Dawn of War 2 has gone gold

It has been announced today that Dawn of War 2 has been completed and is now moving in to production phase. The current release date is February 19th. I havent quite decided whether I am going to get this. On the one hand, I know they are going to bring out loads of expansion packs which I will end up buying because I want to use the Imperial Guard and I should just wait for the box set. Plus, Starcraft is coming out soon also. However, I really enjoyed Dawn of War and what they are doing with the campaign sounds really interesting.
One of things that did interest me in the press release was this:

"Disposable units will become a thing of the past as gamers feel the intimate brutality of war and develop a personal connection with fully customizable squads."

It is one thing to have customisable squads, but to actually make players care... Also, if you have spent ages levelling up a unit players will fear losing it. However, this could just mean that disposable units play an even bigger part, as you cannot risk your good units and so just chuck rubbish units at the enemy and only use your best units in the worst case scenario.

The campaign sounds really interesting as you have control over a very small number of units and there is no base building. This reminds me of a game I really enjoyed a while back based on the film Platoon. The problem I can see though is Platoon was built for this. However, in Dawn of War, the game has to be able to take standard base building skirmishes too. It will be interesting to see how it all fits together. It is easy to see how customisable units can work in the single player campaign, but in the skirmishes, will you have access to them?

What I would quite like is if you had a persistent army (tied to your GFWL[Game for Windows Live] Profile) As you won games, you could purchase upgrades.

For example, when you build a standard infantry squad, if you have upgraded one standard infantry squad to start off with grenade launchers, then the first one would have grenade launchers. All units would be standard after that, unless you had purchased identical upgrades, so you could have more than one unit starting off like this.

The possible problem with this would be balancing, if you win more games, you just become unstoppable. Perhaps to get around this, choosing your army would constantly require trade offs. Yes, you can upgrade all your units to have grenade launchers, but one of your tanks wont be available at all. This could actually work quite well as new players would have a well rounded army to suit any strategy, but then as you hone your strategy, you could hone your army to fit it.

And to think this was meant to be a quick post! Coming up, more on Fallout 3, got in to it and I am loving it. I have only done like the first part of the story, I just keep wandering off in to the wilderness!

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