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We wanted to share something else special with Homeworld fans this week in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the game. Homeworld continues to be great creative fuel for us, and members of our team will occasionally return to the universe when looking for inspiration, as a way to sharpen their skills, or just to revisit the past. This new desktop wallpaper was created by Senior Artist Dave Cheong and features a scene inspired by the game. Even though we have our hands full with Space Marine, Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, and Company of Heroes Online, Homeworld is where it all began for us. We hope you enjoy it.

Those aren’t ships from any of the released Homeworld games!

(They’re a re-imagining of Kushan Interceptor/HW2 Interceptor. Nice work Dave!)

Second book by a Homeworld god is out!

We posted about his first book last year. I picked up a copy a while back and quite enjoyed it.

Check out the trailer for The Burning Skies. The trailer’s done by Paul Ruskay of Studio X, the guy behind a lot of the Homeworld sound.

The next round is up!

Can Relic take on the Blizzard Juggernaut and WIN? They’ve defeated Insomniac AND Infinity Ward. Blizzard though… that’s a tough one! At the time of this post, Relic is up 55 votes to 36! Can they hold the lead? I guess we’ll find out :-)

UPDATE: After Relic holding the lead for most of the day, Blizzard’s devs have posted on their forums encouraging users to vote. Blizzard’s just pulled ahead by 24 votes in the last view minutes. Count at this time, 1231 to 1207 for Blizzard.

Seriously folks, every vote counts! But no ballot stuffing, that’s just wrong.

UPDATE Morning of 3/27: It’s neck and neck folks. 1780 for Activision Blizzard versus 1782 for Relic. Seriously, your vote counts!

Update Morning of 3/28: Polls closed at 6am Pacific time. The Escapist staff were on hand to close them and have indicated that they will be doing a dupe check. It looks like at this time, Relic has a 4 vote lead (2636 to 2632)! I suspect a lot of strategic voting went down by other studio fans from other brackets to help prevent Blizzard from moving on.

UPDATE 2 Morning of 3/28: Polled closed, and The Escapist staff dumped a bunch of duplicate accounts. It ended up in a tie! Voting is now re-opened until 3pm Eastern tomorrow! GET YOUR VOTE IN AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOSH NO DUPLICATES

UPDATE Morning of 3/29: Polls close at 3pm EST Today. Relic’s down by 30ish votes (2996 to 2965). If you’ve not voted, please take this time to help Relic win this Internet Popularity contest :-)

UPDATE Afternoon of 3/29: Polls closed, and when they did, it looked like Blizzard was up with big lead. It looks like that after the duplicates have been removed, Relic’s won! 3012 to 3026! Next up, Harmonix. Will update with a link later!

The armistice to end of The War to End All Wars came into effect on November 11th, 1918 at 11am local time. Ninety years ago today, the world saw an end to the most horrific warfare ever seen on this planet. It was obviously hoped at the time that mankind would never see war like that of The Great War ever again. Sadly, as we all know, war after war has followed in its wake.

The War to End All Wars is obviously was misnomer. After all, mankind cannot stop fighting. There is something at the core of our nature that compels us to compete. Even peace protestors, abortion activists and environmentalists, and organizations like PETA, Sea Sheppard, and Greenpeace all thrive on conflict and mankind’s nature to compete. Sports and Games follow that theme, allowing an outlet for and/or feeding our species’ aggressive nature. One might argue that we do not feel completely alive unless we’re competing. Think of the excitement of watching a sporting event or if you are fit and well trained enough, playing in and winning that same sporting event.

Maybe, one day, we will see an end to armed conflict and we will be left with sporting competition. Until the end of warfare… until mankind can harness its rage at itself, we will see members of humanity fighting each other and becoming casualties of our drive to compete. Until that time, we will see ourselves, our families, and our friends put into harm’s way. Until the end of warfare, it’s our duty to consider why and to remember those that sacrificed their lives and their health to protect humanity against itself.

Relic’s senior producer Tim Holman offers some of his views in two articles published by Edge Online.

The first article talks about the future of the Company of Heroes series. Described as a series of short stories, Tim talks about how Tales of Valor contrasts to the the original and Opposing Fronts as one big novel. He also goes on to talk a bit about the new Direct-fire feature in the game, new multiplayer maps, and units. Also the article suggest to Tim about the possibility of Company of Heroes 2 and talks a bit about COH Online.

Good Company

The last article is about how PC developers hurt their fan base by requiring high spec systems to run their games. Tim offers some of his views regarding this issue.

PC Devs “Shoot Themselves in the Foot”

Tim really offers some hints about COH Online coming to the west.

Castewar sent me a link to an Ebay auction for one of Alex G’s old customized business cards.

Edit: He’s had to pull the auction, but it’s still up for a bit. To view it, click the link above, then re-enter the same URL.

Going on a bit of a “rant” here, I promise, it’ll be short. Little bit of a public shaming for THQ’s support organization who from what I can see are trying to do the best they can with not enough resources.

THQ Support is known to send people to the Relicnews.com forums to get support for Relic’s games. We’re a privately run forums staffed by volunteers. Perfectly reasonable for THQ support to spot a new problem on a community forum, identify a fix from it and document it in their database. But to send people to our forums to ask for help? That tells me that either THQ needs more support staffers, or they’re lazy.

Support for games often requires patches. The game companies provide them. Often games, like Relic games, require you to download patches as you log in. That means they’re already hosted on the publisher’s servers.

Now when it comes to patches, sometimes fans mirror patches as well, and post them publically. Sometimes even posting them in fan run support forums. Moe had his server also resolve to dowpatch.com and had the DoW Patches listed.

So what does THQ Support do? In a public support article, they use the list of DoW patch downloads from Moe’s server. Lazy THQ, Lazy. In all honesty I expect that someone there thought DoWpatch.com was a THQ hosted URL. Still doesn’t excuse it though. The bad part is, that Moe’s server’s been down for the last couple of weeks, so guess what, no one using that article has been able to download patches!

Edit: Just noticed this. I was wondering why people would MSN me asking about that error. THQ Support needs to add this info to the article so people can fix that themselves if the forums go down.

Update: Added “- Sometimes” to the Article title. I’ve been taken to task for suggesting the THQ support team is lazy for sending people to our forums for support as it is not THQ’s Support’s policy to send users to our forums for official support. As a support person, I know how hard it is to keep up when your corporation has you doing to much with too little resources (time and staff). I don’t know what the internal situation is at THQ’s various support organizations, so anything you read above is speculation on my part based on the few issues that have come to light on the Relic forums.

Relic recently hired Thunder to be the senior community manager. His background includes working for Big Huge Games and Ensemble Studios. Here is a quicksnip from Planet COH’s post,

Thunder is a long-time RTS vet, having acted as community manager at both Big Huge Games and Ensemble Studios in the past. He is also an experienced RTS player, even beating strategy game designer Brian Reynolds at Rise of Legends, the very game he developed. So you know that Thunder knows his RTS games!

Can’t wait to met him. I hope he can get past mission 6 in Homeworld.

Buggo is gone, long live Thunder our new Community Manager

fuggles from the forums is trying to plan out a community lan party in celebration of Dawn of War 2 and the Community. However this will only happen it there is enough community backing. So whoever is interested should go and take a look.

Relicon UK

Following with the tradition of what Homeworld.com has become, Sumo gave us their new SumoSac to review.

Relicnews’s review of the SumoSac Chair