Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising
Template:Infobox Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (series)
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising is a standalone expansion that adds another campaign continuing off the ending of Dawn of War II and adds another playable race for use in multiplayer.
Availability
Version Differences
All copies of regular Dawn of War II and the expansion, Chaos Rising, use Microsoft's "Games for Windows Live" as it's form of DRM and online play. Dawn of War II: Retribution uses Steamworks for DRM and online play. Retail copies of Dawn of War II and the expansion, Chaos Rising, must be registered to your Steam account (as they use Steamworks).
Both expansions to Dawn of War II are stand alone titles and as such do not require you own the original Dawn of War II to play. Unlike the previous Dawn of War game and its expansions Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, you are not penalized for not owning the previous expansions with restriction to what races to play; as such you can simply purchase Retribution and gain the Retribution campaign and all 6 races available for play in multiplayer.
Which version you go for depends on what you want from the game. If you want the multiplayer aspect of Dawn of War II, buy Retribution as it is the only one of the three which has a multiplayer community (the past expansions have been abandoned in favour of Retribution). However you will miss out on arguably the two better single player campaigns; those of the base game and Chaos Rising, so if you want to play the game solely for the single player and/or offline play, buy the Gold Edition which contains the base game and Chaos Rising. If you want both the multiplayer and the single player, buy the Dawn of War II Complete Edition which includes the base game, Chaos Rising and Retribution.
Steam
Game is purchased and downloaded through Steam's client and is registered under your Steam account.
Retail
You must use the CD key to register the game under your Steam account for Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising. Retribution will require you to register the game under your Steam account when installing.
Improvements
Skip Intro Videos
Company logo videos or the game's intro can be skipped used a launch command in the game's shortcut or through Steam's "Launch Options".
Steam
- Right-click on "Dawn of War II" in the Steam Library.
- Select "Properties".
- Click on the "General" tab if needed.
- Click on "Set Launch Options".
- Add "-nomovies" to the command line.
- Click "OK" and then "Close".
Issues
Pagefile
Dawn of War II will not run unless you have a pagefile of at least 1.5GB in size.