Tonight at 12:01 am, just after midnight, the Dawn of War 2 open multiplayer beta will come to a close as Relic prepares for the game’s official release on Thursday, February 19th. War has been raging in the 41st millenium over Steam and Windows Live since the beta went live on January 21st to owners of Dawn of War: Soulstorm, then to the general public one week later. Relic reports that the numbers alone show that the test has been a smashing success; over 250,000 unique users have participated in the beta since its debut.

In a surprising demonstration of corporate transparency, Relic has also given the public access to some of the quantitative statistical data collected during beta testing. According to these figures, Relic has successfully met its previously stated goal of creating a game where individual matches can be played from start to finish in a more reasonable amount of time, unlike in Company of Heroes where team battles regularly took upwards of an hour to complete. It should be noted that retail multiplayer games will likely take longer due to improvements to the ranked game matching system scheduled for the zero-day patch–beta matches are probably artificially short because experienced players are often matched with lower ranking individuals, resulting in quick games where one player dominates the other.

For someone who personally (and regrettably) has very limited time to play video games, this shift in focus from hardcore to casual gamer is welcome, though I cannot shake the feeling that these shorter games lead to the popular belief that the game is shallow from a strategic (but not tactical) perspective. Much is stripped from the traditional RTS experience, base-building being the most obvious example, but with these omissions comes more subtle changes to the tactical depth of the game. A common complaint is that resource management is trivialized by DoW2, however I maintain that while resources are less important, the game instead introduces a new resource: your units. With the experience system (also borrowed from Company of Heroes), units become increasingly effective as they participate in combat; they can be reinforced without experience penalty, however death of the entire squad is permanent, making unit preservation one of the key tactics for successful competitive play. Further benefits of unit preservation include denying race-specific resource accumulation to the enemy, which increases only when infantry, vehicles, and buildings on the opposing side are destroyed.

Much of the data on game balance, hero choice, and race preference can be disregarded, since the statistics represent all activity during the entire lifespan of the beta, not just games since the most recent patch (which included drastic changes to core game mechanics and faction balance). For instance, the Tyrannid Hive Tyrant is reported as being one of the least successful hero classes in the beta, however anyone playing since the 1.1 patch knows that Tyranids are hugely imbalanced at the moment due to the bugged functionality of the venom cannon, which is available only to the Hive Tyrant hero. This race has understandably experienced a surge in popularity following patch 1.1 which is poorly represented in the current data.

The popularity of team games (3v3) is also testament to Relic’s increased attention to this game mode. The developers have made it clear both during and prior to open testing that they intended to make 3v3 matches a primary multiplayer focus, unlike in Company of Heroes, in which competitive ranked games were almost exclusively limited to 1v1 (and, to a lesser extent, 2v2). With so many race and hero-specific abilities designed to aid both your own units and allies, team battles undeniably add a welcome layer of complexity to what can sometimes feel like a simple game. However, Relic has not solved the quintessential problem inate to the team automatching process: even teams. Players are able to invite friends to queue with for ranked 3v3 matches, giving them the obvious advantage of improved communication and teamwork over any randomly assigned group of opponents. Furthermore, even when entering the team automatch system as a lone individual you run the risk of getting teamed up with incompetent allies who will make winning impossible, regardless of your own skills.

My own impressions of the game were initially negative, however I found myself drawn back to the game more and more. Being a successful tournament player of the tabletop game of Warhammer 40,000 may make me inherently biased towards liking the game, but I still think that there is significant objective value here as a multiplayer experience. Controlling such a small number of units on the battlefield allows players to focus more on micromanaging units, a vital skill in Dawn of War 2. Skilled players can take up defensive positions in anticipation of attacks and use minimal force to eliminate an entire enemy army with intelligent use of cover, line of sight, and disruptive melee units. And while defensive positions are useful, mobility is still an integral part of any successful battleplan–static units are easily outflanked by fast-moving melee units like Hormagaunts and Howling Banshees or instantly overwhelmed by infantry equipped with jump packs, like Assault Marines and Ork Stormboyz. As such, turtling, while possible to an extent using hero-built gun turrets, is generally a very ineffective strategy when leaned on too heavily.

The biggest critique I have of the game, aside from perhaps the lack of depth (an opinion which I find myself re-evaluating), is that the race-specific strategic assets are bland and fail to realize their potential of allowing for a truly customizable force. The most obvious example of this failure is that every race has essentially the same end-game ability, basically a large area of effect attack that provides a visual effect to warn the enemy before dealing severe damage (the Tyrannid ability is slightly different, sacrificing some direct damage for an aura buff). This represents a major step backwards from Company of Heroes where the three different force organization trees allowed for drastically altered gameplay. This is not present in Dawn of War 2, and it is a disappointment.

All in all, I heartily recommend Dawn of War 2 to owners of Company of Heroes, but warn fans not to simply expect a sci-fi mod of the game. It may seem odd that I have barely mentioned the game’s official predecessor in this article, but playing DoW2 for even a few minutes makes it very obvious that the game’s true parent is CoH, now Dawn of War. Fans of the first Dawn of War may be put off by the radical departure from racing to tech and building huge armies and attacking the enemy en masse in huge battles. You will not find any of these elements in DoW2, but what you do find is something completely novel: being rewarded for skillful application of squad-level tactics. It’s a different game, and it’s a very good one.

(Oh, and I hear the single player campaign blows nards.)

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• Dawn of War 2 Multiplayer Beta Impressions - Part 1
• Behind the Scenes of What Dawn of War 2 Was Supposed to Be
• This Week in PC Gaming - 1/25/09 - 2/5/09
• Incoming! Dawn of War 2 Patch On the Way
• Dawn of War 2 Patch 1.2.1 Coming to a Computer Near You on 4/13/09