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[Bauglir]

The existing thread seems to be about the tabletop games. No, I've never played any of them, but I want the spam to die.

[nenjin]

Pretty sure that thread is intended for 40k table top.

How shall we start? DoW was almost the best representation of 40k in an RTS ever, the only thing that kept it from being better was that it didn't take full advantage of the engine it was using (Company of Heroes is on the same engine and is far more detailed.)

I had high hopes for DoW 2. But the series has continually moved farther away from large-scale RTS gaming to squad focused tactical simulation. And it's the worse for it. I still cannot play the game without comparing it to its predecessors and feeling underwhelmed. The terrain took a step backwards. The scale took two steps backward. The environmental damage took a step backward. While we got all these nice RPG-esqe things going on like gear and equipment, the series lost its visceral appeal to me. Compared to the hundreds of hours we put into DoW, I couldn't convince any of my friends to buy DoW 2 after they watched me play it. Even co-op wasn't enough to compensate for how limited and repetitive the game felt.

I just recently bought Chaos Rising and while it's better, it's still not great. At the very least I'm not playing the first 10 missions on the same 3 maps, that's a bonus.

So anyways I keep hoping for Dawn of War 3 and they decide that, yes, huge scale battles really are more interesting and charging around as a single group of Space Marines is vastly overrated. In 2011 Relic has the ability to take the 40k franchise to the next level, but to me they're bogged down by a lot of ho-hum 40k titles that are enough to pay the bills but not make waves. 40k: Space Marine, the 40k MMO that is still in development and will probably be a day late and a dollar short, and the Dawn of War series which they so far still aren't done with.

[Dsarker]

What do you mean, the environmental damage took a step backwards? DoW 1 didn't let you do damage to the environment.

They're trying to be more true to the 40k lore. DoW1 had the Imperial Guard have the SAME NUMBERS as the Space Marines. Orks? SAME NUMBER AS SPACE MARINES. Necrons? SAME NUMBER AS SPACE MARINES.

[nenjin]

DoW 1 didn't let you do damage to the environment.

There was a lot of terrain deformation, and like I said, CoH, which uses the exact same engine and is just a re-worked version of DoW for WW2.....is the king of environmental damage and interaction.

And then Relic went and made the Essence Engine 2.0, which stripped out much of the genius of the engine in favor of shinier graphics. The fact the developer of Company of Heroes died in an accident probably didn't help.

Compared to the previous engine and both games, DoW 2 is a total step backward in that department. CoH? You could blast individual holes in buildings and see the little guys poke their heads out to shoot at you. DoW 2? Pre-determined sections of buildings, between 1 to 3, disappear. Sections of walls don't break by which part of the mesh you drive through with a tank, a whole section of it just goes "poof." It took them almost 2 years, and expansions, to add tank wreckage as cover. That was a standard feature of CoH and IIRC, Dawn of War.

Yeah, I get the whole realism argument, I was there in the DoW 2 beta and debated it to death. In practice? 12 Space Marines playing a level for 45 minutes and having nukes dropped on them, and surviving, is just as ridiculous. They took the reasoning that Space Marines are super human and used it to justify a really bland and repetitive style of gameplay. It works better in MP than it does in SP, but at the end of a game when you find you're working with all of _7_ units, it doesn't feel epic. Company of Heroes uses the exact same philosophy: less is more. For WW2, it works. For 40k, it didn't, for me.

[Dsarker]

DoW1 had completely predetermined cover.

And there were no buildings to take cover in. Only imperial guard could do that, and only after building the building themself.

[Vault]

I'll be copy pasta'ing a quote from a certain hijacked thread.

I believe DoW2 goes the same route as DoW1 on expansion, but the campaigns are more than enough reason to get the first two anyway. I spent about 70 hours on each, and if it hadn't been the whole winter thing on the second, i'd have done more (for some reason, winter effects hate rendering on my computer).

But you'll want all three. Campaigns for the first two, actual gameplay for the third (they finally get rid of games for windows live in the third).

I doubt I'd have too much fun even with the campaign mode without my beloved space communists. The only real draw Campaign Mode has had for me previously (DC/SS) has been the fun that is picking pieces of War Gear. The story aspect of the campaigns was far too minimal, and far too static to stay interesting on multiple plays. >.> IMHO anyway.

[Dsarker]

Okay. In all three games, you get wargear, and lots of it. In the second, you can lose a squad member as well as deciding your final boss, and both of them allow you to choose which missions to do. You also get to level up your group differently. First one has enough story that you can tell the main baddy by a few missions in.

[nenjin]

Dow 2 had a campaign that was interesting, compared to DoW 1. All the brain power that went into thinking up war gear and stats and an RPG system wasn't spent on levels.

I think it was a lesser game in terms of technical things though. All the things DoW 1 didn't do, CoH did, and many of the things CoH did, DoW 2 didn't do as well or at all. The gap between the two engines just gets me every time, probably because I've put 150+ hours into the CoH map editor and I see how things are being done differently. I constantly come back to the question of "why didn't all that awesome carry over into DoW 2?"

On DoW 2, there is less repetition as you get into the 2nd and 3rd games, FWIW.

[Vault]

Well it does sound like the campaign version got a good overhaul. The story in DC and SS was okay, it was just too little spread out over far too much random feeling stuff. I realize yes that conquering areas isn't really random... but the story hinged on maybe half a dozen areas.

The new campaign does sound interesting though. If it tells enough story I might be able to get into it.

[NewsMuffin]

I have every game and expansion in the series, and I have to say, I like the original and its expansions better than the other two. I hope DoW 3 has around the same graphics as DoW 2 (My computer can't run much higher), but with DoW 1 gameplay.

I'm pretty sure that one of the developers said that DoW 1 felt like 40k, but it didn't play like the tabletop, while DoW 2 didn't exactly have the same feeling, it played like the tabletop a whole lot more.

I have to disagree with this, and here is why:
In DoW 1, Space Marines start as squads of 6, (which is 2 more than the minimum on tabletop) but can upgrade to 10 or 11, if you give them the FC, similar to how it is on tabletop.
In DoW 2, Space Marines come in squads of 3 (and can upgrade to 4, which is the minimum on tabletop), which is not how it is in tabletop.

They're trying to be more true to the 40k lore. DoW1 had the Imperial Guard have the SAME NUMBERS as the Space Marines. Orks? SAME NUMBER AS SPACE MARINES. Necrons? SAME NUMBER AS SPACE MARINES.

Any lore that I've read pretty much said the same thing. Only there are more Orks.
Also, that's pretty much how tabletop is, only there are more Orks. Seriously, you can have 31 orks in a mob, including the WarBoss, and the Nob.

[Stworca]

DC was amazing (too short though), but SS.. i never liked this part of WH40k. The entire sisters idea.. No.

[Dsarker]

Yes. But a space marine player can have a maximum of about 100 space marines, or a company. An ork player can have, at most, just one hundred orks. No nobs, just normal sluggas.

[nenjin]

The new campaign does sound interesting though. If it tells enough story I might be able to get into it.

It tells one passably well. There's a strategic element in that zones you've fought in get threatened and you have to either take the mission or sacrifice the location to (the swarm, eldar, chaos, whatever). There's usually more challenges that you have time to address so you have to make a few choices about what you're going to fight for and what you're going to let go.

There's some story elements revolving around your squad members, and Chaos Rising takes that up a notch by you getting to decide whether they're pure or corrupted marines.

In DoW 2 vanilla, the missions are pretty blech. You constantly have to defend areas and their strategic points against random challenges which give you yet more gear as a reward. You don't get the sense you're actually fulfilling some tactical goal as you are responding to spam to fill in the gaps between story missions. By your 10th "Defend the Array" mission you're thoroughly sick of them. This gets dialed back in Chaos Rising, with fewer random attacks and more stories. But they're still there. Many missions are essentially mini-bosses, which in DoW 2 vanilla you'll fight 10 or 20 of these things.

Repetition, repetition repetition is the name of the game though and whether the RPG stuff is enough to make doing the same thing over and over again worth it. There are essentially two paths every space marine character and their squad can take, melee or ranged, so in the end it felt fairly limited to me, even if it was fun to see them get more powerful.

[rangarkash]

Pretty sure that thread is intended for 40k table top.

How shall we start? DoW was almost the best representation of 40k in an RTS ever, the only thing that kept it from being better was that it didn't take full advantage of the engine it was using (Company of Heroes is on the same engine and is far more detailed.)

I had high hopes for DoW 2. But the series has continually moved farther away from large-scale RTS gaming to squad focused tactical simulation. And it's the worse for it. I still cannot play the game without comparing it to its predecessors and feeling underwhelmed. The terrain took a step backwards. The scale took two steps backward. The environmental damage took a step backward. While we got all these nice RPG-esqe things going on like gear and equipment, the series lost its visceral appeal to me. Compared to the hundreds of hours we put into DoW, I couldn't convince any of my friends to buy DoW 2 after they watched me play it. Even co-op wasn't enough to compensate for how limited and repetitive the game felt.

I just recently bought Chaos Rising and while it's better, it's still not great. At the very least I'm not playing the first 10 missions on the same 3 maps, that's a bonus.

So anyways I keep hoping for Dawn of War 3 and they decide that, yes, huge scale battles really are more interesting and charging around as a single group of Space Marines is vastly overrated. In 2011 Relic has the ability to take the 40k franchise to the next level, but to me they're bogged down by a lot of ho-hum 40k titles that are enough to pay the bills but not make waves. 40k: Space Marine, the 40k MMO that is still in development and will probably be a day late and a dollar short, and the Dawn of War series which they so far still aren't done with.

I'm sure Steam would be willing to make an exception for you, since you obviously think you deserve a refund..

[nenjin]

Nah. I went in knowing what I was buying. It just didn't do it for me like DoW 1 did. Having been so closely involved with DoW since the first one (beta'd that too), having put close to 1,000 hours into the DoW 1 map editor and the CoH map editor.....I saw a lot of things that fell short of my expectations, both as a fan of Relic games and as a fan of 40k. But I still made the choice to purchase after beta, to support Relic.

It definitely cooled my jets for further Relic 40k purchases though. I only got Chaos Rising out of mild curiosity when it was one sale for like $15. I got the Space Hulk levels before I pretty much tapped my interest in it. The only reason I'd get Retribution would be to play as the Guard.