The Dawn of War 2 multiplayer beta started a week ago, and I've been playing the hell out of it. I like what they did with the gameplay; it's just "action" now. No pesky peons / ore collectors you have to worry about wandering into the enemy base. No trying to fit eight extra-large Imperial Guard buildings into your small base so you can make a damn tank. Just non-stop hectic fighting- what a war should be. For those of you who have yet to play DoW2 and are planning on downloading it tomorrow when it goes public, take a piece of advice from me: forget anything you learned about DoW1. Any experience playing Company of Heroes would serve you better.
The game encourages retreating and severely discourages sending your units in to die. You just plain don't make enough resources in the game to support replacing your entire army constantly. The game also really encourages helping your teammates. In the past, the most help you could give your teammates were sending resources and sending units for a joint attack / defense. While you can't send resources (although you do share them), you can reinforce your teammate's points, load units in transports, and more importantly, use abilities on your allies' units.
Games for Windows Live is what the game uses for its online service and this marks the first time I've ever used it. I used to laugh at the very idea of charging for multiplayer support in computer games. (No, scratch that, I still laugh at the idea.) Thankfully Microsoft has come to their senses and realized nobody is going to pay for the "convenience" of playing computer games online... maybe they didn't realize that we had been doing it for free since 1990. Anyway, I think they totally fucked themselves, as they could have stole Steam's (ahem) steam and delivered a decent matchmaking / community service before Valve could. Don't get me wrong, the GFWL service seems fairly decent. The matchmaking is good, and I really like the idea of making a party on-the-fly and joining up as a group after a game if you liked your teammates. I've met some good players that way. I also like the idea of sharing friends across platforms, since I play games with the same people regardless of platform.
However, I'm totally flabbergasted when it comes to their policy of only allowing you be online on one device at a time. The first night I was playing DoW2, Allison was watching something on the Netflix streaming service via the xbox 360. When I first started multiplayer, it signed me into my GFWL account, which is of course linked to my XBL account. This, for some reason, signed me out of XBL. I was at first afraid that it would ruin the already playing movie for my girlfriend, but to Netflix's credit it kept playing. Thinking all was alright, I started my multiplayer game and started kicking ass. Fast forward about 10 minutes later, Allison's movie ends and Netflix freaks the fuck out because it's no longer signed into a XBL Gold account. It re-acquires the connection, re-signing itself back in, thus kicking me off GFWL on the computer. You can imagine my frustration when, right in the climax of the game, I'm suddenly returned to the title screen with a messagebox saying "You have been signed out of Games For Windows Live." I was pissed. My poor teammates who suddenly found themselves without a 3rd and maybe lost because of it were probably pissed as well. That is totally ridiculous. In most games, if you lose connection to the server, you just lose the recording of any stats about the outcome of the game- no big deal in most circumstances.
I know it's fairly common practice to only allow a username/password to sign into a service once and kick any previous connections off. It makes sense for a lot of services, but not for a service trying to set itself up as an end-all community service / media center for your friends and family. They should be encouraging people to use their service on as many supporting devices that they can get their hands on. They're fighting a losing battle right now, and they're not going to make headway by doing anything but. I understand that Penny Arcade recently had a rant about this very same topic, and they contacted Microsoft about it (how nice to have those kind of connections!). It sounds like nothing came of it, and I'm not that surprised. Maybe their misguided masters want us to buy a Gold XBL account for everybody in the house; it's the kind of thinking that can only come from a corporation stupid enough to think they could charge money for the service on the computer in the first place.
I sincerely hope that Relic changes their mind and uses Steam for everything and not just content distribution in the near future. In the meantime, I've had to make a brand new GFWL account just so I can play with people and not get kicked off if somebody turns on the Xbox. Too bad I can't link them somehow so I can share friends.