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I've played it. I enjoyed the game, but I hated hated hated it too. The stupid game takes GHz just to run the graphics. If you don't have a tweaked-out bleeding edge gaming PC with lots of free memory, you can expect ridiculously long load-times (like, upwards of 20 minutes) and significant input/response lag when there are lots of units on the map. And I was running it at the lowest resolution possible; my computer couldn't run it at higher graphics resolutions without a reeeaally slow refresh-rate.

It would be a much better gaming experience if it wasn't such a memory-pig. I played through the Empire campaign, but quit early in the Chaos campaign because the wait for each scenario to load was freakin' painful. I'm not kidding about the 20 minutes. And about half the time it would crash because it couldn't free up enough virtual memory, even after I downloaded the patch that was supposed to fix that.

Someone needs to explain to game programmers that 'really fancy & detailed graphics' are not a substitute for an enjoyable gameplay experience, and more does not equal better.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit. But hell, I'm not any kind of computer geek; to me it's a magic box that mostly does what I want, i.e. surf the internet, exchange email, and play the occasional game.
I'm running an HP Pavilion a450n with a 3 GHz pentium-4 processor, 512 MB SDRAM memory, 48x CD-ROM, and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 graphics card, according to the sticker on the front of the stack. WinXP is the OS.

Heh. Bottom line is, the programmers should have made a game like Dawn of War, where the graphics are adequate, rather than this game, which was too cutting-edge for the common, household computers at the time of the release. In a couple of years, those sort of system demands will probably be easily met by the bulk of the computers in people's homes, but by then, the game will be out of print.

Several folks in my area bought this game when it first came out, and we were looking forward to some multiplayer action... it never happened, because most of us didn't have fast enough machines.

Off topic indeed!
If games aren't targeted at common, household computers, the game makers are going to starve themselves to death. The percentage of high-end, custom-built gaming boxes that can run the latest bleeding-edge graphics, compared to the percentage of off-the-shelf, bloatware filled desktop boxes, is, well, low. It is very frustrating to spend $50 on a game that your computer cannot run, especially when most companies have "no return on opened software" policies. (Oh, I can return it, but only to exchange it for an unopened copy of the same game? What part of 'doesn't run on my computer' don't you understand?)

So the game designers, programming geeks that they are, get all excited about the cool graphics rendering they can do, and make games that suck up memory in order to make the character's hair float realistically in the breeze. But they don't do anything to make the game itself more fun. As Shamus Young says in one of his rants: "Lots of people have been whining about the lack of innovation in gaming. About endless sequals. About re-re-rehashes of Tolkienesque knights vs. ogres and one-man-army type games. About the fact that in the last 10 years we?ve evolved from find-the-key and jumping puzzles to find-the-key and jumping puzzles with awesome graphics."

You point about the older games is valid: Doom 2, Return to Wolfenstein, Half-Life... Battlezone, BZII, Thunder Brigade... Sword of Aragon, Civilization... fun games. But. Most of them, the average person cannot run, because they have the wrong Windows OS installed. Games designed to run on Win95 won't run on Win XP, etc. I know it is possible to get the games to work, but it is not easy, or simple, for people with a rudimentary grasp of computer technology. And let's face it, for all the claims that our younger generation is going to be computer-literate, most of them aren't. They can turn the computer on, and search the internet, and upload videos and download music, but they have no idea how to reconfigure an operating system or recover lost files. It's a magic box! And most of the tech support people I deal with (keep in mind, I work for a public school system) seem to be reading 'Windows for Dummies' to me over the phone- which doesn't help when the problem is with the school system's proprietary software, that was installed four years ago (AND WAS WRITTEN IN DOS! WHAT KIND OF PROGRAMMER STILL WRITES FOR DOS? I'll tell you- the superintendant's nephew, that's who) but I digress. Basically, if computer game companies want to sell games, they need to make them painless plug-and-play.

I had really high hopes for Mark of Chaos, because Dawn of War was such a good set of games. I was, end the end, really disappointed. Not because the game was lacking, but because the graphics requirements were needlessly bloated, to the point that the game was unplayable on most computers. I'll say it again- by the time the average off-the-shelf computer can easily run MoC, the operating systems installed on said computer will not work with MoC, and another good game will vanish into limbo.