Dawn of Bore
Nov. 18th, 2004 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tyggerjaiSo I posted a bitch about DoW recently, and then ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
.
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.
.
Re: Setting and Games Workshop lawhawks
Date: 2004-11-18 04:25 pm (UTC)which reminds me - are you free sunday? I finally have some free time