Quote:
Originally Posted by Raveled
Maybe look for some of the first impression videos? I know a lot of people were upset with "backflipping Terminators" in the first gameplay video.
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It's not just the absurdity of the Terminators. The game was clearly designed towards making itself a major esport without being full moba or rts. As a result, you ended up with a gestalt abomination that couldn't do either. There is no depth to the gameplay, it literally revolves around getting the biggest ball you can and attacking the enemy. Tactics and unit comp have very little to do with it now, because a mob of basic ranged infantry can overpower just about anything. If you tried that on DoW: Soulstorm (Especially with the Ultimate Apocalypse Mod), you would be cut down in second by heavy weapon teams.
As someone who greatly enjoys RTS games (C&C is amazing; shame it ended after Kane's Wrath... if only there was a game that continued what happened...), the feel you get from playing DoW is distinctly missing. I mean, it's obvious that it's RTS-lite, but it's more like
rts-
LITE. In all honesty, it just wasn't an RTS game, which is what they marketed it as. RTS is a very niche genre; you do it right, you'll always get the same customers coming back to you. You do it wrong, nobody comes back (I'm looking at you, C&C 4: Tiberium Twilight). This game seems to have tried to make it more casual and more MOBA based at the same time, and is an RTS in name only.
The Campaign, other than being laughably nonsensical in so many areas, was kinda saddening. The AI is nowhere near aggressive enough to present a challenge. Only a few missions out of the game will the AI actually attack you base, and it's announced beforehand. Since you can't build turrets, they need to give you time to move your massive ball of troops over to engage the enemy before they walk into your likely defenseless base and destroy it. Hilariously, the Marines are the weakest faction (despite costing the most resources per unit) and are easily outperformed by an Ork force or even unit to unit with Eldar.
I'm actually kinda happy that the game is dying and that it's a massive money loss for Relic. I've always loved their games, but they missed the mark so badly with DoW III that it's only fitting for them to suffer a huge financial loss. When the overwhelming consensus amongst the fans of the game is a more expansive and detailed version of Dawn of War, and you decide to make something that is barely recognizable as that, you deserve the scorn and loss of money that comes with making a horrendous mistake. They tried to make a game that they hoped would become a major esport, not realizing that the fans of that series are often rather devoted to it, and managed to anger almost every single one of them. Maybe Relic will actually learn from this. Maybe they'll keep making the same mistakes and go under. Regardless, trying to turn Dawn of War into Starcraft-Lite is not going to win you any fans.