The studio are ”doing some rethinking” about how they approach RTS; what’s the ”best way to present” the strategy genre? There’ll definitely be more ”RTS 40k stuff,” says Danny Bilson.
An announcement for Dawn of War 3 never turned up but THQ and Relic had switched focus to Company of Heroes 2 instead. They’ll be returning to Space Marines.
”There’s a lot of rethinking going on right now with the RTS 40k stuff. We’re going to do something different, but we’re in a bit of a rethinking mode,” explained Bilson, speaking to Eurogamer.
”What we had to do at Relic was prioritise Company of Heroes 2 now and then move back to 40k. With that we moved that over here for a bit - just a bit - because we needed to load all the resource onto making Company of Heroes 2 awesome.”
”But look, everybody at Relic loves 40k. I love 40k. I also have tremendous respect for Games Workshop and the people I work with there. They’re some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my career. So I personally feel really strongly about that brand.” Dawn of War 2 stepped away from the traditional base building mechanic of the original for its single player campaign, but retained it for online matches.
The focus on a small number of specialist squads in DOW2 upset some of the community. ”…we’re doing some rethinking. What that really has to do with is the RTS business, and what’s the best way to present RTS? We’re not getting out of RTS. It’s just, what’s the best way to present it in the future? We’ll be talking more about that later.”
”There are aspects of Company of Heroes we haven’t talked about that are progressive and forward thinking, that we’ll roll out between now and the launch of the game. We’re just giving you the first look at Company of Heroes 2. There’s actually more to it.” Let’s hope E3 next week drowns us in Relic RTS goodness.
