Relicnews: the definitive source for all things Relic

Rainier from Worthplaying.com dropped me a line to let me know they had a couple of articles up that Relic’s fans might be interested in. The Tales of Valor article especially.

First up is a Dawn of War 2 article. Warning, it contains plot spoilers in the extreme.

For example, some of the larger maps we played on included special buildings: communication arrays, shrines and foundries. Going out of our way to capture one took extra time, but the benefits paid off in later missions. For example, capturing an array gives you additional intelligence information when operating later missions on the same planet. Capturing a shrine gives you the Rosarius item, which renders a given squad invulnerable for a limited amount of time, but it only works when a shrine is in range. Finally, the foundry gives you automated turrets. Like the shrine, they only work when the foundry is in range, but can be a powerful defensive weapon.

Following that, they’ve got an interview put together with Brian Wood, the lead designer on Tales of Valor.

More info below…

WP: Another question, going back to the overall design. Relic has already done a few standalone expansions. When you’re sitting down to plan a new project, aside from maybe $10 to $15 in the retail price, what’s the difference in saying that you’re going to do a sequel or a standalone expansion to the existing game? Neither one requires the prior disc, so a new player can come in and buy it, but from a budget standpoint, a resource standpoint, or even a design mentality standpoint, how do you approach working on a standalone expansion versus Company of Heroes 2? BW: For a sequel versus a standalone expansion, the biggest piece, we look at our current community and see what they want, what they’re looking for. How can we make the game better and more enjoyable without changing it so much? So one of the bigger aspects of that with a standalone expansion, we’re not changing the specs from Opposing Fronts, and that’s because we want to let people who play the game from Opposing Fronts, still play the game and enjoy the game as much as they have before. We don’t want to release the standalone and then not let people play the old game anymore. We require that everybody kind of have the same version so that you can play against people with the new content without having to purchase the content yourself. I think that’s one of the bigger aspects, and it’s also looking at the resources we have within the game. We’re still focused on delivering content from Normandy because we spent a lot of time developing that village, that world, and if we were to move onto a completely different game and world, we’d want to deliver on a much bigger experience, move Company of Heroes to the next generation, really focus on where the PC market’s going, so it would take a lot more time in development. I think we still want to maintain the group and community support that we have without waiting three years.

Some pretty interesting stuff in both articles. The Tales of Valor article’s quote above is especially interesting, as they basically tell us that we won’t see another theatre (Russian Front, Pacific, Africa, etc) in the CoH engine.