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If you look at Metacritic, SR has only 69% compared to DOW 3 77%. But on Steam, SR has 85% while DOW 3 has only 45%. Clearly, despite DOW 3 being better made, SR is much better for us players. I personally enjoy SR far more than DOW 3.

Why?

No, it's not the price. I do believe that SR was too expensive for what content it has (I bought it on discount).

To me, SR is a guilty pleasure. It's not good, but it serves to appease my inner urge to Purge the Xenos. In the game, you play as Space Wolves and then Astra Militarum. And there are so many Orks to kill. As I close out the mission, I look upon the carnage I wrought throughout the mission, seeing all the dead bodies and shattered vehicles, and I feel proud of myself. I pat myself on the back and pray to the Emperor.

That's what a 40k game should feel like. You play as one of the Imperial faction and you just unleash a mindless genocide on those heretics and xenos. That's why Deathwing Space Hulk is also well-liked by many: you get to kill a ton of Genestealers in that game.

DOW 1 and DOW 2 both have this element where you run the Space Marines (or whatever your faction in the expansions) on a conquest, driving all enemies before you. DOW 3 lacks this element because you play as 3 factions and never get invested in any of them. The ending is also lackluster and makes you question was all this playing even worth it.

This is the direction Warhammer 40k should go. Good plot is important, but the main grab should be always letting the players kill as many things as possible (preferably not repetitively).

DoW 3 was terrible game so being slightly better than a terrible game still makes the game you are schilling for a terrible game as well.

TheAvengingKnee wrote:
DoW 3 was terrible game so being slightly better than a terrible game still makes your game terrible as well.

I know. As I said, SR is so bad. But it's actually good as soon as you stop expecting and turn off your brain.

bibotot wrote:

TheAvengingKnee wrote:
DoW 3 was terrible game so being slightly better than a terrible game still makes your game terrible as well.

I know. As I said, SR is so bad. But it's actually good as soon as you stop expecting and turn off your brain.

Sounds like a great reason to never play the game then.

DOW3 was too niche to have reliable ratings. It was more noteworthy as a terrible sequel to DOW2 than anything (positive) about it, itself.

My big problems with DOW3 have been migrating to the tabletop:
-Marines lose their identity. They're basically Necrons; squads of uniform layout with no flexibility
-Cover and terrain are an afterthought, poorly integrate into the game, and have far too little effect on the result
-Between lack of facings, ease of movement for heavy weapons, lack of terrain impact, and removal of most restraint-based rules, there's no real tactics. So much less in the way of ambushes, hardpoints, chokepoints, or killboxes.
-Uniformity and "rebalancing" reduces the values of counters. You don't bring Melta for vehicles, PLasma for heavy infantry, or Flamers for light infantry. You bring units becuase they have enough dakka and/or durability. Almost everything just boils down to an overall "killiness" and "tankiness".
-"OMG KEWL" centerpiece badasses "are the game". Knights or heros are the army. Everyhing else is just support.
-More stylized and crazy modeling/displays, over restraint and consistency

These all made for a terrible DOW3. Sure, each piece might look nice. And combined, make an impressive looking display at first glance. But that's it. It's devoid of depth. What character could be had is replaced with over-the-top-ness. And what value anything had is reduced to two number-esque values.

Apparently it did so well that they ported it all to the tabletop.

bibotot wrote:

TheAvengingKnee wrote:
DoW 3 was terrible game so being slightly better than a terrible game still makes your game terrible as well.

I know. As I said, SR is so bad. But it's actually good as soon as you stop expecting and turn off your brain.

But why would I not play a game that's fun both when I do and don't turn off my brain instead?

A bad game is a bad game.

The problem with DoW3 was that it wasn't a proper remake of DoW1.

That and the chasing the whole Moba thing, never found that genre fun at all.

DoW1 had a setting where the corpses never despawned. With enough dakka and bolters you could have a proper nightmare battlefield.

Just needs a "remaster" now.

TarkinLarson wrote:
DoW1 had a setting where the corpses never despawned. With enough dakka and bolters you could have a proper nightmare battlefield.

Just needs a "remaster" now.

DOW 1 was more in the classic RTS vein, with basebuilding and units.
DOW2 was more like CoH, which probably tunred off alot of veterans.
DOW3 was more like an unholly Hybrid between moba and strategy crippling both to the point it was absolutely disliked.

DoW3 as already stated was garbage. I installed it, played for literally 2 hours and uninstalled.

Why they just didnt make a DoW 2.5 I'll never know.

DoW2 Retribution's release coincided with the 5e Imperial Guard Codex, and it appeared to me that GW told Relic to push the new Guard minis, hence the Bane Wolf and the Manticore's inclusion instead of more traditional Guard fare and the ludicrous OP-ness of the base-hugging Manticore killing everything in non-campaign battles.

I didn't bother buying DoW3 because all the trailers focused on the Knights and I expected it to make the Knights stupidly OP to try and encourage people to buy Knight minis.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
DoW2 Retribution's release coincided with the 5e Imperial Guard Codex, and it appeared to me that GW told Relic to push the new Guard minis, hence the Bane Wolf and the Manticore's inclusion instead of more traditional Guard fare and the ludicrous OP-ness of the base-hugging Manticore killing everything in non-campaign battles.

I didn't bother buying DoW3 because all the trailers focused on the Knights and I expected it to make the Knights stupidly OP to try and encourage people to buy Knight minis.

I played DoW3 for a few hours you were pretty much correct in your assumption, it was terrible, DoW2 at least had the last stand mode that was pretty fun.

Dow3 was terrible and I managed to stumble through nearly 5 or so hours of it. It wasnt what I wanted and I was disappointing as soon as I started it.

I genuinely liked DoW2 when it was released and during the beta - I maybe have 60 hours of it played with the Chaos exp

Dow1 was a beauty

Played all of the DOW games, and enjoyed them all except 3. I think I logged about 10 hours of that game before uninstalling.

DOW2 was my favorite though, with last stand mode being the highlight.

I played an unjustificable amount of hours in DoW2, both in classic mode and in last stand.

Me and my friends were actually among the first to clear the last stand.

I still play DoW1 and Sanctus Reach, I enjoy both. I really didn’t like DoW2, I much prefer my classic RTS base building. DoW3 could have been better with a few minor tweaks. Knights are too powerful and everything else was too weak.

DoW 3 was basically special effects vomited onto the screen and was entirely focused on hero abilities instead of strategy gameplay. Art was ehh and the voice acting sucks (wtf is up with the Ork voices?). The perspective switching campaign would be ok if the campaign didn't look like crap for even one race. Relic completely missed the mark on the game as it tried to split between DoW1 and DoW2 (but mostly 2) but hurting a lot of the CoH type mechanics for more of a moba feeling gameplay. I'm the end it doesn't work at all.

DoW 1 was in the traditional RTS vein and Dark Crusade did an amazing job of capturing the gameplay of leading those armies (balance issues aside). Big armies fighting each other gives that 40k feel that traditional 40k artwork depicts.

DoW 2 was a lot more Company of Heroes inspired which focused more on unit micro, tactical gameplay, and down played the importance of base building. Different than CoH 1 and I don't blame those who didn't like it but it did make for some great gameplay in multiplayer. Also Retribution's Ork campaign is the best depiction of 40k Orks ever made. In general I think the art and voice acting for DoW2 is outstanding (even the meme fest that is captain diomedies). Looting wargear was fun and was developing your characters but while characters where the meat of the campaign, multiplayer was still mostly about the units with your character being more like your HQ in a tabletop game.

I think I played Dark Crusade with every faction but Marines, it was a lot of fun. Soulstorm not so much, it became rather tedious pretty fast and there were probably too few territories between Homebases.
Dow2 retribution was nice, too. Tyranids were too easy but other than that I liked that campaign.
I haven't tried Dow3 yet but I probably will once it's on steam sale again. Hard to imagine that it's as bad as people make it out to be

Despite putting a fair number of hours into DoW 2's various iterations online, I was never totally convinced.
As a single player game though they were all fun enough.

Dawn of War 3 just seems to take its cue from Company of Heroes 2 - which wasn't good either. Maybe if you are an expert its different - but you just never feel like you are making useful decisions. The tactical gameplay is nerfed, but the strategic gameplay is nonexistent. So you are just left with this unsatisfying... malaise. Run these units into those units, big explosions, oh no stuff died, send more in, repeat.

I kinda enjoyed the storyline they used in DOW3, but it felt incomplete. The eldar infighting was cool, but their campaign overall made me want to throw myself into a brick wall.

I think DOW2 was great because of the character development. Diving into everything as SM, CSM, and Ork was a lot of fun. I've actually made a D&D and Starfinder character based on the Ork Captain. Much fun was had by all.

I enjoyed Sanctus Reach, even more so when the Guard became a playable faction.

Dawn of War 2 had two major failings for me:
1) To many of the campaign maps (esp in retribution) were linear. There was very little choice going on; you had your units and you ran down the gauntlet that they presented for you and beat the end of level boss. They felt more mmo/hack and slash style even though the gameplay built around it was strategic.

2) Retribution lied!! Mostly in how the "campaigns for every race" was Relics standard affair of "identical story, just different race visuals". Which they've basically used for most of their games (even the great Homeworld). It made replaying as different races rather dull because you new exactly what each map was; not helped by them being highly linear.


To me it was a solid, if very different game engine and direction that would have benefited from more open map design and more choice in how to resolve missions rather than "charge the objective".


I've never played the 3rd, but it has surprised me a lot that Relic chose, twice, to basically ignore what the market screamed for (Dawn of War 1 gameplay) and instead provided something totally different. DoW3, was clearly trying to chase the Moba RTS market which has proven itself several times to be basically not liked (Rise of Legends and Command and Conquer were both being developed along the MMO/Moba RTS online approach and both were dropped during development, from what I can gather in part due to user feedback on the model just not working)

I can applaud Relic for experimenting, but at the same time wish they'd gone with a tried and tested. Esp since an up-scaled (larger armies, larger maps) Dawn of War 1 with modern graphics would have ideally suited putting in knight scale units. *


*It actually amused me that Relic said many times they never put Tyranids into DoW1 because the unit scales for Tyranids wouldn't work in the engine (read they couldn't put enough gaunts into it). Then Retribution added tyranids with 5 unit gaunts and got away fine.

It's LELIC.

What did you expect.
Also DOW 1 has a insanely active and talaneted modding scene.

The only thing from DoW3 that I wish was in 40K would be loyalist Knights with twin Gatling guns.

Everything else in DoW3 was garbage. Chasing the MOBA E-Sports scene was a terrible idea.