Dawn of Bore

[tyggerjai]

So I posted a bitch about DoW recently, and then sly_girl reminded me of how easy it is to just offer criticism, without it being constructive. So, herewith a constructive criticism of an almost good game.



To be honest? Starcraft is better.

To be fair? It's a bees dick away from being *great*, which is all the more frustrating.

I speak here to the campaign, not the skirmishes - I haven't yet played the skirmishes.

Also, I've only played the normal difficulty level. I'm about to try again on insane, and see what happens. It's possible that I've just become better at RTSs than I thought :)

The campaign has loads of story, which is, um, all well and good. But you know, I still don't grasp the story behind starcraft - I know there is one, I suspect it's Warhammer 40K-esque without the religion. But I've been playing starcraft for more years than I care to remember now, and I don't care about the story. I don't have to. With DoW, it seems to be the focus of the game, rather than supporting the game. Which is reasonable, for a licensed game with such an established canon, but it feels like the actual game play is an afterthought.

My main gripe is that missions soon become routine, and nothing ever breaks the routine. Create a squad of marines. Move them forward to take and hold a resource point. Move a servitor forward. Buff up the resource point with cannon. Rinse, lather, repeat. Once you have two resource points, you sit back and hold them, buff everything up, build a machine cult, and wipe the map with 3 Landraiders. End of mission.

That's my first complaint - the missions almost *all* follow that pattern (replace Landraiders with "shitloads of units" in the first few missions, but eh). There are a couple of attempts early in the game to introduce variety, but the things that spring to mind are:

"Get scouts to point A, build a base, build a squad of marines, see above" , and ... actually, that's about it. The only variant is *why* you need to control the map ... and as I write that sentence it occurs to me that "controlling the map" is a (the?) classic victory condition for the tabletop game. But if I wanted the tabletop game, I know where to find it.

Halfway through the campaign, there's an instance of my pet hate in RTSs (and Command and Conquer : Generals, which I've also played to death recently, suffers even worse from this), which is the "Oh look. Halfway through the mission we're going to do something that you couldn't have predicted, and that you almost certainly can't defend aginst! We inaccurately call this a "challenge!" Bah. Hint to game designers: don't. There are missions in the campaign where I should have listened harder to the blurb about the objectives, and I have no complaint about having to do those twice. But making it effectively impossible to win the mission unless you *know* what's coming, when you can't know what's coming? Poor form.

Even more frustrating, at least in C&C generally there's some trick to overcoming the level. In DoW, it just reminds you to really, really solidify your base defenses. Now, that would be interesting if securing your base was challenging, but it ain't. In those first 5 minutes, while you only have to hold one base and maybe one resource point? You only need 2 squads of marines. So build servitors, up the unit cap early, and fill the map with bolter cannon and minefields. Minefields! At least with the cannon there's a limit to where you can build. Aiieee. Now, this would be a problem if resources were scarce - if holding a resource point was *hard*, or if they ran out. But I've not yet hit an upper practical limit. I've heard "Relic has completely decayed", a few times, and no doubt it causes Relic level designers to giggle, but it doesn't *seem* to affect my resource count. And by the time I've climbed the tech tree to terminators and landraiders, I've never been too poor to afford them. The only limit I hit is thhe unit cap.

Speaking of the unit cap - it's ridiculously low, which is about the best thing about the game. You have some interesting choices, almost. Except that after the first three minutes, you do't need scouts, and you only need one or two servitors. And if you max out the unit cap for both marines and vehicles, you have an unstoppable force. So it needs to be even lower. Or, alternatively, the enemy needs to be tougher. In Starcraft (oh starcraft, you are still the finest RTS known to man!), not only is a maxed-out unit count harder to get to, but you *still* can't guarantee wiping the enemy out when you get there. That's called "balance." I found myself, when I had climbed the tree to Terminators, sending squads of marines into enemy territory to clear my unit count ... and swearing when they survived! Eh.

So. I think what's missing is the trditional starcraft zergling rush. There is, as someone (paracelsus? delve?) recently pointed out, there's a whole generation of RTS gamers out there who grok "zergling rush" without ever having played starcraft. And if I really had to sweat the first five minutes of a DoW mission, it would be a thousand times more playable. If, occasionally, I lost a resource point. If I had enemy in my base. If I had to choose between another bunker, an SCV or a squad of marines, and have it *mean* something. Then I'd feel good about it. Of course, if you hunkered down too hard for the first five minutes in starcraft, you'd have an amazingly well defended base, and the enemy would have three amazingly well defended bases. And you'd be fucked.

So. There are those balance issues. Nothig that nerfing the marines or buffing the orkz/eldar couldn't fix. And if the skirmishes fix that, or if Relic patch it, then the game will be much more playable. But what that won't fix is the boring sameness of the campaign missions. Story can't cover that. Patches can't cover that. Nothing can cover that.

Anyway. Having said all that, I lost 24 lapsed hours, almost, tofinishing the campaign, even if the last 10 hours were a slog. And that included an allnighter. So I didn't hate it, nor was it entirely unplayable. The squad based upgrade stuff is very cute, but ultimately irrelevant. A buff terminator squad is a buff terminator squad - they don't get sergeants, and it doesn't matter, really, if they're carrying flamers or heavy bolt rifles - they'll still chew the enemy to pieces, and anything they can't handle, the Dreadnaughts will crucify. But it's not entirely unplayable.


I'm off now to try the skirmish mode, and one or two missions at insanely-hard. I'll let you know how it goes. But I ain't holding my breath.

sol.
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Comments

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Halfway through the mission we're going to do something that you couldn't have predicted, and that you almost certainly can't defend aginst!

I *detest* that particular device in games. It doesn't actually make things more challenging, because once you know what to expect you can restart and plan accordingly. All it achieves is to make you lose a half-completed game through no fault of your own. Sort of like a pre-scripted system crash.

At least when Starcraft's missions had surprises, they were usually of the "but if you've been playing well, you should have enough troops to cope with this" variety.

[drwally.livejournal.com]

Let me know how you go online against real people... I find it's always easy to predict the comp player.

[thorfinn]

Yeah, the AI is just moronic. The "difficulty" setting, AFAICT, just changes how many units it collects together before it sends a wave to attack you... and I think it tops out at somewhere near 1/3rd of the total possible unit cap for a wave. That's just nuts... Humans play all the way up to 100% of the unit cap on offensive if they think they can get away with it. It also doesn't really roll out and collect RPs anywhere near as fast as it should or could.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Especially because you don't need units to defend your base, because you fill it with bolter towers, becaus there's no resource cap, because the aI doesn't expand fast enough ....

Now there's all the excuse in the world for that problem in Skirmish mode. But in scripted, supposedly balanced Campaign missions? Bollocks to that.

sol.
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[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

I suspect that'll make all the difference, yes. But even so, it's just occured to me that there's nowehere near the same difference between units that there was in Starcraft. At least, for the humans. Your troops are all the same - Terminators are just buffer marines. There's no ghosts, no flamebats. Now, they make up for that a little with the squad customisation, but they're all still marines.

Ditto with the vehicles. Tank, or walker. Starcraft had valkyrie to vultures to battle cruisers to tanks.

Eh.

But yeah, I'll give it a shot.

sol.
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Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[drwally.livejournal.com]

Take a look at the Space Marine Codex for the 40K tabletop and you will realise that it is very true to its title; you can get Space Marines. You can get young Space Marines (scouts) and older Space Marines (Termies).

They have a wider range of tanks available, some LR variants and bikes; which didn't make it to the game. So in keeping with the 'vision' proscribed by GW, this is why your unit choices seem so slim. Space marines are space marines, and differ only by the squad choice: Tactical, Assault and Devastator. The latter is distinguished from Tactical by allowing up to 4 Hvy wpns in the squad. Assault marines always have jump packs and instead of bolter, boltgun/CC wpn. What the game has done is roll Tac and Dev into one with your unit upgrades.

Again you see a lack of air support simply because of the transition from tabletop to RTS. Inviolable flyers screaming across the board makes for a less interesting game. The Thunderhawk you see dropping vehicles and stuff in DoW can be bought as a 300 pound (sterling not weight) resin model that can strafe and drop marine units like coconuts from a ripe palm, but you risk all your friends leaving you and playing with more reasonable weirdos.

Try playing the other races. They are much more varied in their troop selection. In fact there's a lot missing from the Eldar force; only 2-3 of the 7 Aspect warrior types are represented.

unfortunately marines are the everyman. They make up more than 50% of armies brought to Tournaments; they are GW's big seller, and all the 13-yr-old kids fuckin love them, because they're big men in power armour. It follows then that they would be the faves in DoW and also turn out to be the most boring army.

They redeem themselves in the tabletop because of customization; choosing chapter colors and style, adding individuality and selecting special advantages/disadvantages to change their play style is okay, but you lose out in the game. Why?

I think 4 races that are quite different is a nice start; even though Chaos is rather similar. That's not a cop-out though, that harks right back to the story that is pretty strong in 40K. It could seem that way to players of DoW. 'Oh these guys are marines but with Chaos and daemons'.

And interesting point you inadvertantly make is that you don't seem to give two shits about the engine; Starcraft had a wealth of unit types and so on because it was a 2D engine; less work had to go into sprites/animations, etc. Not to say it didn't do what it was supposed to do; model and represent units fighting on a battlefield.

However DoW; you can get down on the street amidst your marine squad and watch them plant their feet and start hammering at incoming Orks, swirl around the battlefield, zoom out, crash in, freeze and find the marine going in with his combat knife on a greenskin, endless detail.

For a 40K player who has always had to imagine what the hell is going on, painting a picture from the board and the dice results, this is the greatest thing for me. All the minis I've had for ten years are 'alive' and running across the board, and now I know what all the muzzle flashes look like.

So it is rather interesting to hear thoughts from a 'newb' who is evaluating the game simply as an RTS and not a 'faithful as possible' adaptation of a classic tabletop.

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

I've never played the tabletop, but I'm vaguely familiar with the mythos (mostly via WHFRP, rather than WH40k itself, plus randomly listening to people like you talk a lot)... I'm a huge RTS fan, so I'm also evaluating it from that perspective. I haven't played DoW vs humans yet, but I get the distinct impression that I'll find it a huge lot of fun once I do. I was very disappointed in the campaign itself, for basically all the same reasons that tyggerjai is, though. I also love the animation detail, but I love it in the same way that I love the animation detail in Homeworld 2... Great to look at, but geez, who has the time to zoom in, unless you're just about to win? I do like knowing that it's there to be looked at, though...

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Ah, the engine. The engine, basically, made me wonder if Blizzard were about to sue, or if they had in fact legitimately licensed the warcraft engine. So yeah, I'm really not much concerned by engine over gameplay.

I do say elsewhere that I appreciate the limits imposed by a licensed game with such an established canon, but .... If the canon means you can't make a good computer game, either step outside canon, or don't make the damn game, to my mind. Now ok, evidently the target market is sad tabletop gamers like you, so fair enough. But that means that yeah, I'm going to assess it as an RTS, not as an addition to the WarHammer 40K canon.

And again, my real complaint is lack of versatility in the campaign. There was one mission where I needed to use the jump packs, and I only needed to use them once. So apart from that one mission, the difference between Assault Marines and standard marines is meaningless. Now ok, maybe other missions might have been easier if I'd used Assault, but ... eh. I could just roll landraiders over the map, so what's the point?

Whereas in a good terran vs protoss map, I *need* my firebats.

sol.
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[thorfinn]

I do like tossing apothecarys in with the Terminators. Sure, they die sometimes, but until they do, those Terminators just live forever.

[thorfinn]

I haven't played skirmish mode against humans yet... but my strong suspicion is that the AI is just shit at the game. It seems to me that skirmish mode is likely to be a lot more interesting against humans, because you do have to sweat it about the early tech tree. Humans can just fling units all over the map capturing shitloads of points and still zergling rush you at the same time. Especially if they're playing Orks. Hell, it's what I did to the AI all the time during the campaign, and that was with the Marines. Spread out as fast as possible, nail down the choke points (if any), pause to hold off the magic free troops that appear on the enemy side for that mission, then start rolling slowly outwards whilst working up the tech tree.

Once you've hit the top of the tech tree, base defenses just don't stand up to even a half-load of whatever vehicles are at the top of the tree, no matter how many you put down. Which leads me to suspect that actually building a whole string of duplicate bases, if you can capture the space to put them down, is likely to be the way to go, particularly since most races have some sort of unit which can get anywhere...

I do agree with all your comments about the campaign, though. The campaign was just a bit crap.

[thorfinn]

Oh, and I forgot to mention... the delete key (scuttle) is your friend.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Yeah, used that a couple of times, but it's the old starcraft habit - given the choice between just killing a unit, and having them take down enemies on the way, go for taking something down.

It's just that in starcraft, that consisted of walking half a dozen marines up to a base and watching the blood fly.

sol.
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[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I had a solid minefield, half a dozen bolter towers, half of which were upgraded, and a single landraider defending my main base in the last campaign mission, and it was holding against 4 of those big nasty things, and waves of infantry. Only just, though, I'll grant you. Oh, and there may have been a squad of marines, too. But at the same time, my main force was decimating all.

So yeah. It's partly the balance, but mainly that the missions played like skirmish against stupid AI. No sense of campaign at all.

And again, to be fair, that's somewhat implicit in the WarHammer style. But still.

sol.
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[thorfinn]

vs the AI, base defenses are good enough, but that's because of the aforementioned "hardest difficulty == waves of about 1/3rd of unit cap" issue. 1/3rd of the unit cap at the top of the tech tree won't wipe out base defenses. Damage 'em so they'll want repairing, yes, but wipe, no. 1/2 will, particularly if you do the logical thing and walk in with a lot of lascannons on those vehicles, and using a higher proportion of your units makes it happen faster.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Oh, and also? The tech tree isn't. You can't build the machine cult until you've got the monastery. Once you have the monastery, you have unit upgrades. Take the unit upgrades, and build the machine cult. Duh. So it's not a tree so much as a shrub - small number of dense branches all growing together. It doesn't feel as varied as the tree in Starcraft, because in starcraft you had to *think*. In DoW, I just click the monastery/fortress, click the highlighted upgrades, and get back to the game.

And that, it occurs to me, is because they haven't split upgrades between buildings. Hit the chapel once to get frag grenades, the monastery constantly, and the machine cult .. never. Smoke? Meh.

So again, you don't have "upgrade" buildings vs "unit" buildings, whcih you do in starcraft and warcraft. C&C combines the unit building and upgrading, but again, there's a lot more tree to climb.


And yes, because there's a small number of buildings and unlimited resource cap, you can turn every resource point into a full base, and sacrifice the main one.

Oh well. I dunno. It's pretty, and playable, it just eeds tweaking. But then these days, games like this do seem designed to go straight to the online vs human market. I just thinkn that's a shame.

sol.
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[thorfinn]

*nodnod* I think that's the point of DoW, though. WH40k is a skirmish tabletop wargame... and this is an RTS which does a good job of feeling like a fast paced realtime version of that. Yes, the tech tree is fairly short... I've never really viewed that as a problem... In C&C, ferex, multiplayer is a lot more fun when you cap the tech tree at about 2 or 3 (whatever just barely gets you the second sized tank)... A lot more free-flowing, and a lot less about building the undefeatable base...

So yes, the campaign sucks, because the game is designed to be a multiplayer human vs human thang. I think they would've been better served to do about 3 missions with each race as the campaign, and beefed up the computer AI a bit.

[nigelw.livejournal.com]

If you want to play vs. a human, give me (and Neef and Renee) a hoi.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Sounds like LAN party time.

I'll give skirmish mode a good run this weekend, and see how I do.

sol.
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[sly-girl.livejournal.com]

... and your place would be the perfect venue! Not ours. Our place is smelly.

[sly-girl.livejournal.com]

Actually, constructive criticism aside, Dawn of War bored me silly within about 5 minutes.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

It took 12 hours for me, but yeah.
Are you a huge RTS fan?

sol.
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[sly-girl.livejournal.com]

I've only played a few, starting with Dune 2 (or whatever it was) on the Sega (hehehe) and then Warcraft II which I loved the shit out of it and am currently replaying. I tried Command and Conquer and that was OK, although I don't think I ever finished it. After that, I don't know, something about the games changed and I stopped liking them.

Partly, it was the style. DoW is a good example of everything I don't like in a computer game. I don't like the graphics, the voices, the seriousness of it all. I like my games to be a bit cartoony, which is something Warcraft II had in spades. I also have trouble understanding graphics, sometimes. Show me a computer image of a corridor (or something) and I'll have trouble telling where the wall ends and the floor begins. With simple, topdown graphics there's no problems but DoW has this zoom all around stuff and it's all very dark and I just actually can't quite make sense of what is on the screen. I find it confusing. I had the same problem with Doom and all that lot, so I totally gave up on first-person shooters - except Duke Nukem which was cartoony enough to keep my interest for a bit longer, even if I was utterly crap at it. I'm also not a big fan of sci-fi games and would much prefer a fantasy game.

So why the hell do I like 40K, should be the big question. Well, I play orkz and Da Grrlz really are very cartoony. I think I'd get extremely bored playing anything else. Plus, I don't have graphics problems with actual miniatures :) I also only find battles with orkz in them interesting 'coz it maintains that fantasy element.

... hmmm ... appear to have got off the topic here, a little. But yeh, I think I've covered the basic points :)

[kitling.livejournal.com]

Having got bored of the Campaign after the first mission - but then maybe if I could play something other than space marines in the campaign I would have lasted longer.

The skirmishs are fun, especially against real people - *waves at nigelw and neef* want an invite to a skirmish?

As a tabletop gamer - i hate marines armour save

[morganjaffit.livejournal.com]

Everyone hates the marine armour save. It sucks balls.

The only real trick is massed firepower - marines pay through the nose for their armour save, so make sure you're fielding units of 20 or so, versus their 5 man squads.

Take them out wholesale

[drwally.livejournal.com]

Al mentioned his Chaos Marine army got absolutely bent over and driven home by Mike T's Dark Eldar army last weekend.

How did he do this? By concentrating fire on one squad at a time. It worked, too.

He also mentioned he got his terminator squad shredded by a pack of scourges with 5 (I think) splinter cannons. Ha!