corncobman

0 comments by corncobman on Mar 20th, 2013

I'll try to keep this short and try to stop myself rambling incoherently.

Dawn of War

I may not have been present in a lot of the early forum discussions but I picked up the original Dawn of War around the time it was first released. When I first played the game, it was a revelation. It was fresh, different and exciting. The campaign was brilliant and immersive and the characters dynamic and had a powerful presence. The different playing styles of the four races was a stark contrast to the two races in another of my old favourite, Total Annihilation. Balance was all over the place though. Eldar could completely dominate in the hands of someone with above average skill, Chaos and Space Marines were decently balanced apart from a few niggling things and Orks got the short end of the stick. The patches tried to address some of the issues but the races remained lopsided and in fixing some balance problems new ones would crop up in their place, often worse than before.

Winter Assault

When I first played Winter Assault, the experience was pretty good. The changes that streamlined the races didn't really seem that much of a big deal to me. However the more I played it, the more I realised the changes were wrong. A lot of the upgrades that were present in the original game were gone, unit roles were changed completely. It's almost as if they were changing things for the sake of changing things. This made the game easier to pick up sure but it also removed the essence of what made the original fun. Jaimas, one of the more vociferous forumites had a tendency to exaggerate when talking about the changes to the races and about the Imperial Guard in particular, but his points were valid. The game was still pretty fun to play in spite of the sweeping changes, although substantially less so than the original.

Dark Crusade

The campaign for DC was a big change. Gone were the scripted linear mission structures of the previous two games and instead was a military map risk-style conquest mission structure. The scripted missions were a blast (apart from a few exceptions) and the rest of the maps were skirmish style annihilate type missions. A lot of people were put off by the skirmish style maps, I however quite like skirmish fights so I had quite a lot of fun. The game tried to address some of the issues of the previous games, some removed researches and weapon upgrades returned and some glaring bugs were fixed. However the balance, particularly of the 2 new races and especially Necrons, and even the balance of the "old" races (Eldar I'm looking at you) left a lot to be desired and a large number of bugs were never rectified in the 2 patches that the game received. Overall though the game was still lots of fun in spite of the issues.

Soulstorm

Balance in Soulstorm was a massive leap in the right direction. Necrons got a swift kick in the rear, races got tweaks that really helped in the overall game and the new races were well balanced right off the bat, which was a lot more than could be said of the previous 2 expansions. There are still some minor balance problems but I guess it's what happens when balancing 9 races, trying to keep them different from one another. A lot of other people were disappointment because they were expecting something massively different from DC, but I bought it because I enjoyed Dark Crusade and wanted more of the same but with MOAR!!!. If it weren't for some glaring bugs that made it into the retail game (which were fixed in the subsequent patch and a half) the game could have been the most popular game multiplayer wise. Also if it weren't for the automatch system being totally broken and never being fixed even with the patches, the game would have remained popular today. Instead Dark Crusade is more popular in multiplayer which is a real shame because in my opinion Soulstorm is more fun.

Modding

Just around about the time or maybe a little bit before DC was released I started reading on the forums reading a lot of balance discussions, taking part in some and watching replays of games. Dawn of War had a pretty healthy multiplayer scene at the time and I had quite a good knowledge of the game so I quite enjoyed reading up about it and about the various strategies and races and balance debates were very entertaining. It was around the time when the DC mod tools were released I started modding it. Starting off doing small changes here and there, correcting what I felt were mistakes or improving the general game all round, gradually worked on balance mods, new ideas some of which were silly fun things that I did when I was bored and I eventually released some of my mods to worldwide acclaim (or at least that's the story I'm sticking to). The fun mod is my main pet project though and through it I tried a lot of different things, adding new units, new abilities and fiddled around with effects and icons and stuff. Turned out quite well in my humble opinion even though this mod was mainly for me a lot of people like it and that's quite good.

Conclusions

I loved the Dawn of War series and I still do. The first game and its depth is what sparked me to make a fun mod with a hint of balance and some added kerazy thrown into the mix. I tried to capture some of the feel of the original game, fresh, dynamic and above all fun - even though the mod isn't totally the same as the original Dawn of War, I've tried to stay true to how the races should feel and with any luck you will agree with me. I have a lot of fun playing it and I hope you do too. Cheers.