Dawn of War II not at THQ event

Having announced Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II on Thursday, THQ promptly forgot about it for most of its Gamers Day event in San Francisco, with no demonstrations, details or gameplay footage. Instead we got three screenshots.

THQ executive vp of worldwide studios Jack Sorenson told the gathered press that the game would be released in the company's fiscal fourth quarter - January through to the end of March 2009 - and that Relic had been hard at work "upgrading that engine continuously" after it was used in Company of Heroes, which he was anxious we all noted was the "highest-rated RTS game of all time".

All there was to see of the game though was a brief CG trailer in which a Space Marine commander unit (a hero type, you may remember) took out a huge Space Ork enemy with some of his trademark silver-haired melee excellence.

When asked why Dawn of War II was absent from the THQ Gamers Day, a spokesperson told us that the publisher wanted to give it a grand stage to arrive on, rather than letting us loose on a few pods in amongst the rest. Which sort of makes sense.

Expect DoW2 to build on the original's mixture of resource and strategic control point-based gameplay. For the moment all we know is that it will have Orkz and Space Marines (the original DoW, including expansions, now has nine factions), a co-operative multiplayer campaign, and support for DirectX 10 and multi-core CPUs.