Oh yeah, I’ve got on of those coupons too, good til the 31st. Hit me up if anyone wants it.
I was so looking forward to this game. Then I saw the gameplay videos and it went to the “$10 or less” category.
Just the fact that, it is already at 50 percent for everyone is probably rather telling. And this isn’t the first bargain either, where the game has been heavily discounted.
Its a shame, because I loved the franchise, but this game is quite unlike the rest of the series. In their quest to make the game E-sports ready, they probably ended this subset of the franchise.
This is my problem with it, and I didn’t realize it until reading this post. It’s frustrating because I really liked the first two games (the second in particular, which had taken the best of Warcraft III and Company of Heroes to make an amazing RTS, imo) but every time I watched gameplay from the third game I was… just not interested. And I think this is why, they made it more “competitive” and less fun for folks like me, I guess. :(
I thought the DoW2 campaign was really good fun and really solid. It could get a bit repetitive but with a bit more understanding of what they were doing and taking some tricks from Diablo 3’s success, I think a sequel could have been fantastic.
They didn’t do that.
For my tastes, all of the Relic franchises have taken a step back with each iteration. It’s really disappointing, because Dawn of War and Company of Heroes were two of my favorite RTS games. I didn’t care much for the DOW2 skirmish mode, but the co-op campaign was a lot of fun at least. DOW3 is just blah, and COH2 I just wondered why I wasn’t playing the original.
Even though I still play DOW today, and DOW2 fairly often, DOW3 just hasn’t worked for me and I barely progressed beyond Mission 3. I never really got over the somersaulting terminator, which was just stupid.
I remember this was $29.99 within a week or two of release and having the 50% off coupon in Steam hasn’t tempted me to buy this.
This was bad enough I think I tried it for like 10 minutes before bailing. I really really hate the UI, and the graphics are worse than DoW 2 somehow.
For me it had the makings of a good game but I think they missed an opportunity to have a points based customisation system, so you could customise your astartes chapters. Say 20 points and you can allocate them how you like.
Balanced would get you ultra marines.
Heavy librarians would be blood ravens.
Heavy melee would get you space wolves etc.
Letting people own their factions like that would have been awesome.
Also annihilation should have been in from the start. This generator thing just didn’t quite mesh for me.
Technically speaking I had your make my own save in every Misson because the game wouldn’t remember my progress. Imagine finishing a mission and if you don’t go to the next one immediately the game forgets you had done the preceding mission, so when you load the game up again it appears you’ve done no campaign.
Then how in how units seem to die so quickly…
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.