Dawn of War III likely to get no more major updates as it hasn't sold well

Loved DOW1, not much DOW2, tried and refunded DOW3.

I too want DOW "1.5"...

I preferred the first game with the RTS aspect.

From this I learned that there's going to be an Age of Empires 4 and my heart aches because Microsoft owns it :(

Quoting: omer666So the rampant negativity won in the end. Well, whatever...

There's no rampant negativity here.
Just a game that's all-around pretty underwhelming, developed with a mystifying lack of vision or understanding of what people actually liked about the previous games and design decisions that are borderline inane (mobile-junk-like unit unlockables in my RTS game, no thanks).

Even developers themselves are aware of that.

"Professional" journos liked the game somewhat because they never really play games for long and are mostly just amazed by pretty or pretentious things.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 13 February 2018 at 9:07 am UTC

Quoting: Spud13yFrom this I learned that there's going to be an Age of Empires 4 and my heart aches because Microsoft owns it :(

Yeah, that is the worst takeaway of this whole situation.
Who knows what they're going to do to the series...

But AoE being Windows-exclusive is not really news. It has been since the inception of the series.

I paid the full price as well since the game looked awesome. I shouldn't have done this since I've known in advance there's a dead multiplayer and a average single player at best.


Why didn't they step up their game and made a nice looking and fun to play DOW III? But it's not only them, it's also Feral who didn't manage to work together with relic to get Multiplayer working. They might have this mentioned troubles because of the static game engine, but anyways, people could talk and there're possibilities like Github so they could collaborate and Feral could have sent in commits and so on.... Many possibilities, they took none and surrendered. It's a shame.

I like the game. Sad to hear it didnt sell well.

My 40k fanatic friend got bored of it within 3 hours and we both played DoW1 and 2 for hundreds of hours. It was a major disappointment for me as well, it's like every decision they made was the opposite of what I wanted from a 40k RTS:
- the art style looked nothing like the content of 40k codices, it's hard to describe, it's like they took the comical heroic proportions of objects in 40k and tried to made them more realistic while keeping the ridiculous gothic look and making everyones faces look like they're made of play dough
- the audio was ok at most, just as safe and bland as gameplay, it wasn't Jeremy Souls orchestra blasting away while the worlds best AND worst voice acting confirms my commands
- I'm not going to comment on gameplay as I played maybe through half of the campaign and a few skirmishes before giving up, what I saw was slow, safe and boring and felt like being designed so people coming in for the new experience won't get offended at being exposed to pesky RTS features. The peak of DoW for me was playing IG with a SM friend and pushing a bloody grinder forward against 4 AI Ork players teamed up against us. I got none of that in DoW2, but it was still pretty entertaining to coordinate our squad members to take down targets. In the meantime I got none of these with 3.

All of these things would have been forgiven if they finally ditched the skirmish level of gameplay. It made sense in DoW1 due to hardware limitations especially considering how pretty that game was on release, DoW2 was forgiven due to focusing on a mix of small squad gameplay with RPG elements all wrapped in a neat story. DoW3 kept the DoW2 scale with nothing that made DoW2 actually good while stripping features that made DoW1 stand out as an RTS.

What I would like to see, now that we have the hardware for it, is a DoW game that actually reflects at least some of the scale present in 40k lore with massive battles with hundreds of units, there's reasons why Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander are still considered to be some of the best RTS games despite not having much else to offer other than their grandiose (IMO). Less 5 man tactical squads, more Ultimate Apocalypse mod type gameplay. What I should note is that I have the same piece of criticism about CoH, nothing made me feel more immersed than taking Reichstag with 3 early war tanks and 20+ penal battalion troops.

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: omer666So the rampant negativity won in the end. Well, whatever...

There's no rampant negativity here.
Just a game that's all-around pretty underwhelming, developed with a mystifying lack of vision or understanding of what people actually liked about the previous games and design decisions that are borderline inane (mobile-junk-like unit unlockables in my RTS game, no thanks).

Even developers themselves are aware of that.

"Professional" journos liked the game somewhat because they never really play games for long and are mostly just amazed by pretty or pretentious things.

Yeah, good old conspiracy theories about magazines getting paid for producing free advertising. That's why in France, Le Monde disliked it so much... As I said, I don't mind people not liking it. I have the feeling that user bashing prevented the game from having a second life, because there are things done right in this game.

Also, considering I love DoW III's game mechanics and that I hate MOBAs, well I come to the conclusion that I am an E.T. Which is fine, really.

QuoteYeah, good old conspiracy theories about magazines getting paid for producing free advertising.

Bullshit.

Its not a conspiracy theory, its a fact. Many people talked about it. If journalist won't write positive review, he might no longer get the pre-release copy to review. Which means that he might not be the first or one of the first to review it (since he will have to review it after release), which means that people waiting for said game will not buy that magazine for that review.