Dawn of War: Winter Assault FAQ

[dmille]

Q: What is Dawn of War: Winter Assault
A: Dawn of War: Winter Assault is an expansion for Relic and THQ's real-time strategy game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.

Q: When will Winter Assault be released?
A: Current articles state that Winter Assault will be released in the fall of 2005.

Q: Didn't THQ hold a poll asking about a new race? What happened to those results?
A:

The poll that was done by THQ UK was purely for entertainment purposes.

Q: What does Winter Assault mean for DoW support?
A:

We will not stop supporting the original game just because we have a team working on the expansion. You will still see updates from us.

We were also told that the next patch for Dawn of War, version 1.3, will be released before the expansion.

Q: What will Winter Assault add to Dawn of War?
A: Winter Assault will add the Imperial Guard as a fully playable race with a single player campaign.

The nature and details of other changes or units that Winter Assault will bring is currently unknown.

More information on units, as well as plot details, are expected to be forthcoming.

Other relevant developer and publisher statements

This will be the first major RTS expansion to include a full extra race for play in both multiplayer and single player. It take a lot of work to add a new race into the balance mix.

Well well...I see our little announcement has sparked the rampant speculation, again!

First off, it's worth pointing out that we didn't choose the Imperial Guard simply because we had already included a few IG units in the original DoW. In fact, we've thrown out the IG units from DoW and made new ones that are more appropriate for the Expansion (so, no reuse at all!). We're creating new effects, voice work, the whole nine yards.

And as Tranj pointed out, our work on the Expansion does not preclude continued support for DoW. In fact, from your point of few, it guarantees continued support for DoW because an Expansion is in effect an additional investment in the original on THQ's part.

As for the 3 screenshots listed above, the Baneblade concept piece is not from a pre-rendered movie. It was used internally as concept art to illustrate the massive tank firing its weapons. Pretty effective, isn't it?

might be plenty of other cool stuff to be announced yet

Too true.

C'mon everybody! We can't just tell you everything that's in Winter Assault all at once. What would you all have to speculate over and discuss if we did that? This way we get to give you little tidbits of good news right up until launch. It's much more fun for all of us this way!

I think the Imperial Guard were a great choice! Incidentally, GW were happy to let Relic and THQ decide what new race to add...although if they'd chosen Squats they would have been in big trouble! Big tanks, big guns, and hordes of expendable infantry. What's not to love? I can appreciate the disappointment some of you are feeling, though. I work on the project, and even *my* current favourite race (Dark Eldar) didn't make it in! What a rip off!

Current Winter Assault Screenshots & Art:
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3

Concept Art 1

[Moe]

The Dawn of War Library will be used to collect all concept art and screenshots for the expansion as they become available, as well as unit and structure info. The screenshot thread is up now and can be found here.
If you have additional unit/structure info or screenshots/concept art that is not yet in there, please drop Moe a line via PM.

[Moe]

Druidika just posted this bit of info:

Seems like the May issue of Gamestar (major games magazine in Germany) has some new info about Winter Assault, as well as some screenies. I don't have access to a scanner at the moment, so I'll see what I can do about that later.
Here are the facts:

• Units in squads look varied now, have slightly different height, faces and so on
• There's a new feature called 'Kill-Cam' which shows a close-up of those spectacular finishing moves
• Commissar is included, and boosts the morale by executing soldiers
• Sanctioned Psycher is in
• Techpriest Engineer is in. He repairs vehicles, and one of the screenies shows him carrying an axe for close combat
• The Sentinel is in, the IG's walker unit
• The Baneblade will have awesome firepower, but a rather weak armor
• The Chimera troop transporter allows units to fire from the inside
• The main hero will be the Imperial Captain, which is just a bit weaker than the Force Commander. Games Workshop will bring the unit to the tabletop soon.
• The 4 older races will get new units, but the article doesn't mention which
• There will be a 'good' campaign which will let you play the Space Marines, Eldar and the Imperial Guard, and an 'evil' campaign which will allow you to play with the Chaos Space Marines and Orks. Each of them will consist of about half a dozen missions.

Please note that this is from an early version and might change until the retail hits.


Discuss here.

[Moe]

Thanks to Satyagraha we have some more info on the game:

• Imperial guard will be based around long range & defense.
• there are tunnels mentioned - it isn´t clear if they can be entered & if that´s gonna have an impact on gameplay, however.
• there will be more interactivity in the sp-missions and warcraftish "side-quests". before the last mission of each campaign, the player will get to do a decition that might drasticly change the end.

Source is once again a Gamestar article.

[Moe]

Tacit (Assistant Producer for DoW) has answered a bunch of questions in the gameplay video thread, we have collected them for you here:

Well vehicles often have unique markings as done by their crew members (especially during the WW2 era) and have different number markers on them i.e 88, 105 etc :P but not point in dwelling on little details like that.

You're right. The IG unit in our game is the 412 Cadian which is evidenced by the insignia and numbering on the vehicles and structures you see in the E3 footage. But, with the Army Painter you can customize your units the same way you did in Dawn of War so in multiplayer games you could have any one of the official GW-sanctioned regiments or come up with one of your own, certainly.

I have a question Tacit about the SM chaplan. In the innital reviews they said the chaplan will be a "ranged combat master", yet in the video he was fighting off 30 or so cults and i dident see any ranged comabt what so ever. So i guess my question is, when you say *ranged* combat specliast, is he like the farseer/librian as in he has ranged spells or just ranged combat in general? im abit confused :P

Certainly the Krozius Arcanum is not the only weapon in his arsenal, but it's what we wanted to show in the E3 demo.

tacit, just wondering how many units in total are we suppose to expect in WA i mean exact number units for all.

The IG have about 15 units (including vehicles) and the other DoW races get 1 each (total of 4).

Erm...not sure if this question has been asked before but what weapon was the Sentinel sporting in the video demo at E3? Multi-laser?

That was a Multi-Laser, but we're still fiddling around with different armaments for the Sentinel so it's not final.

Thats to do with graphics settings not the expansion pack

You're right. The Banshee weapon glow and the Reaper's projectiles were all in DoW and have not been modified in WA.

Thanks for the info Tacit. Just a little question (along with everyone elses!) could you give us some info about the new units places in the tech tree? I believe we nearly got to hear it in the video with Jonathon Dowdeswell, but he didn't get time to tell!

If Jonathan had been given time to talk about that he probably would have said that the units are still being balanced and we're not ready to talk about exactly where they fall in the tech tree.

tacit since you are in the answering mode, could you answer me some things ??
First of all in the campaigns, with player freedom how much is it ? will a choice made in one mission perhaps affect later missions ? and will there be stormtroopers ?? (i just have to know, it means a lot to me)

We're trying add depth to the SPG by providing players more than one way to complete objectives within the missions, but the missions themselves result in a binary success/failure outcome as they would normally. Just gives you more choice as to how you complete the objectives within a mission. There will be some other more macro choices you get to make in the campaign but I'm not sure we're ready to talk about that yet.

Hey, c'mon guys. Ease off Tacit - it's not like he actually knows what's going on inside Jonathon Dowdeswell's head.

Yes I do.

neohunter: i never thought that the earthshaker round could be an ability that you could turn on or off... i thought that everytime they fired you lost a bit of req.

if you listen to the words on the movie someone in the audience makes a comparison between sentienel walkers and the scout walkers from star wars, then the anouncer says something along the lines of them being able to kill vehicles, this combined with the gamespot review where they say that the walkers kill infantry with flamers leads me to belive that the walkers will have multiple weapon upgrades wartrakk style.

Yes, the Earthshaker Round will be a special ability for the Basilisk. It fires further and does more damage, but cost Req. every time you use it. This is separate from the Basilisk's default attack.

We're experimenting with making Sentinels anti-vehicle units, yes. But, they are primarily fast-moving scout units that can uncapture enemy strategic points (as a harassment tactic).

I'd assume different maps (and mission objectives) for each race.

And I noticed Tacit ignored my question.

No plans to add the same variation in vehicles as units within squads, since the whole idea was to make sure all 'organic' units didn't look the same (vehicles of the same type would probably look the same in 'real life' wouldn't they?). And no Sisters of Battle.

I don't think we're getting into specifics about the structure or content of the single-player campaigns yet.

And the Leman Russ is a tank.

Whoa. Anyone who did not get an adrenaline overdose whilst watching that is what I like to call clinically dead.

A few details:
1) The Chaos player who attacked the IG base built turrets to secure his front... hopefully we'll see some proper WWII style frontline combat, cause that would not only revolutionise DoW, it would FUCKING ROCK!
2) The Chaos Lord turned into a Bloodthirster and the commentator said that this was in an early Chaos mission. So maybe the BT's lost his annoying health de-generation? Cause it would suck to have a hero in a campaign whose health rapidly deteriorates throughout every mission.
3) The berserker running/walking animation SUCKS. They look like they have a sexually transmitted disease or something.
4) The IG buildings weren't clearly shown, but they appeared to be firing in the Chaos attack. If all IG buildings have in-built gun turrets, wouldn't it overpower them? Unless you make their buildings like ork buildings, of course. But that would suck.

Oh, and the IG look like they jumped straight from my dreams of what RTS'es should be like. I'm gonna sell my PS2 t buy this expansion, seriously.

I was the one giving the demo. I didn't say that footage was from an early chaos mission, but was a simple setup illustrating our plans for Winter Assault, the idea being that we're adding more depth to the SPG by providing more player choice. We're also making WA more cinematic than DoW by adding intra-mission NISs to help advance the story, give the player some visual payoff for completing objectives, and just generally making the game look even cooler than it already does.

Did I see and hear correctly? The IG Captain can call in an airstrike, similar to OB?

Yes, it is an ability called the Strafing Run, as I described in the video (might not have heard it though since the audio was pretty bad).

new game types and tunnels could be single player only or multiplayer as well. The parts of the video showing them were definately from the campaigns.

The mega armoured nobs could be independent or could be like oblits (purchased in a squad of one but then reinforceable) the nature of ork pop cap combined with the strength of these monsters means that if its the latter we'll probably only be seeing them on their own anyway (one of them can take on a full marine squad - why have more than one per mob? ).

The maps and small scenarios you saw in the E3 demo were created especially for E3. Nothing you saw there is from the campaigns.

The new units look impressive.

The new Nobz just destroy the Space Marines so easily. I wonder how they fair against the Dreadnoughts?

The Fire Dragon look powerful, but they could be very expensive to make.

The General with the claws look tough but did he seem to die so easily.

From the looks of it the expansion will continue on with the storyline from the first game with the malicdem.

The General had been on the front line of that battle vs. Chaos and if you watch the video you'll see he took a lot of hits before anyone took him down.

well i saw in one of the vidoes the techpriest doing some working animations at a building. But still, there will need to be one to summon the buildings.

Yes, the Techpriest Enginseer is needed to build structures. They come in from space just as the Space Marine structures do, but even those need Servitors to 'assemble' them. Same deal with the Techpriest.

All that these videos have done is raise more questions about the IG. Its seems they only have two infantry types (i mean the soldiers, not counting their support units/commanders) those being the Guardsmen and the Ogryn. I hope there are a few more infantry in there. Secondly, weapon upgrades: A grenade launcher upgrade for Guardsmen is visible, but i wonder what other upgrades the infantry and tanks will have.

We only showed a handful of IG units in that demo. There are many others that you didn't see.

the commisar doesnt look fat to me, but i think they should remove the golden splint mail with a trench coat, but a commisar isnt supposed to look cool, he supposed to look mean and ugly so the troops will fear him.

Games Workshop seemed to like the Commissar we added.

[Moe]

NEW AND OH SO FRESH:

Thanks to Druid, our amazing armed Squirrel, we now have a complete unit list for Winter Assault in the Dawn of War library, with pretty pictures from the E3 Video.

Find it here: http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=64646

[Moe]

Will there be a demo?
-Maybe. Originally, no demo was planned, but that position is currently being re-evaluated.

How many CDs will the expansion be on?
-Winter Assault will ship as a two CD pack.

Will there be a DVD?
-No, although Tranj said he would try to talk to his people about it.[/b]

What patches will WA require?
-Winter Assault will require the latest patch 1.4 to be installed. The patch will be supplied with the expansion back, you won't have to download it.