare objects); “Let’s pimp out squads with cool stuff!”, you will see these items in-game as well of course.
- You’ll fight your way through the campaign with the same squads.
- A squad leader (one or several?) will need to survive if you want to complete a mission; you really have to look out for your squads and don’t treat them like cannon fodder.
- The campaign lets Space Marines operate from a spaceship, you’ll get a view of an underlying planet and you’ll be able to choose from different missions (which are tagged with difficulty colors, green, blue and red).
- Certain reward items won’t be usable at once in the campaign, so they’ll be taken back to the SM spaceship for research.
- Release in early 2009 or later.

Looks like it’s from the Belgian Mag PC Gameplay, and is an interview with Mark Noseworthy (who’s the producer on the product).

I also spotted this summary of some of the article on a NeoGaf forum:

Some quick info:
-Buildings can be occupied (like in coh)
-Environment completely destructable ^^
-Vehicles are bigger (there were only a couple of dreadnought shots)
-LOTS of blood (i saw the screens and thought LOL)
-Over the top finishing animations
-when units are in melee, pieces of battle armor can be chopped off in the action

I’m thouroughly enjoying Soulstorm (it’s M.O.T.S. of Dark Crusade, which isn’t really a bad thing), so I’m stoked info about this is finally coming out. Looks awesome!

There’s also a VERY INTERESTING Video that I spotted in a Something Awful thread.

Click More to see a description of the screenshots in the article.

* There’s a screen of an Ork Warboss taking on three space marines. The warboss looks really brutal. With his right hand he picks up a space marine and crushes him in the air, with his left arm he’s holding a chainsaw i think, and sawing the space marines in two?(pic is rather small so not to clear), a third marine attacks the ork from behind.

• There’s a screen from a Commander with a warhammer, charging an Ork Warboss.

• The most brutal pic is that one of a dreadnought that slams his left arm into an ork, and the blood splashes in the air ^^

• After looking real good, i can see the tongue of an orc coming out of its mouth with mucus.

• Another pic is that of a battle between two dreadnoughts and some thirty orks i think (plus behind some cover, a few space marines supporting the dreadnoughts with heavy bolters).

• A space marine with a flamer roasting some orks.

• A rather large battle, involving three predators i guess (wasnt too clear, looked like two of ‘em were already destroyed) many orks and some orks were obliterated by an orbital bombardement (that’s right ^^).

• A close combat marine (forgot the name, with the jetpacks, yes that one), bursting his jetpacks and flying into the air.

• Two brutal finishing animations pics, but they werent too clear.

• And a pic orks occupying a LARGE building(looked like a cathedral), some marines assaulting it.