Dawn of War III
Relic gives us an opportunity embrace heresy... or reject it
Developer Relic enteRtainment publisher Sega price $ 59.99 AvAilAble At Steam dawnofwar.com
FORDHAM: Videogames based on Warhammer 40,000 might have begun all the way back in 1992 with Space Crusade, but it took 12 years to find a truly winning formula in 2004’s Dawn of War.
Sadly, for 40K fans, that “winning formula” meant letting go of a faithful, digital reconstruction of the table-top game, and instead shoving Games Workshop’s IP into an RTS.
Full credit to Relic: the first Dawn of War still kept plenty of 40K flavour. Squads had individual upgrade options, the graphics were visually faithful, and by the time the last expansion (Soulstorm) came out in 2008, most of the core races had made an appearance, to varying degrees of authenticity.
But real fans know that 40K is about squads and gear loadouts and customising an army just-so. And unless you’re playing the Epic variant, the tabletop game has a focus that’s more intimate than the average PC RTS.
Relic seemed to know this as well, and so Dawn of War 2 changed the formula. Basebuilding and rushing were out, and keeping individual Space Marines alive for the entire singleplayer campaign was in. RTS fans bemoaned the loss of bases and upgrades and resource-points, while 40K fans - especially those whose tabletop sessions only used a few dozen miniatures - found the new scale and focus on individual units much more familiar.
Now here we are again for Dawn of War 3. The base-building and in-mission tech upgrades are back, and the whole thing immediately feels more RTS-like. Campaign missions start with an Elite-unit focused opening section, and then morph into a buildyour-economy-and-smash rush-fest.
The game leaves us with two really big questions. One: is this just the original Dawn of War all over again with fewer aliens and prettier graphics? And two: has the return to a more standard RTS structure (with considerable MOBA influence, as we shall see) actually made Dawn of War III a worse Warhammer 40,000 experience? David?
base-building and tech upgrades are back, and immediately feels more RTS-like
HOLLINGWORTH: Well, look at it this way - I played Dawn of War II to completion. I loved the more open nature of the campaign, and the time-critical nature of many of the missions. The gameplay actually felt more like the source material, both mechanically and thematically. And as you say, it was just a more intimate experience.
Dawn of War III, on the other hand, is turning out - for me at least - to feel much more like a chore to play. The way the campaign forces you to play each of the three races in turn (instead of having a campaign for each) is annoying, as basically I’m still Space Marine fanboy at heart, and really that’s my buy-in for Dawns of War. Orks aren’t for playing, dammit, they’re for shooting into tiny green pieces! And even then, the campaign is completely linear, which is a real let down from the previous title.
But what really sticks in my Emperor-loving craw is the backwards step (as they say on the Twits, don’t @ me) to classic RTS gameplay.
It’s still a good RTS - Relic remains a master of the genre - but it really doesn’t gel with the setting, in my opinion. Sure, each race retains its strengths and weaknesses, and a wellplaced Marine Tactical Squad is still one of the most effective units, but making them feel so faceless and expendable just isn’t right.
But, as you know, I am a 40k tragic. As someone less wedded to the background, how are you finding the game?
FORDHAM: Okay here’s the thing about PC. If I get up one day and decide I want to play a game like Dawn of War… I play Dawn of War. It’s right there, in my Steam list. Even if I don’t have it installed right now, it’s never more than a couple of clicks (and sure, nine hours of ADSL “speeds”) away.
Meanwhile, DOW2 is Dawn of War except more like tabletop 40K… kinda. But it’s different, is the point. So if I want to play Dawn of War except with squads and a branching campaign, then I play DOW2.
Why do I want to play Dawn of War III? Because it has better graphics than the original? Sure, except it’s still the same ART, and the only thing that’s really changed are the special effects. Apart from that… why not just play DOW?
Your point about the way the campaign makes the player switch sides constantly is really important, actually. Because RTS is all about factionalism. Choose your race and learn the meta, discover your preferred play style and perfect it. Bouncing from race to race basically ensures that I don’t care about anything that happens in the campaign’s story.
With DOW there was a joy in building a big army and unleashing WAAAGH, but now we have these Elite units. Yes, an Elite can get swarmed if it’s left without backup, but army construction now is less “hmn, he’s focusing on air so I will go anti-air but with stealth” and more “gotta capture all the Elite points so I can summon in all my Elites and then I will attack with my Elites while spamming whatever other units I can be bothered building.” Yeah okay, there’s a bit more strategy to it than that, but I’m finding the Elite way, way too dominant in each battle.
Or maybe the campaign is just a big tutorial for multiplayer. Because that’s where all the “new” stuff is, and where Relic has decided to include a bunch of MOBA-like systems for… some reason?
Overall I find the whole thing confused. DOW2, for non 40K-tragics, was interesting because it took ideas from Company of Heroes (especially cover) and integrated them into the Warhammer 40K universe in a way that made perfect sense. Hell, the Games Workshop artists are always drawing ruined cities a la the Fall of Berlin, so the way the whole system works is probably inspired, to some extent, by WWII-style combat.
But now we’re back in a traditional RTS… except the multiplayer is weird. Do you get what they’re going for with the turrets and the shield generators and what not?
HOLLINGWORTH: Well, it’s kind of circular. MOBAs sprang out of RTS games back in the day, so it’s inevitable that MOBA gameplay concepts are now finding their way back into RTS titles.
FORDHAM: Is it though? DAVID: Yes. FORDHAM: Okay fair enough.
HOLLINGWORTH: Anyway, in Dawn of War III’s multiplayer, the game focuses on the same resource-grabbing of the original - you capture these points, and then build on defences and other upgrades that increase the rate of resource acquisition. This engenders an aggressive play style, wherein you can
never afford to sit back and defend. In fact, there are very few defensive upgrades at all.
The Power-core system further pushes you onto the attack, with three phased objectives on every map - it’s not about destroying the enemy, but rather destroying these objectives. First there’s a shield generator, then the turret it’s defending, and finally the power core. And, again, this dominates the strategy you use to aim for victory. No matter what kind of army you build toward, it’s going to need to attack these certain points.
It’s straight out of MOBAs, wherein you’ll need to destroy a gate to get to a tower to get to a widget or whatever. I can see the focus that it gives to multiplayer, always ensuring that the action is funnelled to certain locations, but at the same time it seems to really take a lot of player agency out of the equation.
You know, I really wanted to like this game a lot more, but the more I play it, and write about it, the less I realise that it may in fact be my least favourite Dawn of War game - in fact, it may not even be that great to begin with.
FORDHAM: RTS is a very, very challenging genre for a developer to work in, these days. As far as I can tell, you either have to be Blizzard or you have to build some kind of ultra-epic scale Supreme Commander thing that’s half-game, half-DirectX 12 tech showcase. You know, like Ashes of the Singularity.
Teasing aside, the “ants dance” games (so-called because of the zoomable scale which sometimes reduces units to tiny clumps of pixels) are great for the strategic player because wars are not won or lost by cheesing six earlygame units or tech-racing to Carriers or whatever. They’re like real wars, where territory control matters, and the tide of war ebbs and flows.
After Dawns of War I and II, that’s the kind of thing I’d be more excited to play. The last Epic-scale 40K game was Final Liberation, which had pretty good FMV and nothing much else. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with this.
One of the core ironies of Dawn of War is that, to the uneducated, it could come across as a “rip off” of StarCraft II. That is, heavily scripted singleplayer missions relying on moving troops to different regions on a map to trigger the next script.
Starcraft spawned an industry in South Korea while Dawn of War grapples with its identity
It’s ironic of course because StarCraft has always been a shamelessly-transparent “substantial variation” on Warhammer 40K, and yet it spawned an entire TV sub-industry in South Korea, while Dawn of War continues to grapple with its own identity.
Playing DOW3 skirmishes just makes me TIRED. I’m tired of having to first spawn a squad of Assault Marines and then click on them and choose a squad-level upgrade. I’m tired of going through the same motions of building structures, then upgrading them, then getting ready to bring in some cool late-game unit, then realising I’m at my army cap so I have to send a bunch of dudes on a suicide mission to free up supply…
And I don’t think I’m holding this game to some kind of extra super-high standard, just because it has a 40K theme. Any RTS released in 2017 that plays like this deserves at least a little of the ol’ side-eye.
I’m really struggling to come up with something notable, something wholly good, about the game. David can you help me out here? Is there anything about it you actually like?
HOLLINGWORTH: I have to be honest, once I’m done with this review, I’m not going to go back to it. It looks fantastic, and I will say that the persistent carnage of dead bodies and wreckage is visually appealing, but as an RTS it’s very by the numbers, and as a Warhammer 40,000 game it seems to more or less miss that mark too.
Sure, smashing a bunch of orks into mist with a Knight is fun, but it’s almost too much fun. The epic units are almost laughably powerful, in a way that units in the actual game - which I can never get away from, I know - never really are. There may be a solid sense of traditional rock-paper-scissor with the lower end units, but the entry into a battle of, for instance, an Eldar Wraithknight completely changes the battlescape.
A lot of Warhammer 40,000 has always leaned towards the Rule of Cool, but this is too far in that direction. I just can’t get into it.
FORDHAM: There are some good concepts in here. The game is wellbalanced out of the box, and the Doctrine system - essentially tweaks for the Elites - lets you tailor each faction to your own preferred play-style.
Weirdly I’ve found the EARLY game is more varied, while the late game devolves into a slog even when your opponent has obviously lost the will to win. This is more-or-less the opposite of most games that have only a handful of possible openings, but can get pretty wild toward the end of the match. There doesn’t seem to be a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
The game is full of niggles, from weird animations to odd lore violations (Steam reviewers seem particularly hung up on the way a Librarian in Terminator armour will occasionally do actual backflips) but at the end of the day the biggest drawback of Dawn of War III is that the first two games still exist.
Sometimes, a developer will bring out a “new” game that’s almost identical to the old, but adds enough stuff that once you get over whingeing about paying for everything again, you realise you can never go back to the original.
StarCraft II is very cleverly designed to be different enough from StarCraft, so much so that I’m looking forward to the HD “remake” and will play it. In contrast, Red Alert 2 added so much to the formula (especially garrisoning buildings) that Red Alert lost all its 900-Mammoth-Tank-spam charm.
Dawn of War III isn’t a combination of all the good parts of the first two games. Yet neither is it interestingly different. It adds bases, sure, but it removes so much more.
The equation should have been simple: Base-building plus bigger armies plus persistent units and a branching campaign. And maybe cover and terrain deformation, and anal adherence to 40K law. That’s the game I wanted.
Unfortunately it’s not the game we got. Perhaps DOW3 will one day be redeemed by expansions and enhancements. But right now, it’s the third Warhammer 40K RTS in much more than name only. ANTHONY FORDHAM and DAVID HOLLINGWORTH