A new direction for Dawn of War 3

They had two good directions they could have went in the previous games. Instead they chose to make a mediocre, generic rts that was almost completely unrelated.

Most disappointing game of the year. Bioware and hello games were saved by this mess.

Today’s patch will open up the strategic depth of Dawn of War III to ALL players. After listening to how fans felt about the Skull system, and watching how players interacted with it in-game, we’ve decided to unlock all Elites and doctrines for everyone.

We had intended for the Skull system to introduce pacing to the multiplayer experience, but we didn’t want this to come at the cost of barring advanced play styles to those ready to tackle them. You’ll still need to unlock Elite level rewards as well as those gained from campaign progress, but this will be a lot easier with an expanded arsenal of Elites at your command!

Well thats a really nice change. I have to go back and give it a go , I did like 2 campaign missions and a handful of skirmishes and then shelved it at release.

I played a bit more of the game with the free weekend they have right now. After playing four missions, I reached a conclusion:

-The single feature that affects more the game in both gameplay, controls, UI, how good you are, etc, and in the end is in detriment to the game, is the fact that almost every unit has an rechargeable active ability you can use.

You can use them, and you must use them, if you want to be play well, as there is a big difference between playing only using the abilities of a pair of heroes, and activating all the abilities of all your army (grenades, flamethrowers, assault jumps, knockdowns abilities, slow down/immobilize enemy, etc), and the timer means that you surely can use them again for the next firefight.
The problem is, I find it so much a bother. It’s micro for micro’s sake. It’s a pain in the ass going through all units quickly and clicking fast in the enemies. I find it uninteresting as a system to try my reflexes on, I much prefer action games for that, and it’s barely strategic nor indicates any great tactical move from my part, usually it’s more important try to use 6 abilities in obvious targets, than being slower and only using 3 abilities in well chosen targets, quantity matters.
If at least the developers would admit it’s an issue so they would readapt the UI/controls to fix it, maybe for example showing all the abilities icons on screen of all units you have selected in a moment, that way you wouldn’t have to go through every unit. But no.

There was a time where the RTS genre was popular and the main examples were Command & Conquer 1/Red Alert 1, Starcraft 1, Age of Empires 1/2… which had much less micro. I don’t think it’s coincidence the actual downfall of the genre.

StarCraft didn’t have millions of abilities to click but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the game that brought us the term APM didn’t require a ridiculous amount of micro to be good.

I’m with your general point, though. I think the esport and hyper competitive crowd loves the micro, but I hate it. It feels like babysitting to me. I’m much more interested in the tactics or strategy than I am having to instruct every Private when they should use a grenade or switch to automatic fire. It’s just not interesting to me in the least, but it’s required to play many of these games well.

Funny, this is why CoH was so good. Some units had abilities, but needed to be used sparingly as they burned up precious resources like munitions. Judiciously using those abilities (like grenades) at the right time was a core part of the game, and was not at all “spammy”.

Starcraft required high APM in part because you could only select a limited number of units to move at one time. I’ve always felt like that was crappy design / UI limitations on the game, as opposed to some great gameplay mechanic that ought to be replicated.

Eugen’s RTSs have some game design issues, but the way they let you zoom out and they’ve very deliberately not chosen to have special abilities to worry about for units is a godsend compared to Relic’s offerings.

Grey Goo also avoided special abilities and had a few other quality of life features that everyone since has been content to ignore. :-/

That’s all folks!

While Dawn of War 3 has a dedicated player base, it didn’t hit the targets we were expecting at launch, and it hasn’t performed the way we had hoped since. It’s been tough for us as professionals who want to make great games for our players, and for us as people who care a lot about what we do.

When a game underperforms, plans need to change. With Dawn of War 3, we simply don’t have the foundation we need to produce major content. We’re working in close partnership with Sega and Games Workshop to determine the best course of action, while shifting focus to other projects within our portfolio.

Again I’m left wondering what wacky targets they had set. I’m sure most of us would’ve predicted failure.

More and more I am convinced that unless you are Blizzard, you need to be building games for single-player. Dawn of War 3 had nothing I could see for single-player.

I hear what you are saying. That being said, Multiplayer comp stomping is super fun! Join us!

Yes it is! Personally, I have no interest in SP RTS. I also don’t have any interest in competitive PVP matches, though. :) More interesting vs AI options in these games would be welcome and would get around the issue of lack of players.

To me, the main issue with Dawn of War 3 was that it just wasn’t a very good or interesting game. It even somehow managed to look worse than I remember DoW2 looking years ago, but maybe that was my imagination.

Anyway, I played it for a little bit but thought it was pretty meh. It felt like a rip-off at $60.

There doesn’t really seem to be a multiplayer RTS market at all. Even Blizzard has kind of surrendered Starcraft II at this point.

MOBAs at the multiplayer RTS market. Now you have a frame-perfect fighting game that’s also kinda an RTS in the same package.

My favorite single player RTS was DOW1 with the community AI mods. The game was actually challenging as all hell as the AI was great at using certain mechanics incredibly well - those dancing space elves (toggle ability to move faster but do less damage) drove me mad.

Please don’t screw of AoE4, please don’t screw up AoE4, …

AoE2 still finds itself in the top 50 games played every day on Steam with around 10k players, which isn’t bad for a game made almost 20 years ago.

OMG. I was just looking at this and I bought it in Dec of last year and never even installed it!? I guess I should at least give it a try, right?

You done good.

How much do you value your time?

LOL interesting. Highly!

I see it has Mixed reviews on Steam, so I assume the reasons I never got it at launch despite loving DoW2 for years and years still hold up (whatever they may be - I know I had my reasons but I can’t remember them now)? I mean, the screenshots at least look pretty, surely it’s worth a skirmish or two vs. the AI?

As far as I can tell, and this is my professional game critic opinion, that they roundly lost what made DoW2 any good. They added fiddly crap to a game full of fiddly crap. They lack the high quality coop campaign that DoW2 had as well. It’s just… not a good game.