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Posting articles about DOW3
MrBenis
So what I'm going to do with this thread is post links to some articles, cherrypick some parts out of them that I want to address or mention and then open a discussion on these points.
Let's get straight in to it and look at this 'excellent' article by pcgamer.com. I say excellent because it does raise a few eyebrows over what exactly is contained within it.
Posted on 26th Jan 2016.
http://www.pcgamer.com/eldar-domination-hands-on-with-dawn-of-war-3s-space-elves/
While the previous games focused on the Space Marines, leaving the other factions to muck around in Skirmish mode until they got expansion campaigns, the third game’s campaign jumps between the Space Marines, Orks and the Eldar, as they race to claim a superweapon hidden on a frozen world.
Okay so at least the writer has the self awareness to know about the previous games. We're off to a good start already in this article, I largely stopped reading sites like IGN and co many years ago due to their writers obviously being casual mobile app scum that only play games when their job requires them to. They very often didn't know anything about the series, its characters or the settings in question. So its nice at least that someone at pcgamer sounds like they played a previous DOW title (probably dow2 as you'll see).
"The Eldar are sort of the origin of the story," game director Phil Boulle tells me. "Our protagonist, however, Macha, she’s got her doubts about this prophecy. She represents the player’s cynical view. She’s the voice of reason."
Okay so if Macha is our protagonist we are going to be seeing the first Eldar centric campaign... ever? I can't actually recall a single instance of this being true before. Also shifting focus away from the blood ravens a little bit is a bold move seeing as they're the guys who made DOW famous but that's ok. Just don't commit the cardinal sin of making us finish the game as the wingman. Remember this simple advice: "if the backstory to one of your characters is more interesting than the tale you're trying to tell today, you're telling the wrong story".
Unfortunately, Macha’s not in charge, and must bow to the demands of her zealotic superior. In the Eldar campaign mission Relic fired up for me, set on the world of Cyprus Prime, Macha’s been ordered to assassinate her enemy-turned-friend-turned- enemy, Gabriel Angelos
This is something that I've always had an issue with, thematically. Last time I checked the eldar were originally on Tartarus fighting for control in order to stop chaos freeing the daemon in the macguffin. Gabe and Macha join forces temporarily to defeat chaos, then after they win Macha is trying to tell Gabe to just bury the thing again and seal it away so noone can mess around with it ever again, but Gabe derps out, smashes the thing: thus freeing the daemon and Macha has a seizure, curses Gabe for being stupid and runs away. They were NEVER friends. Shut up CS GOTO your books were awful.
While sheer numbers can win some brawls, it’s these extra-powerful attacks that have the might to turn the tide of a battle.
On a more serious note I could see some people having an issue with this. This is the line of writing where it confirms what I had strongly suspected which was that the average mook was just meat for the grinder and that the hero units would be pulling most of the weight. In order to make micro matter in a dawn of war game, Relic have opted to condense the micro down to using special abilities on a given number of units (in rotation I'd suspect) thus allowing micro to exist in DOW without it being some exercise in group selecting and blob moving your whole army at 120apm.
That’s why cover has completely changed, too. "We moved to larger armies, larger squads, with the camera pulled out, and it’s a lot more finicky if you have to line them up along walls," Boulle explains.
Okay I get it. I didn't like DOW2's cover system anyway so I got no real comment here.
The Space Marines’ plethora of knockback and stun attacks are important tools here
>
"What we’re going for is the fantasy of the faction," Boulle explains after I finally send Gabriel Angelos packing. "So it’s not always a direct manifestation of the ruleset, it’s more this is how they’re portrayed in the fiction, this is how they’re portrayed in all the art. This is the fantasy that they represent."
So these two quote lines were not beside each other however I do feel like they go together. Mechanically speaking they will work in a certain fashion probably inspired by the concept of what these units are doing in combat. It makes no sense that dire avengers would be stunning enemy units in melee, they don't have the raw strength for it. It does make sense that assault marines would, because they weigh over a ton each and are hilariously strong.
I'm looking forwards to digging up more articles and touching on the things they say in them. Obviously PCgamer wrote this article as a propaganda piece but then I suppose what else should I expect, the reciprocal relationship between media and developer practically necessitates it.
Comments
MrBenis
How embarassing, I meant to say 2017. inb4 someone points out I got the date wrong.
MrBenis
I wasn't going to do another article today but then I ran in to this gold mine of fail, courtesy also of PCgamer.
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-orks-go-waaagh-in-a-new-dawn-of-war-3-gameplay-trailer/
Please note this is exactly what I was saying earlier, about journalists writing pieces on games and making it painfully obvious that they don't have any idea of what they're talking about. Andy Chalk at the time of writing this article, I suspect, googled what an Ork is and what their tactics are meant to be and he arrived at the /tg/ archive site which is mostly satirical and self-aggrandising for the /tg/ community.
Here is the 1d4chan entry for those who don't know
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000/Tactics/Orks(7E)
This is not professional journalism, it is not the work of a fan of WH40K and it is not the work of a fan of DOW as a series. I'd bet serious money he either hasn't played DOW before or if he has he forgot 100% about the older games before sitting down with the new one.
Relic pls, don't allow hacks to write your articles. From now on just suggest Fraser Brown at pcgamer do your write ups because that guy actually sounds like he gives a f*ck.
Doobeedoo
Just so you're aware, the Eldar mission article ... we've already seen that gameplay a month ago. The article is just late for some reason.
MrBenis
Yeah I know but its a running commentary on the articles themselves, these guys are like salesmen with the way they flourish and embellish their sentences. At least Fraser put some effort in and didn't cite a 4chan archive as a credible source for background information. Jeeeezus.
Lemme just grab a completely random paragraph from the 1d4chan article
Gorb
You not agreeing with the point of view of authors, does not invalidate their professional status as a writer of articles. You should know better, and all this does is incentivise people to attack you over whatever competencies you may or may not have. It's not a constructive attitude to hold, and it doesn't create a good thread premise.
First post? Great.
Second post? Kinda went into conspiracy land with assumptions about who plays what, what target audiences are what, and so on, and so forth. I recommend avoiding this because it's obviously not an area that you're professionally-involved with, it's simply an area you have strong opinions on.
Which are normally fine! But when you start attacking people you don't know for having a different opinion to you (even I read 1d4chan occasionally; it's not a direct fluff source but it sometimes contains recaps of events written vaguely-humourously, so long as it isn't peppered with childlike offensive language), then this stops being fine.
(this is an opinion post more than it is an instruction post)
MrBenis
If you google Andy Chalk and Dawn of war together you get like 3 relevant results total between the two subjects.
If you google orks and tactics 1d4chan are the top two results.
'nuff said.
Maryjan
Is there something wrong with this? Sounds like pretty sane game advice written in an amusing way because reading through long slogs of technical texts is something you have to force people to do.
MrBenis
The point is, that this guy writing a public facing piece of literature used the content contained above as his research material. As I pointed out just before, it takes like 12 seconds to uncover that this guy apparently did precisely zero vetting of his sources and that furthermore he provides a link to the aforementioned article in his work.
bask185
ding ding ding, you guessed it. Most of these review website is nothing but heracy. People who have no clue what they are playing wright stuff down and I would not be suprised if they are somehow 'persuaded' to be positive. PCgamer however tends to actually provide us with honest reviews most of the time.
If you want good reviews wait for the steam comments after the release. And you can follow some youtuber because you can quickly tell whether he has or does not have his head stuck up in a place where the sun does not shine. Especially people who are bound to are a specific game and are popular, are getting often paid to say positivie things and these people help in destroying games.
Gorb
That doesn't actually tell you anything beyond you looking at two quite unrelated Google searches.
Doobeedoo
Steam user reviews are not perfect either. People can review the game with under an hour played, and then return it. Idiots can leave negative reviews over some minor reason. Many great games have bad Steam reviews because of a small group of people setting out to try and sabotage it.
MrBenis
A new day, a new article about to be scrutinised.
http://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/feature/interview-game-director-philippe-boulle-on-dawn-of-war-iii,446255
Action-RPG.........? Whaaaat?
Oh boy, it looks like it's going to be another one of those articles again. Fingers crossed kids!
So here we see Relic saying the camera is dragged really far out in comparison to earlier games in order to fit more units on screen, due in part to there being more units than before actually present as well. I'm curious to see if this has any relationship with the many complaints people have had about unit detail and clarity on the field when there's action going on. A more zoomed in camera might actually lead us to not caring that there's so many special effects going off in some fights.
So DOW3 and COH2 run on largely the same engine, the same broad codebase. Never played COH2.. is this a positive?
I had to do a doubletake on the Diablo comment. How... how does diablo even feature a campaign? It's a loot fetch whackamole game. There's a story, sure, but does that qualify as a campaign? I'm really curious to know about how DOW3 has been received as well, let's find out.
"The reception has been great." Yes. I'm sure it has. Amongst those who have played the game. I'd love to try out the game for myself, just to see. Give me the 3 missions shown so far and I'll give a fair and balanced write up of it myself, here on the forums. These have already been public facing and played by people at events live so why not offer them as a demo? What do you have to lose?
Not too concerned about this. In DOW1 upgrading hero gear seemed almost pointless, for everything but psyker powers and orbital bombardment. In DOW2 it seemed too strong with certain wargears being totally OP in combination. When I've said that DOW2 was the moba entry in DOW, this is what I'm talking about. Lane combat, contrived resource system (creeping/jungling vs nodes) and heroes with 4 special powers each and a bunch of gear they can equip. Smells like moba spirit, and I'm personally glad to see DOW3 divorcing themselves a bit from it. I imagine the gear system stifled creativity more than it enhanced it.
i'm curious to know why this approach was adopted and not say dedicated campaigns for each race, each time building up a bit more of the story in relation to the other campaigns. Time issue? People will reference old favourites like SC1 and WC3 but upon reflection those games were looooooooooonnng and especially in SC1 with the simplicity of the tech powering the game the number of missions there might have just been because it was there to pad out some length. I actually used to design missions in SC1 back when I was like 13 and if a 13 year old could make a 5-mission mini campaign then anyone can. Making super long campaigns for a modern audience might be cost prohibitive considering all the extra assets and animations etc that would be required, at the end of the day, games still only sell for $60 US + $110 in DLC (which is not necessarily paid for by everyone). Essentially the limit on how much work you can put in to a game before you start losing too much profit to be viable has gotten lower, especially for everyone paying only the base cost of the game, because the budgeting on modern games relies on DLC whales to cough up extra now, the accounting for noone buying DLC portion of the equation would mean you get very little indeed.
Bersercker
It seems these days its enough to have experience and levelups for a game to be named RPG.
Its somewhat similar though, like you controll 4 heroes and slaughter endless waves of enemies to get loot and experience. The chaos rising even had more choice and cosequence than most modern "RPG" games i'd say. 
The correct term would be dungeon crawler though i guess.
Gorb
A lot of people criticised DoW II SP specifically for the RPG mechanics (specifically ARPG, more in the style of Torchlight or Mass Effect than something like Baldur's Gate or similar). It's a valid comparison.
On the engine, Relic have been using what they call "Essence" for many years now; it debuted with vCoH. This is no reflection on the current codebase, and indeed what it's capable of. Essence "2.0" (if you will) was supposed to be the basis for vDoW II, and Essence "3.0" was the basis for CoH 2. They're milestones, and nothing much more than that.
Does it mean it's possible that there are some restrictions in-place from older versions of the engine? Absolutely. But that's the trade-off between re-engineering an existing engine base (which you will have experienced programmers already-familiar with) and creating a new one from scratch (which doesn't mean it'll be perfect, either).
bask185
I know, but the point with steam reviews is that there are alot of them which in the end will provide us with an average rating. And that average rating is a more truthfull rating than whatever 1 single guy from some game review sides says
Gorb
Not really. Games can be flooded with fake reviews, and given how compromised the Steam platform is in general (i.e. how easy it is to have fake / burner accounts), this can happen (and has happened) on a wide scale.
PhilthyPhilPhD
We don't have to look any further than the CoH2 metacritic which was vote bombed by angry Russians for depicting Soviet WW2 in a negative light.
MrBenis
It's fair to say that scores can be manipulated up, then they can be manipulated down. If you watch some of Jim Sterlings stuff he descriptively and meticulously details how some companies brigade each others ratings and scores on Steam in order to manipulate the ratings of them up in order to push them higher on the store front. It's not a stretch of the imagination to say it happens in reverse too (probably with companies like EA and Ubisoft, Wargaming being a alleged case of expending millions to trash advertising campaigns of competitors in order to control the market. Here )
Gorb
They can be, absolutely. But all that does is prove further how you can't rely on Steam as some kind of "objective" rating.
In fact, and this is shared by many journalists I like reading, an "objective" score is very hard to define. It would be better if we moved away from such things, but sadly they're embedded in the industry as a performance metric.
bask185
Funny you mention it, there are in fact companies in asia of which you can by things like facebook likes or something like that. Just a huge room full of people behind computers making and managing dummy accounts for whatever you pay them for. But I wonder if some steam reviews are that heavily corrupted by such companies.
20% of 1273 people are positive about c&c but red alert 3 scores a whopping 84% of over 3000 votes which is really really odd (not to mention suspicious
).
The negative reviews have in my opinion often the most usefull information. If you read of 4 or 5 different users that the AI is bad or the pathfinding sucks and the game has an overal postive rating of just 50% than you know not to buy the game.
@Gorb I wanted to make a poll thread but it seems it cannot be done??
MrBenis
Just make a strawpoll
MrBenis
Today let's look at an article from IGN
http://au.ign.com/articles/2017/01/30/warhammer-40000-dawn-of-war-3-first-ork-hands-on
Alright, interesting, scrap doesn't just make them generally better it actually adds functionality to the units. Further expanded on just below
Alright so at least some of these abilities are toggled and some are innate. Very noice. I think this adds some very needed uniqueness to the ork faction, where being upgraded with scrap might make them marginally more powerful than similar units of other races however when the gauntlet is down you can just spam the basic infantry without consideration. Only question I have is about unit costs.......
Alright so scrap becomes its own central mechanic to the orks more than just being a matter of upgrading or building units in the field, we are looking at it providing tangible long term and short term utilities and benefits. In addition to being a form of currency and providing new abilities to units they also
Build cheap units at wholesale prices, missing some HP but this is not a hard cap. I think it should be a hard cap. I think that fundamentally allowing a race to build deffdreads in the field right outside your base or even during a battle and then having this thing walk in to a fight and potentially be a full strength asset by the end of the game is not good. This is merely my opinion but if orks get the ability to make units wholesale from scrap, are their units built at the home base balanced with this flexibility in mind? Surely they are, so are the units built at base deliberately nerfed in terms of cost or performance to compensate? If not, then should they be? Should the scrap models be nerfed?
Even the writer finishes that statement with a negative inflection, that he felt like it was wrong somehow. Stacking WAAAGH bonuses might prove to be very overpowered once the scrap/field/base equation starts to occur.
I guess I agree with that statement. Just remains to be seen how it all works out.
Silk
@MrBenis
Everything you just said about scrap has already been seen in the videos and commented on this forum, if I recall.
It depends on the time it takes to build those units, the number of HP they have when they are built, etc. If it takes a lot of time to put an half-dead Dread on the field and still cost money, I'd have no problem with it at all.
Again, it depends on how easy it is to take down those towers, the time the WAAAAGH! effect lasts, etc.
Auric
From the gameplay video, it appears that grots are required to build scrap in to units on the field. I'm going to be very surprised if grots are anything approaching resilient, so that will probably help balance the fact they can build heavier units right on the battlefield. We should also consider the space marine drop pod mechanic which will allow them to drop full health units and tanks on to any point of the field they can see. Eldar might lack either of these methods, but their vehicles are going to be faster than their counterparts in the other races, and the whole teleporting base thing will probably help quite a bit in getting their troops and vehicles where they need to be.
grndmrshlgando
I think tau would be a great addition to dow3 because they would get to show off what the larger tau units look like since we're on a larger scale in dow3. but I don't believe they would make it in before some of the more popular factions such as chaos or necrons (assuming necrons aren't a secret 4th faction)
MrBenis
http://www.pcgamer.com/go-in-depth-with-dawn-of-war-iii-multiplayer-this-month-at-the-pc-gamer-weekender/
Been very thin on the ground lately with articles of any substance. For those who didn't know, they're having a thing on Feb 18/19 and you will be able to play DOW3 there.
GuruSkippy
Multiplayer informations, finally.
Good catch
PhilthyPhilPhD
Excellent catch, I guess we have our date for MP, hopefully they summarize or explain the info the following day or very soon after for the rest of us. Also, perhaps someone from the forums will be attending and be able to tell us everything they learned there.
Auric
I will be attending and will be happy to throw up a thread on what I pick up from the talk.
PhilthyPhilPhD
Thanks so much! So I just saw on Facebook that they said mission 14 would be playable, so I'm not sure the guys on the floor will be able to play MP unless the messages are getting mixed or something. If you could attend the MP talk where they are apparently discussing MP and give us the low down that would be great!