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

[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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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

Relic used the Impossible Creatures engine, according to their interviews. Having never played Impossible Creatures, I wouldn't know... but it doesn't really feel like the Warcraft engine to me, for a number of reasons, mostly camera-related, I think. Oh, and the whole squad-damage thing, but that's just WH40k tabletop, rather than being an engine thing.

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Could just be look'n'feel similarities - the "heros" down the left hand side, the mana & hitpoint charts, the item boxes. *shrug* So yeah, could just be the interface. I did mean to get Ipossible Creatures, though - from the sounds of it, IC is actually for more "original" as an RTS.

I don't get what was so original about DoW as an RTS. The squad-based upgrades seemed to be about it, and bolting a concept as old as Syndicate onto an RTS doesn't really count as original, to me :)

I mean sure, it was a pretty, playable RTS, but what was so original about it?

sol.
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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Ah.

Ok, it occurs to me that it's not Yet Another *Craft, or C&C:X.
So yeah, it's not one of the "franchised" RTSs. But changing the franchise does not "freshness" make, and surely IC qualifies moreso, both for that reason and for the actual new ideas?

sol.
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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

Could be that IC did it (where "it" is the concepts I talk about below) first... I know absolutely nothing about IC, though, and I get the impression it didn't sell well... Which makes it "first" in the same way that Lord Dunsany wrote Fantasy before Tolkien "invented" the genre...

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

I guess it's not that original... The main difference is the focus on multiplayer skirmish. In a way, this strikes a really weird balance between realtime tactical and realtime strategic... the whole "resource locations" thing, and scattering a lot of them over the maps, makes for a much more "rolling combat" game. Most RTSes are a lot more "big wave - pause - big wave - pause - big wave, ah, broke the base defenses that time, quick, chuck the cheapest fastest units in... boom". In DoW skirmish mode, if you're not engaged in combat (or at least poised to be engaged within a minute or so) permanently from about 5 minutes out all the way to the end, you're probably dead.

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Really?

I play C&C:Generals much like I played DoW. Solidify the main base, push out to an expansion, mass comanches, wipe the board. But C&C:Generals has the same resource points (oil derricks), also has things like hospitals, and is more challenging. So no, in terms of overall tactics, I don't see a huge difference, C&C just has more entertaining details :)

Rolling combat doesn't happen much in starcraft, and only a little more so in warcraft, thanks to the heros. But DoW felt a lot like C&C:Generals, without the challenge. C&C is much twitchier - you have to be fast and you have to be good (and sometimes, like I say, they just deus-ex-machina you into oblivion), and you have to use resources wisely. But my tactics are pretty similar, I think.

sol.
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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Ah! You know what I think would make a big difference in DoW? Hide the damn resource points!

And again, in a tabletop, you can't hide them (if they're there at all. I guess the tabletop doesn't have resource points at all. But still.) So it feels like another import from the tabletop for the sake of slavish copying, rather than because it makes a better game. If they were hidden, the game would suddenyl become much more challenging.

sol.
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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[morganjaffit.livejournal.com]

You have memories coloured by the patina of fond remembrance, if you think DOW looks like the Warcraft engine. Zoom in on WC3 hero and then do the same in DOW. There's more polys in a DOW unit than most FPSs use - and it shows, too. Warcraft looks like *shit* if you do a side by side.

And yeah, I realise the latter comments on "overall look and feel" stuff, but I still thought it worth pointing out.

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

I think my favourite bit is definitely the big ole 3D book strapped onto the Librarian's Armour. That just rocks. Can't remember which reviewer pointed it out specifically, but it's just cool.

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

*nod*
I don't pay a great deal of attention to engines, I must admit. It all just looked very WCIII, down to some twitch reflexes Just Working. And that's not really a complaint either - I'm all for consistentcy in interface design. But yeah - the engine didn't really make an impact on me, beyond being pretty and playable.

sol.
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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

I'm hoping that it makes 'em enough money that they make Midday Of War (or whatever name they come up with for it), adding in a bunch more units and races, and actually having a reasonable campaign. I've got to give them kudos, though, DoW is, actually, the first new thing in the RTS genre that I've seen since the invention of the "real time tactical" (Myth, etc). It's not a standard RTS, at all. It's its own thing, and that's a pretty brave move... Which is why I think they got the campaign wrong - they should've just gone with a "here's a few missions in each race" campaign, then had a bunch of cool skirmish maps.

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Brunch of War!

Don't see it, myself. To me, it was just another RTS. Pretty, but just another RTS.

Agreed, with the campaign. The only thing that kept me playing the campaign was the thought that it'd get better in the Eldar missions.

Oooops.

sol.
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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

Ooops indeed. I'm hoping that we get some fan-created material out there that's good (apparently people are working on making Imperials playable, too, but I dunno how that's going). Fortunately, I knew that I was only going to get the Space Marine missions, having heard about it before starting...

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[morganjaffit.livejournal.com]

If it helps at all, it's not original. Wasn't meant to be either, but that doesn't much change the facts. Obviously I know the ins and outs of the entire dev process pretty well for both IC and DOW, but even so - I just don't have much to add to what you've said overall. All your observations are correct, and while most of them were intentional byproducts of the design, it doesn't really change much.

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[thorfinn]

Do you happen to know (and if so are you allowed to talk about it) how much argument there was (or wasn't) about the single-race 10 mission campaign as a plan? Did they just think that having one straight storyline would play better than flitting around every 3 missions or so to a different race? I assume they did, since they cut the dice this way, but was it a close argument, or just one of those things...?

Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

*nod
See, I don't really have problems with "not original". Obviously, ground-breaking RTSs that redefine the genre get bonus points for doing so, but there's nothing wrong with a solid, well-executed old-skool RTS.

The squad-based upgrade stuff would, in fact, probably have been enough, if the campaign hadn't sucked dogs balls.

Now, see, I had even worse criticisms of Warcraft 3 until I discovered the DOTA custom maps, and I still don't really like straight WC3, but the campaign had far more variety in the missions.

So yeah, I suspect DoW will really come into its own in multiplayer mode. But me, I like good campaigns.

sol.
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Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks

[kitling.livejournal.com]

I've been playing orcs in skirmishs against neef and bear - strangely enough I can defeat space marines but not eldar..

which reminds me - are you free sunday? I finally have some free time

[thorfinn]

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