Dawn of War II lead designer Jonny Ebert and his team at Relic had a bleak view on real time strategy games in 2006.

[When we finished out last game], we decided if we continued on our current course, we weren't going to succeed. RTS sales had plateaued and are actually declining. We need to expand our player base or eventually we'll lose out to other genres and die out.

Their answer is Dawn of War II, which ships today and should be in stores (and on Steam!) tomorrow. This sequel to the Warhammer-themed real time strategy games is not your father's Dawn of War. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's not your father's real time strategy game, period. The developers at Relic weren't content to do things the same way, and in the process, they've created one of the most refreshing real time strategy games I've played in a long time. There is no base building and no traditional resource gathering. There are only small groups of units at a time. It's built around hand-on battlefield action among Space Marines, unruly Orks, the Tyranid aliens, and the mystical Eldar.

On the eve of Dawn of War II's release, I talked at length with lead design Jonny Ebert. He told me how people have reacted to the new gameplay, how the brand new Tyranid race gets no love, why you'll only get seven multiplayer maps, what they learned from World of Warcraft, and how Relic hopes to turn the genre around 180-degrees.

Read the interview after the jump.

Tom Chick: From playing a reviewable build, and the beta, my process with Dawn of War 2, which I've seen mirrored at various other places around the internet, was "I hate this! What have you done with Dawn of War? Give me back the base building, give me back the old units, give me back the old resources. I don't like this game." That went on for five, six, seven matches before it started to gradually change. And at one point, there was this dramatic click where I suddenly loved what you guys had done. Did you expect that kind of reaction and how do you feel when you hear that from people?

Jonny Ebert: [Deep breath] Yeah. Yeah, we did kind of expect it. Actually we didn't kind of expect it, we expected it. But even though we were bracing ourselves, initially we were a little shocked by how strong some of the reactions were from our established player base. So when we first posted the beta, some people immediately loved it. We had a fair number of people who said "I don't normally play RTS, but this is the kind of game I like. I'm actually going to play this". That's exactly what we were shooting for.
         But we also had a portion of our fan base that were expecting the old things, like base building, to continue forward. They also liked how the units were more disposable in the old game. Some of our established players also struggled with the concept of cover, which surprised us because we thought there was more overlap with the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War fan base. But now I'm starting to think, based on the reaction, there's a lot less overlap than we thought.
         So at first there were some really strong reactions that they wanted something closer to the original. But it seems like, based on what we've been reading, that the discussions have gone from "this is not what I wanted" to "okay, this needs to be changed and this needs to be changed". Balance discussions started happening among people who, at first, were upset by some of the changes. At this point, you read through a message board and it's subjective. It's hard to figure out how big each constituency is. I guess sales numbers will ultimately tell us that. But we really hope our existing fan base, the one who were shocked at first, is being won over like you were and that we are continuing to add new fans to the franchise.

TC: Do you guys do focus groups? Have you put this in the hands of many people who haven't played RTSs and been able to see the results?

JE: Oh, yes. Yes.

TC: Tell me about how that went. I'm a hardcore RTS guy. I would love to know how this design plays for someone who doesn't know the genre.

JE: We bring people in off the streets and traditionally we try to bring in people who don't normally play RTS. One of our goals was to maintain the depth of RTS, but we always felt RTS front-loaded way too much complexity, so we developed what we called a simplified entry point, kind of like World of Warcraft. You look at a raid screen in World of Warcraft and it's incredibly complex. More complex than an RTS. But a lot of housewives and casual gamers get drawn into World of Warcraft. WoW starts you off very basic, but it lets you grow slowly into a complex set of actions. We tried to take a page from that.
         So every week, every Saturday, we'd try to get people off the street, from outside the company, and watch them play. We adopted some of the practices we learned from Valve in a [Game Developers' Conference] presentation: "Don't listen to what the player says, watch what the player does". Valve brought up some really good points. Either they'll be hyper critical to try to impress you with how much they know or they'll be very accommodating because they like you and they're fans of the genre or the company. So you take what they say with a grain of salt. But watching what they do, watching when they get stuck or confused, that's much more revealing.
         It led to a lot of changes in our [user interface], a lot of changes in the early parts of the campaign, a lot of changes on things like capturing the points on the battlefield, though I still think we want to work on that some more. I'm still not 100% satisfied with where we landed on that. But it was a great process and I wish we'd done it even more. Just getting more time to polish and iterate.

TC: That's another question I have. Was the way Dawn of War 2 plays differently, was this something you guys had in mind from the moment you came out of Dark Crusade, the last Dawn of War game you worked on, or did it gradually iterate into its current form from something closer to the previous game?

JE: This is pretty much what we wanted to do from the moment we started. We decided if we continued on our current course, we weren't going to succeed. RTS sales had plateaued and are actually declining. We need to expand our player base or eventually we'll lose out to other genres and die out. So right at the end of Dark Crusade, we sat down and started comparing RTS to other genres. Some of the things we started to come up with were pretty obvious and shocking at the same time. Most genres, like first person shooters and massively-multiplayer and free-to-play games, the ones that are experiencing strong growth, were constantly working to simplify themselves and make themselves more approachable, where RTS is going in the opposite direction. It seems like each one was more complicated than the last. The other genres were having constant breakthroughs in pacing, reward structure, drawing players systematically into the experience, whereas RTS had stayed the same across the board. To us, it felt obvious that we were falling behind for a reason. We decided we needed to simplify the entry point but retain the depth at the back end. And we need to work on the pacing. We need to work on ways to draw the player in and feel more committed to the

TC: A lot of hardcore fans sometimes feel you guys overbalance things in the patching process. That is to say that when Relic fixes something, you guys wait for a while and then the pendulum swings way too far, rather than just nudging the pendulum a shorter distance but more frequently. Do you feel there's any validity to those complaints? I'm specifically wondering because of the way some fans have reacted to the last update to the beta.

JE: Oh, I'd say it's entirely valid, Tom. It's just human nature. You tend to overcompenstate because you want to be sure to see a difference. When you work in RTS for a while, you have to very disciplined about that. Even then, you're human and sometimes you'll still find yourself overcompensating. We even have hard rules. "Okay, we're not moving it more than ten percent". Then we'll move it 10% and later in the meeting, "Oh, maybe twenty." You have to be really tough with yourself. But at the same time, you don't want to not fix it.

TC: Out of curiosity, where do you guys stand on the current state of beta, in terms of the changes introduced in the latest update to the beta? How will that stack up with how you hope to release the game.

JE: We've already made adjustments. There are a couple of things we inadvertently broke. The Apothecary's heal isn't working as it should. Something happened with the venom cannon. It does crazy crazy damage. And the requisition change. We were really unhappy with that.

TC: Oh, you were? Had you guys said you're unhappy with that? I haven't kept up with the official word.

JE: We drafted something said "this is what we're going to be changing to address these things we weren't happy with in the first balance update". We've also posted our reasoning, because that's something we feel we could do a better job on. It's one thing to just post the list of changes. We want to give people "we're making these changes because we think it can help in this way". It can be very helpful to the player base if we establish a rapport so they feel like it's a two-sided conversation.

[Note: you can read the post here.]

TC: Tell me about your approach to the single player game. You mentioned that players are more attached to their units when they don't die as often, which is one of the most dramatic changes in Dawn of War 2. There are fewer units, they tend to live longer, so you feel more attached to them. You're playing up on that for the single player campaign?

JE: Even more so. Single player, we're taking even more chances. We're giving you a small persistent strike force. So imagine you took four of your favorite units from the multiplayer game. Say the scout squad with the sniper sergeant, the heavy bolter devastator, the tac marine with the sergeant, and the force commander. Maybe the dreadnaught and the assault marines. Say you have one of each of those squads and each of the sergeants had a name, a face, a backstory. Imagine you commanded these guys across several missions. We thought that would be really cool. To add to the excitement, we made it so these guys get better as they fight more. With each shot they fire, they gain experience. And occasionally, they level up and you have attribute points to spend on things like health, ranged combat, or melee. You have cool abilities you can unlike when you invest in attributes. You have new types of weapons you can discover on the battlefield or get as rewards for missions you accept. We're trying to take that feeling of valuing your units and in single player we're making it persistent across several missions where you're pursuing long-term goals. We hope it'll make for a more compelling experience to manage a group of guys you care about rather than sending a faceless horde to its death like you do in a more traditional RTS.

TC: You're actually naming your characters?

JE: You name your Force Commander.

TC: And I presume it's a different set of upgrades and abilities from the multiplayer?

JE: Yes, an entirely different set.

TC: How dynamic is this in terms of replay? In terms of being like an action RPG, if I sit down to play Diablo one time, it can be a completely different experience if I play a second time. How dynamic do you feel the single player is in Dawn of War II compared to something like Diablo?

JE: There's some dynamism there, but it doesn't have the replay value of Diablo. Originally, we were hoping to arrive there. Just due to scope and what we were trying to accomplish, we had to dial it back. You could play through more than once and it could feel different because you could take different paths when navigating through the missions. Of the unlocks on your squads, you can only unlock about half of them on a single play-through. So if you want to see the road not taken on your characters, that would add novelty to the experience.

TC: It's only the Space Marines?

JE: It's only the Space Marines.

TC: Oh, I see. I didn't realize that.

JE: I wouldn't want to overpromise anything on the replayability. There are some people who will like playing through a second or even a third time, but I would think for most players, once will probably be enough.

TC: In multiplayer, you're using a new skill-matching service, if I'm not mistaken. Microsoft's propriety thing, right?

JE: It's Games for Windows Live, their skill matchmaking.

TC: And how does that differ from the previous Dawns of War?

JE: Previously, we were using another service provider. A lot of our players were frustrated with it. The search times were incredibly long. The firewall negotiation and the NAT negotiation issue was...not very strong. A lot of players behind more secure firewalls couldn't find matches at all. It didn't seem to be able to handle the server load. Whereas now we're using the same servers that handle Call of Duty 4 and Halo. I'm pretty sure we're not in any danger of taking the server down. We think it's going to make for a much better experience for our players. But it's a new service. Both Microsoft and us are learning new things. That's one of the things that was so valuable about the beta. It's something we're going to continue to refine. We're definitely putting a lot of energy into improving the online experience over the next year.

TC: I'd like to ask you about the races and the design philosophy behind each race, partly for laypeople who may not know the Warhammer universe, but also for how that race fits into the gameplay. So, the Space Marines, would you describe them as sort of the vanilla humans?

JE: I would describe the Space Marines as the hero race. The Space Marines are genetically modified superhumans. They're about eight feet tall, they weigh about four hundred pounds without their power armor. They have faster than human reflexes and superhuman strength. They actually think faster than we do. And then on top of all that, they wear two tons of power armor, which enhances their strength even more and makes them extremely difficult to kill. A Space Marine is one of the deadliest creatures in the galaxy. Fortunately, they're considered the pinnacle of humanity and they're protecting us from the aliens that are working to exterminate us.

TC: When someone first sits down to play, you would recommend the Space Marines over the other races?

JE: Yeah, probably. Their weapons are going to be the most recognizable. Their squad roles will be the most recognizable, since they're based on human forces from our day and age. Well, loosely based on them. Your units will be much more durable than the other races. There's more versatility, so it's not quite as highly specialized as the other races. It's easier to adjust your strategy on the fly.

TC: Tell me about the Orks. They're not the zerg race anymore, because you guys have a new zerg race. Now that the tyranids are in there, what role to the Orks play?

JE: It's such a grim and dark universe, that Orks add a much needed humor element. They say funny things, they die in funny ways. They're not evil, per se. They're like soccer hooligans. They love to brawl and they live to brawl. People may get killed by their brawling, but they're just having the time of their lives. They're kind of like the raging horde race, which is different than the swarm race. The closer together they they, the more of them there are, they get more confident. They pick up steam that way. They have their war shouts that stack on top of each other. They're probably the most well-rounded army. They have a unit that can deal with almost any situation. For me, the humor element makes them my favorite race. I always have to have Orks somewhere in the battle for me to be having the most fun. If I'm not playing them, they have to be on the field for me to get the most out of the Warhammer experience.

TC: I imagine that was an amusing voice recording session.

JE: Without a doubt. One of the voice actors said this was a character he created for himself when he was four-years-old. It was the first time he'd found a venue for it. The guy was basically a real-life Ork who found his calling.

TC: Now the Eldar. Whenever I sit someone down to play Dawn of War for the first time, if I see them moving the cursor towards playing the Eldar, I have to slap their hand away and say, "No, that's not for you yet". How would you characterize them in the overall scheme of the game?

JE: They're the finesse race. They're kind of like a scalpel, but you have to use them properly. Whereas the Space Marines are a hammer and the Orks are a club. In the hands of an artist, the Eldar are probably the deadliest race. They rely on speed, deception. Their units are highly specialized. They're extremely good at what they do. They're the caster race, so they rely on a lot of psychic spells to tip the balance of the battle. People who love a high-end stereo with lots of knobs to twiddle, that would be the Eldar experience.

TC: Dawn of War 2 has the first dramatically new race. There was a lot of cool stuff in the expansions, but nothing dramatically alien - actually, I guess the Necrons in Dark Crusade were very different. But the Tyranids are completely different from anything previous. Also, now that you have the Tyranids, you're probably glad to no longer have fans breathing down your neck saying "Please add the Tyranids". There's got to be a sense of relief. What did you get to play with when you brought them into the fold?

JE: We have the Essence engine and that's kind of what we've always been waiting for. Because Tyranids rely on the environment so much to turn the battle. The Essence engine is built around environmental destruction and environmental combat. Also, the Essence engine has a much more refined animation system, so we were able to do things with their inhuman skeletons that we wouldn't have been able to do in the original Dawn of War. Things like the Lictor's flesh hook ability, where it hooks a guy from a distance and just yanks him away. We wouldn't have been able to do that as convincingly. It's those little touches that make it feel like the alien swarm that's going to devour the entire galaxy one day. We finally felt we had the tools to bring them to life. But even then, while we were doing it, we thought, "Aw, maybe we should have waited one more generation". There's just so much you can do with that race if you have the time, the budget, the lastest bells and whistles for the PC.

TC: How have you felt about the player reaction to the Tyranids. There were obviously a lot of expectations. With the beta, lots of people have seen the new Tyranids. How have the fans reacted?

JE: They seem to like them quite a bit. My suspicion at the beginning was that not a lot of people want to play the Tyranids. They just want the Tyranids to be there. That's because they're the least identifiable race. All the others are humanoids. They represent some aspect of humanity. Eldar represent grace and beauty, Orks represent thuggishness, Space Marines represent heroicism and stoicism. Someone can always identify with those. Tyranids are just entirely alien. They're much harder to relate to so there's going to be fewer players who play them. But because they are so alien and exotic and exciting, people want them on the battlefield. I wasn't shocked when we broke open our player metrics and Tyranids were the least played race. Not by a huge margin, but if each one is 25% in theory, Space Marines are about seven points above and Tyranids are about seven point below. 32% Space Marines, 18% Tyranids, Orks and Eldar right around 25%.

TC: You guys have mentioned that you already have plans for downloadable content, which is nothing new. It seems like all games are doing this, so I'm glad to see you guys announcing it as well. However, the game will ship with, I think it's seven multiplayer maps?

JE: Yes.

TC: So a lot players might wonder if you're holding back some multiplayer maps for paid download down the road. What do you say who people who might complain about that?

JE: That's not our plan. The reason we held back on making a bunch of maps is, traditionally, our approach has been to start making maps fairly late in the project. We've played the game internally a fair amount, which is, like, fifty to seventy people playing the game. And we think it's going to be played a certain way and we start making maps on those assumptions. And then the game gets out into the wild and it doesn't play like we expected. It never does. You have like hundreds of thousands of minds playing with it and taking it in cool and exciting new directions. So usually what happens is we make, like, twenty maps and all of them will suck except for, like, three or four by sheer chance. And that's not just our RTSs, that's pretty much every RTS. There's like four maps that everyone plays and the rest just suck. So we decided "Why don't we just make four or five maps this time and get those out for the beta, watch how the game is actually played, and then start making more maps based on the information we get, so our batting average will be much higher?" So the numbers worked out. We made five maps. We've made two more we're going to be releasing the day of the launch, if not a day or two later. And those already play way better. So what's going to happen is we're going to watch people play those maps and the next generation of maps will come out more improved and we'll also see if games are turning out predictably so we can offer a map that changes that dynamic. I personally find this a much more exciting and flexible way to provide maps. I think once players see we're going to keep introducing maps, they're going to come to like this system much better than the traditional system.

TC: Can you tell me anything about one of maps coming up? Maybe give me a hint of what we're going to see in the maps you're working on now?

JE: Well, the first thing we noticed on all of our maps is that there are way too many choke points. A lot of maps were turning into big campfests, especially in the team games. People could rush out a suppression weapon and lock off huge pieces of the map. The flow of the combat wasn't quite what we wanted. So the first thing was, "We need to open up our maps". So these two maps are much more open. It's going to be easier to flank your opponent and harder to lock down sections of the map. We find in our internal playtesting - we had some top players testing them out, too - that they seem like they're going to be much better. They're both jungle maps.

TC: Finally, I want to ask you about two things that are my own little pet concerns. I'm sure that 95% of your players won't care about this stuff, but I'm curious. I'd love to know more about what, if anything, you intend to change in terms of the way information is presented. Right now, you can see units' hit points, but that's it. There's no measure of how hard a unit hits, for instance. In Company of Heroes, there was the indicator for how strong a weapon was against infantry, soft vehicles, and armored vehicles. That sort of feedback isn't in the beta. Is that intentionally gone, or do you plan to fold it in later?

JE: Yes to both. We actually started out trying to minimize the UI as much as possible. That's one of the things we thought was too intimidating to most players. We threw out everything we felt we could get away with. I think a lot of things we threw out people don't miss. But there are a few things that people miss. We either want to make them options, or we want to bring them back. Things like how much damage a unit does. When the beta first came out, a lot of people - and this is a testament to our fans - started doing their own lists of UI improvements. So when we started going through the message boards, we'd say, "Hey that would be a really nice improvement". And our UI artist started compiling a huge list of changes we could make. So we won't be able to make them all at once. We're probably going to have to layer them in over a series of patches. But we're trying to find the low-hanging fruit first, the things that will improve the UI the most that we can implement the quickest, and graduate to the more complicated things. Unit damage is one of those we were looking at.

TC: The beta as it is right now, is there anything drastically different that we might see in the UI?

JE: Not per se. We passed our first certification with Microsoft. You always plan for three, just to plan for the worst. So we passed the first one and we were, like, "Awesome. Now we can address some things we wanted to address that we ran out of time on". So there are some UI things in the single-player campaign we wanted to change. We added some cool new UI screens. Now that we've got that ready, we're looking at our second patch, and those are some of the multiplayer UI changes we'd like to make. Some of them include increasing the size of the "Wauggh" resource text, the red resource. Possibly adding the damage indicator, but I'm not sure that's going to make it into the first patch or not. Improving decorators, coming up with more symbols that are easier to grok right off the bat, easier to see. Making the health bars larger. We also like allowing you to see everybody's health bar if you hold down the alt key. Things like that.

TC: Finally, my other pet concern, with again I'm sure 95% of people don't care about, is a speed option. In the past Dawn of War games, there's been a speed setting for multiplayer games. Is that something that will be in Dawn of War II?

JE: We had always planned to have multiple speeds, but then there's something in our simulation once it starts going past two time that starts coming unglued, and things become inaccurate. It's going to take a little time to iron that out and play at four times speed or eight times speed or sixteen times speed and still remain true.

TC: That's funny to me when you say that, because when I ask - I'm like an old guy - I'm curious because I want to slow it down and take my time admiring the animation and planning things out. You guys have always been good in the past letting people slow it down. I'm not one of those guys who wants to play it at eight times speed. I want to play at half speed.

JE: Oh, I see. I thought you were just talking about replay speed.

TC: No, no. I meant ingame speed. You could host the previous Dawn of War games at slow, normal, or fast. I noticed you couldn't do that in the beta for Dawn of War II and just wondered if that would be in there.

JE: That one I'm not so sure about. We've thought about it. We've seen the requests. But we don't want to add a variable that might fracture our player pool. But we're still weighing the pros and cons. My answer to that would be "to be determined".