Taking place years after the events in Dawn of War II: Chaos RisingTM, this title allows players to choose their perspective with the first multiple-race single player campaign in the Dawn of War II series. The first race to be revealed is the savage Orks, but no matter which race is chosen players will be taken on an epic journey through each story arc, revealing the answers to many questions left open in previous Dawn of War titles.

As well as the single player campaign, Retribution will feature new multiplayer units, maps and an entire new playable faction when it ships.

THQ announced that Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Retribution will use Valve’s Steamworks networking and matchmaking to provide co-operative and competitive online play. This new back end will allow players to invite friends into matches from their Steam friends lists, and take advantage of the full set of Steam community features including groups, achievements, and Steam overlay chat channels. We are also going to include an all new matchmaking and ranking set up, built specifically for Dawn of War II – Retribution.

The move to Steamworks will also allow us to provide features like guest passes, free multiplayer weekends, pre-loading and the ability to provide fast turn-around on future patches and updates.

To accomplish this transition, Dawn of War II - Retribution will be a completely stand alone title in the series and will provide multiple campaigns to play, as well as all six multiplayer races, with new units for each of the existing five races and one new unannounced one. In a change from our previous strategies with expansion packs, we will not be patching this content back into Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising.

Owners of Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising will get the chance to try out the full set of Retribution’s Steam features in a multiplayer beta that will take place in the new year. More details on the beta will be announced at a later date.

Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising will continue to operate on Games for Windows LIVE, in order to preserve the owners of those titles ability to earn LIVE achievements as well as their established friends lists.