Back in May , the original Dawn of War and its many expansions cast off the shackles of Gamespy and Games for Windows Live and replaced them with Steamworks. Dawn of War 2 and Chaos Rising, meanwhile, required additional work—work that's now been completed. A new update for both games has just been released, which gives GfWL the old heave-ho and moves achievements and leaderboards over to Relic's servers, while integrating Relic's battle servers to manage multiplayer networking in both entries.
In the process, Relic have removed a few features from the games. LAN multiplayer, Referee mode, and the option to pause during multiplayer are all gone. It's a shame, but at least the games are still playable online. Meanwhile, Games for Windows Live is still kinda, sorta trundling on, despite reports that it was heading for the guillotine—Microsoft hasn't put it out of our misery just yet.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.
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