Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dawn of War II: Retribution: Part III: Return of the Nested Subtitles!

I’m going to keep this fairly short and sweet with regard to mechanics, since I’ve already written about Dawn of War II’s multiplayer when it was in its nascent form, back in beta. Not a whole lot has changed since then.

It feels a little bit like the sliders have been re-arranged, but that’s more likely an effect of the community becoming more stable and dedicated rather than the result of any sort of tweaks. I more or less hold to everything I said before: Retribution changes the game of Dawn of War II without ever really changing any of its rules. It’s a good thing, a wonderful thing difficult to quantify and impossible to describe to someone uninitiated in the game’s complexities. The only thing that a solid month of playing multiplayer post-release have changed for me are my opinions of the community.

While there are still plenty of friendly folk to be found in Dawn of War country, simply by merit of it not falling into the trap of AAA releases, dickheads and whiners have begun to emerge. The primary targets that I’ve noticed: Chaos Heretics with grenade launchers which, to be fair to critics, are quite annoying and difficult to counter without jump units or mid-level armor and Manticore mobile artillery platforms, units that can devastate entire armies from across the map but can’t even hold up to a guardsman squad with plasma weapons in toe to toe combat. People whine about lots of other things, sure, but so far these two elements have elicited the loudest and most fervent cries of disgust from my various internet compatriots.

The Chaos Heretic thing isn’t even that frequent, and it’s certainly not that tough to counter, since Heretics wither under almost every kind of attention, but in the Manticore’s case the protests are much louder. And they stem not from balance issues, but from the changes to game mechanics that the Manticore brings to the table.

It’s understandable, in a way. Getting your army devastated from across the map is never fun, especially when you never even see your enemy if he uses stealthed stormtroopers. And the Manticore works best against the sort of players who are losing games anyways, people who use large numbers of stationary units and focus on massing units up and rolling a fat stack across the map. This is already a great way to frustrate your enemies while inexplicably losing the game, since controlling victory points without spreading out your force is tough, especially if your enemy plays to your myopic tactic and uses stealth units to manipulate victory points while avoiding the direct conflict you’re so fervently trying to force on them. But the Manticore further punishes this violation of the rules of Dawn of War II by allowing your opponent to shred your pitiful, by merit of its size, slow moving force. The AOE damage, the disruption to your formations, the damage to your pride that you were too slow and stupid to notice the red smoke calling in the strike, it all combines to open you up to an opportunistic attack by combined enemy forces which will wipe your massive-stack out and force you into the kind of game Dawn of War II really is: a game of map control, of movement and response.

It’s just making Dawn of War II more Dawn of War II-ish, but the people who hate on tactics are, by nature, the same people who tend not to get what makes Dawn of War II unique and special. So it’s no surprise to see the Manticore get hate, even from Imperial Guard players. I was matched with an excellent three-man team that stuck together through a few matches, and one of the most comical moments was running into an enemy who whined about one of my teammate’s use of Manticores not once but twice and mopping the floor with him on each occasion, devastating his forces as he failed to anticipate our movements. It reminded me of why I played Dawn of War II so fervently and frequently in years past, and cemented Retribution’s quality as a multiplayer product in my mind. There are good RTSes, like Starcraft 2, inelastic systems for competition that are great at illustrating mechanics and letting players slug it out with those mechanics without any fear of the unexpected, and then there are games like Myth and, of course, Dawn of War II – chaotic games that provide for the unexpected and the uncalled for, sloppy affairs that generate moments of genuine beauty among their rules. The latter category is a step beyond good, and perhaps great, into the serendipitous. They express both the capacity of and future for Real Time Strategy as a genre. So long as games like Dawn of War keep emerging, games that re-read and re-write the rules of Rush-Boom-Turtle, RTSes will never get stagnant or dull.

For this quality alone Dawn of War II: Retribution and Relic deserve to be celebrated. And this is just considering their multiplayer system, completely divorced from their adequate, if not particularly good, single player campaign. I haven’t even touched on the Last Stand mode that Relic opted to add into their games, the mechanic that me and my gaming buddies, or internet-husbands as I like to call them, have latched on to. The Last Stand hasn’t changed much either on the surface. But if you look a little closer, it’s changed completely. Let me explain.

The Last Stand can be played exactly as it was before, on its old map with only the three original classes or the two additional classes added in Chaos Rising, and you’ll never know that there was anything new to be played. But careful observers will notice the Lord General has been added, a hero I have had woefully little time to play around with since acquiring the game. And less-careful observers will find themselves immediately thrust into a brand new map, a smaller and more deadly map, filled with Chaos units and upgraded versions of all your favorite factions who have been optimized to ass-rape you and your friends. That’s right, a challenge mode has been added to Dawn of War II’s Last Stand. Not an official one, or a mode that involves restarting without any of your fancy new gear for no apparent reason.

Instead they’ve just hitched a punishing new map to The Last Stand, a map filled with upgraded units clearly designed to let you put your favorite load-outs through some more rigorous paces and give players a new end game. The waves have a distinctly puzzly feel to them, and they’re more than willing to wipe you out just as soon as look at you. The experience rewards are greater, for certain, but the increase in difficulty is considerable. And this is the map that Relic clearly wants you to play. It’s the default Last Stand Map, even after playing through a round on the old Bloody Coliseum. And there’s no warning, no chance to cancel. After you start the countdown, you’re locked in. If you picked wrong you’re well and proper fucked.

This map would be ideal for old-hands at the previous Last Stand who have maxed out their characters and want to explore a new progression of challenges, see how the waves unfold and how their hard-earned tools play into each new band of foes. And me and my internet-husbands would fall into this category easily if Relic hadn’t opted to disable the proposed feature which allowed players to carry their previous multiplayer statistics into Retribution. But, to date, I haven’t met a single person who transferred their stats from Chaos Rising to Retribution successfully, and all of my attempts to do so, along with the attempts of my friends, have been met with naught but frustration.

This isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s pleasant to climb the ranks again after having done it before, and it gives me a feel of nostalgia for a game that I haven’t played in a very long time. But it does disincentivize experimenting with new heroes since I can’t just switch back and enjoy my jetpack, my plasma rifle and my Dreadnaught. And it is a bit of a slap in the face to, as someone who neared level 50 in Team Mode with his race of choice, have all of my efforts reset by the new, admittedly improved, Steam based matching system.

And it really, really is an improvement. Games for Windows Live was terrible, beyond atrocious. And being forced to use it each time I wanted to play one of my favorite games was the definition of uncool. Steam is great by comparison, and instead of using the shit-tastic TrueSkill system it uses a matching and skill derivation system utilized in competitive chess leagues. So this is mostly a nitpick. A server reset is far from the worst thing that could’ve happened to Dawn of War II: Retribution, considering all the other changes they made. But it is frustrating. And literally, aside from the slight increase in whiny assholes since beta, the only thing I could possibly conjure against this game. Dawn of War II: Retribution really is 2011’s first great new RTS release. And, this is kind of overstating my case, it advances the genre of Real-Time Strategy in general in a tremendously powerful way. If you play RTSes against other people you simply cannot ignore Dawn of War II: Retribution.