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When: February 12th, 2011
Time: 12PM
Where: Student Union - Room 218CD
ORIGINAL POST:
It looks like Relic will be rolling-out the Dawn of War 2: Retribution Beta in three phases:
- Invites
- Preorders
- Owners of a Steam-registered Dawn of War game
I'm really interested in a Retribution Beta LAN, but I want to get a feel for when I should petition to have that. Do most people who would be interested in such a LAN already have the game preordered or plan to preorder it?
The reason why I'm not just going with the obvious here (stage 3) is because I think it would also be worth it to have a launch LAN (possibly work out something with GameStop as was done with SC2?) as new Last Stand stuff and all six new co-op campaigns will be available and I think a lot of us are really interested in LANing some co-op campaign action (something- face it- as PC gamers we rarely get to do). So anyway, if we could do two LANs, then a phase 2 beta LAN and a launch LAN would probably work best, as there would be enough separation and we could even show-off the beta a bit.
If you haven't preordered the game yet, but want to, check out this article which explains what is currently known about Retribution and what preorder options exist. Since that article was published, it has also been confirmed that Retribution will be using an impure P2P version of Steamworks that supports a "NAT reflection server", which can best be summed-up as proxy dedicated servers for players to connect to other players with when NAT and such issues crop-up, so if Games for Windows Live's networking was a thorn in your side before due to such issues, rest happy in knowing Retribution should resolve that.
Side note on phase 3 and the "Steam-registered" part:
Company of Heroes currently has a beta patch going on through Steam right now. I don't own ANY Company of Heroes games through Steam (I have vanilla and Opposing Fronts as boxed copies and Tales of Valor from Impulse), but Relic/Steam let me register whatever of my keys I wanted to on Steam to unlock the Company of Heroes beta patch on Steam. I'm assuming they will do something similar for anyone who has non-Steam Dawn of War 1 games (if you have Dawn of War 2, obviously you're fine because Steam DRM is integrated into DoW 2- only an issue for those w/out DoW 2).
