That is a bummer, but I can’t really blame them. DoW 2 survived off a strong single player, unique design and neat use of the Company of Heroes reinforcement system. But this is the 5 game they have made using a similar system and people are bored with it.
And seriously, RTS games need to learn that their maps need to be compelling play spaces. It is more important to have nuanced environments to play than to have these over-tooled units with 14 special abilities.
DoW 3 had the bad habit of "listening" to the most vocal fans that wanted base building and "huge armies". They didn't seem to understand that people who played DoW 2 and just liked it were not posting on forums or being vocal about it. They game should just stuck to its guns and stayed at tactical RTS game that made DoW 1 and DoW 2 so strong. Fuck it, just remove the economy and go with a system like Steel Division Normandy 44 where later units just unlock as the battle moves from the early stages to the pitched battle.
I'm not really worried about Age of Empires IV as long as it doesn't try to be all things to all people. They can't make every old fan happy while also making a new, modern game.
Idk, liked a lot of the ideas on paper, but I didn't feel like going into the solo grind and 2v2 and 3v3 while fun, felt a bit flat. It's one of those games where I can't really say why I didn't like playing it as much as I thought I would.
Sounds good on paper pretty much sums up what DoW 3 sounded like to me as well. But I had concerns once they started talking about base building. People say they want to “build bases”. But when you dig into it, they want to alter the battlefield in ways to benefit them. We like building fortifications and defending them. This is why CoH got by because you could build sandbags and bunkers. But the designers took that at face value and had us build production buildings. And also had us research tech levels for some reason.
Imho base building really wasn't the problem with Dow 3. The maps just ranged from trash to barely passable and games played very similary. The maps weren't interesting and the shield generators just made games go way longer than they shoul... If i totally trash someone, let me trash him, but i often found myself just being bored to death with a giant advantage - luckily most people just left in these situations but if not... UGH.. 2-3 games like that in a row made me quit. Earlygame was extremly punishing (but fun if it turns out evenish)and lategame was just plain dumb.
Oh.. And constantly gathering trash as Ork for every Unit was the worst mechanic ever. Larva injects or mules feel natural in comparison..
I didn’t say it was a problem. It said it was pointless and didn’t do anything of substance. But they spent a lot of time developing those buildings and animating them, only to have them do nothing worth remembering.
The rest I agree with. That game didn’t really know what it wanted to be.
Good to see Relic aren't throwing good money after bad. DoW 3 was built on some pretty fucking shit ideas (or experimental, never been done ideas if we're being polite) and hopefully they'll learn from all this and make some good games instead.
They've got the AoE 4 contract so that might be interesting, though I fear it'll be windows 10 exclusive like AoE:DE is, because microsoft are cunts and don't like sharing.
On February 09 2018 15:39 BEARDiaguz wrote: Good to see Relic aren't throwing good money after bad. DoW 3 was built on some pretty fucking shit ideas (or experimental, never been done ideas if we're being polite) and hopefully they'll learn from all this and make some good games instead.
They've got the AoE 4 contract so that might be interesting, though I fear it'll be windows 10 exclusive like AoE:DE is, because microsoft are cunts and don't like sharing.
Why is a Windows 10 exclusive a problem? Microsoft store exclusive might be problematic but most people game on Windows and any version except 10 is soon without support, forcing migration to it or a non Microsoft OS anyway.
Played the game at my friends house, how did Relic manage to make a game so many years later that is so markedly inferior to it's predecessor? DOW2 was better then this game by a mile, their development team made some very questionable choices going forward.
Likely the talent pool who made the last game left and new people were put in charge. Video game companies staff up and down between games and that leads to some products being uneven.
On February 10 2018 01:47 jpg06051992 wrote: Played the game at my friends house, how did Relic manage to make a game so many years later that is so markedly inferior to it's predecessor? DOW2 was better then this game by a mile, their development team made some very questionable choices going forward.
It's what happens when you try to satisfy too many people. They wanted to reach the DoW1 community with their basebuilding and army size, the Sc2/esports community with terrible damage, the moba community with their heroes and the DoW2 community with their resource system and multipronged harass. But the DoW1 community hates terrible damage and isn't very multiplayer-heavy, the dow2 community hates terrible damage, heroes and basebuilding, the Sc2 community hates the heroes and towers and the moba community hates the nonstop action, snowballs and ladder grind. That way they satisfy nobody.
On February 09 2018 04:13 Plansix wrote: I didn’t say it was a problem. It said it was pointless and didn’t do anything of substance. But they spent a lot of time developing those buildings and animating them, only to have them do nothing worth remembering.
The rest I agree with. That game didn’t really know what it wanted to be.
I liked the base building. Utility structures and production facilities created strong points on the map. Contesting them going up felt important early on and I liked that.
I don't really think production time was the major problem, outside of their mappool the game didn't feel rushed to me. I think it was more about basic game design, understanding that players need low action phases, that heroes while being a massive comeback factor can also be a massive frustration factor and that towers didn't add anything to the game because superior eco wins 99% of the games with the mappool they released.
I like the idea of building hard points and re-enforcement points. I don’t like them being linked to a tech tree in general. Just messing around with Steel Division(the name game I will get after Monster Hunter releases me), I really want games to forgo the building of production buildings as a means of progressing through the tech tree. It is liberating to just a predictable pool of resources and progression that you can tweek without having to deal with shit on the map.
On February 09 2018 02:01 Plansix wrote: That is a bummer, but I can’t really blame them. DoW 2 survived off a strong single player, unique design and neat use of the Company of Heroes reinforcement system. But this is the 5 game they have made using a similar system and people are bored with it.
And seriously, RTS games need to learn that their maps need to be compelling play spaces. It is more important to have nuanced environments to play than to have these over-tooled units with 14 special abilities.
DoW 2 survived not because of strong single player but because of its multi player and ability to be modded. Hell, people are playing it all the time up to this day. DoW/CoH system doesn't get boring for its fans (it never did bore me and I'd love to see more games using that).
DoW 2 looks great even today. Maps are really cool and there's nothing really wrong with it.
I really should get back into DoW 2 and CoH. I loved 3v3s in CoH and they were never plagued by lag the way DoW 2 was. Maybe after Steel Division Normandy.
Idk, DoW2 had a hardcore Multiplayer community that never stopped playing, but realistically speaking we are talking about 2-3k people here. That's too small of an audience to produce games for, especially too small for triple A titles.
I know 3 people who played DoW2 but none of them started playing PvP. And most positive comments I read about DoW2 outside of dedicated PvP pages like this one mention that the singleplayer for DoW2 was great. The majority of the European strategy community after all is a PvE community.