In other news, "trading GFWL for Steamworks" named the year's biggest new trend in PC development.
Dawn of War II: Retribution, the second expansion to Relic Entertainment's great Warhammer 40K RTS, will not ship with Games for Windows Live support as its predecessors did. Retribution will instead use Steamworks, which means you'll be able to invite your Steam friends into online matches, earn Steam achievements, and use Steam chat in place of the features offered by Microsoft's service (which mostly amount to Xbox achievements accessible in a PC game).
For Relic, this switch means that entirely new systems have to be built. According to the game's official community web page, Relic is in the process of creating an all-new matchmaking and ranking setup. The studio is also putting itself in a position to take advantage of all the things Steam allows its creators, including weekend deals, faster patching, and content preloading.
As previously reported, Retribution will be a standalone expansion that adds a major twist to its campaign component: other races, one of which will be an Ork faction. On the online side, Relic is giving each of the five races a new unit and is also adding a sixth new race to an already delectable roster.
Eager to get your hands on Retribution? According to the same post on the website, owners of Dawn of War II and Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising will be receiving beta invites for Retribution's online component next year. That's definitely not a bad deal for hardcore fans still taken with the games' strong fiction and narrowed, tactically satisfying approach to RTS design as a whole.
