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The reasons player base collapsed
3 years ago
Tilltech
- Focus on multiplayer - the destroyer of enjoyment and the birther of frustration - it is so weird that Relic devs still don't understand that over half of players want to play single-player like Dark Crusade or Soulstorm, or co-op. Why didn't you expand and polish the Dark Crusade concept, why?!
- Absolutely atrocious DoW3 campaign, the worst by far. Not only is it exceedingly linear, but it has no faction coherency - you play every other mission as a different race, even if you don't want to! How the hell would anyone think that completely removing player agency would ever be a good idea, simply baffling!
- Stripped features: sync kills, cover, destructibility, garrisoning, suppression, unit experience(which makes units disposable like in decrepit Starcraft 2). It's like Relic had an internal competition over degrading the game, making it arcadey and dumb like that horrible Starcraft 2 crap!
Seriously, if someone at the top Relic management is not fired over this fiasco it would be wise to not even consider Relic's past games as something to give them benefit of doubt in their future projects.
Post edited by Tilltech on
4
Comments
Gorb
Have you ever played Winter Assault? Your complaints of the campaign apply, pretty much completely, to that title.
In fact, out of all the vDoW and DoW II titles, only Dark Crusade and Soulstorm featured the multi-faction metamap design.
Opinion post.
Tilltech
Of course, and such campaigns, like Winter Assault, were always the worst in the series.
But even then, we had no such idiocy as linear intermingling of races during the campaign. That is a new low.
Gorb
That's exactly what happened in Winter Assault. You chose either the Forces of Order or the Forces of Disorder and then you had to rotate between either the IG and the Eldar, or Chaos and the Orks, as determined by the campaign - not you.
DmonBlu
Just ban him. He is a genwumner and only cares bout himself. Ppl absolutely love the OG DOW but this guy hates it.... I have no word for him:))
Amoc
Well calling for people to get fired is pretty malicious. You have no idea what led to the present game design decisions. For all we know they may have been developing the game under some heavy constraints and guidelines from SEGA, and we all know which way the **** trickles.
I do, however, agree with a lot of your points, though I don't think there's anything wrong with focusing on multiplayer as long as the single player is good. Your point about the single player campaign is bang-on, especially regarding the disjointed campaign.
The stripped-down features is what bothers me most. It's okay to get rid of some of them, but I need something equally as interesting to make up for it, and MOBA-style tunnel fights revolving around ability spam doesn't do it for me. On the plus side, this game got me interested in LoL again. :P
Bitterman
We don't need another one of these threads. We know why the player base collapsed. It's not some sort of mystery at this point.
Tilltech
People need to be held accountable for making bad, bizarre decisions.
There is no progress without such measures.
They literally went in the complete opposite direction to DoW player base expectations.
DoW player base does not care about linear crap campaign and arcadey RTS crap gameplay with stripped features.
This was all known to anyone willing to listen.
Amoc
Okay, but how do you know it was even Relic that sent the game in this direction? This may have been:
SEGA:
"We want a bigger, flashier DOW, and we want to hook into the massive MOBA genre. Get it done.
Relic:
"But glorious leader, that's not at all what fans a--"
SEGA:
"Shh. We need more MOBA. No more words."
Lordnine
I actually don’t mind linear campaigns if they are done well. That said, the DoW3 campaign was incredibly inconsistent and ranged from pretty good to downright poor as far as mission design and world/character building. One thing that has always stood out in the DoW series is that the characters are actually interesting and well developed; a rarity in the RTS genre. DoW3 reintroduced characters from the series but none of them held true to their previous incarnations.
On the level design front, I’m not sure what happened there. The first few missions almost made me give up on the campaign entirely. Long drawn out missions without much player agency where the only option was build up a large force of crap units and throw them at the enemy. Thankfully, I did stick with the campaign as the second half is actually pretty enjoyable.
As far as the gameplay itself, I would agree on the stripped out features complaint. I may be in the minority (although, judging by other comments I don’t think I am) but I never wanted the game to go large scale. I enjoy small unit tactics where every life matters. With that in mind, I still would have been OK trying something new if they hadn’t completely shifted the gameplay away from the conventions I enjoy. I do not agree with the sentiment that things like cover, suppression and unit experience wouldn’t work at the scale of DoW3.
Pringworm
So your example is that Relic suddenly stopped learning to improve. Lol.
Gorb
I would call it a different style, and not relating to an improvement, really. There are plenty of people that got bored of DC and SS's metamap campaigns. DoW II went back to being linear as well, you see, and you couldn't choose your faction there either (until Retribution).
Pringworm
Well must of been all those guys on ModDB and file planet that wished we were able to mod it without blowing up the game then. Honestly that is the kind of statment I would expect to see on 4chan. And in regards to Dawn of War II, the replacement was at least having intresting unit progression and Wargear.
Tilltech
Yeah, it's still a mystery why would anyone say it, a really dumb false dichotomy.
Like you wouldn't be able to handle each unit having an active ability in addition to everything else.
And even if that were the case it could easily be rectified with doctrines, which would be like meta passive abilities replacing active abilities.
Sigh, it's too late now anyway, I doubt the series will recover after this. Maybe it's time to turn the Dawn of War torch to another studio.
g0ll0
MrBenis
Do you even visit 4chan? They're not some gestalt hugbox that shares the exact some opinion on everything. We are individuals unconstrained by names or titles. No moderators (such as you'd notice) and ideas are free to be exalted or you get called a series of expletives. Even /v/ which was for the longest time regarded as an autistic cesspool of ADHD addled tards can manage to spit out some reasonable discussions on things when they feel the need.
People accuse dow3 campaign of a lot of things but you can never please everyone. Personally I think it's alright. From what I can tell people really like DC because you get to win the game as your faction of choice. Not because the maps or conquest zones were particularly well thought out, or because the specific mechanics of the main map were that amazing. It's important to people but on paper it's mechanically unimportant how you win the game only that you do it the way you want to.
DaDokisinX
Actual reason why Playbase is small for DoW3:
1) Typical relic balance (or lack thereof). Also relic not communicating at all and interacting with community (Especially bad considering the poison on this forum)(although this has improved recently).
2) A legitimate concern about lack of content. It is a bit underwhelming to receive only a handful of maps and 3 races for a DoW game.
3) An unprecedented barrage of salty-neckbeard-40k fanboy hate that comes from an aging playerbase unwilling to be charitable at all to a game based on superfluous first impressions of the game.
4) RTS's and strategy games in general being unpopular.
"Stripped features" you refer to all came with their own bugs and problems, some of which straight up had to be removed from the game since it wasn't working well. I honestly don't know why people hold up DoW 1 and 2 as huge successes that deserve to be emulated for the sake of the playerbase. The "playerbase" straight up abandoned DoW2 after a couple months of release (not as sure about DoW1 since it was released in a different environment). Tell me why relic should just duplicate their old games when hardly anyone stuck around to play it after a couple months?
Amoc
The DC campaigns were interesting because they offered variety. In most cases, the factions played entirely differently and their matchups were varied. Replayability was therefore excellent. Additionally, there was a ton of flavor added to the campaigns and collecting enemy's head's and progressing you commander was cool.
DC was the high point for DoW.
steinernein
It's the lack of content and there were some balance issues that made games pretty stale.
Tilltech
Oh jesus, my skin crawled just reading those words, and people have actually already normalized this.
Stoner
I have to disagree on 4th statement. Really don't think RTS games are unpopular, it's niche one way or another, but generally has not too big but very devoted community. On success of previous titles, I can bet my money on it, if Relic would just port DoW I to new engine, rework some mechanics just a little, game would sell like hot cakes. I don't know how long it would hold people, but the fact that it would be mindblowing success and hitting 1kk sales in short time I'm sure of.
Queso
agreed, but hopefully with time they will patch it
relic was really targeting a difference audience(arcady/starcrafty/MOBA), who just never picked it up, so now whats mainly left are "dawn of war" players, and therefore we have posts like this...
DaDokisinX
https://www.statista.com/statistics/189592/breakdown-of-us-video-game-sales-2009-by-genre/
Also, even if it were true that DoW 1 and 2 were super popular, it doesn't make sense to market primarily to the people who played DoW1 as much. These people are mostly in their early-mid 30's by now. Many of them have actual lives to live and cannot devote inordinate amounts of time playing a video game. This then may deter them to picking up a strategy game as this type of games demands a lot of dedication in order to have some sort of competence at it. They are not the optimal demographic to market to (those that spend 6+ hours a day gaming and buying tons of micro transactions). Games like LoL, CS:GO, and FIFA are extremely profitable in no small part because their main demographic, I'd wager, are those aged 16-25.
CANNED_F3TUS
All DC and SS campain were was a skirmish campain.... You play skirmish over and over and over till you got all the territories or finished each faction off. It was compstomping practice. Not very replayable unless you play each faction. Once you are done with that you do ++heresy redacted++ all lol.
Tilltech
This is blatantly false. Many missions were quite unique, and the stronghold missions were of excellent design, better than we have seen in any linear crappy RTS campaign.
On top of that, upgrading your commander an acquiring units as you conquer territories was also fantastic, which was further improved upon in DoW2(as it regressed in many other ways from DoW1).
They should have build upon it, instead of reverting to putrid, linear RTS campaigns of old.
Amoc
Even the linear campaigns are okay, if they're any good, but DC's campaign was particularly cool. There really hasn't been much like it, before or since.
Andtaxes
If anyone could say for sure what causes player-bases to die off faster than bee's they would make alot of money by letting some companies know.
I would go as far as to argue that people finish the single player and stop playing if all they want is the single player (or pirate it..) or they have watched some one on twitch play it and they get the same level of enjoyment. The real concerning player departures come from multiplayer and there are endless things to attribute that to. I don't consider "single player only" players to really count as far as player retention numbers are concerned.
If you look at some recent games you will notice that alot of companies have managed to pull the nose up with time and win back some of their player base. Diablo 3 is probably my favorite example.
Fww
People play DoW games for single player?
Sure DC and SS had some replayability but it was still a joke compared to games like Total War or 4x games in my opinion DoW was all about multiplayer.
Still DoW3 has solid campaign with gameplay like in SC or W3 with a weak spot in the story.
Misery
TW W was one of the biggest selling PC games of last year and was an RTS, which has not changed it's mechanics much since the first one, and is maintaining a much larger playerbase. So it's hard to blame genre for this games popularity. Especially when Starcraft 2 came out in 2010 and was massively popular.
The main problem this game has right now is that it isn't very fun. If it was people would still be playing it. As it isn't people get bored and go to do other things.
Fww
Just wanted to say that TW games aren't rts, it's like saying that Civ is same genre as Warcraft.
Arc
Swung out of the park. Obviously the actual goings-on are muddier than this but these are some salient points to take away. Much like Evolve the lack of up-front content is pretty insane, and really makes you wonder why it was released like this (investors being impatient most likely). The worst part is that the gameplay is pretty tight, it needs improvement sure but it's a really solid base to work on. IF we get an expansion pack though it'll need to bring a lot more to the table than Relic expacks in the past, if it comes with "only" one or two races there's no telling if it'll sink or swim.
Worst part for me is that we've got it on record that Relic aren't even working on other races right now at all. Like, at all. I like the game but that right there is pretty egregious and if past experience is any guide we'll see any sort of meaty content additions way further down the line than we should (as far as, you know, keeping a substantial playerbase.)
Anecdotally, a lot of people I know (relatively) have actually gotten into the series with this title. People who'd never touch an RTS are really digging it. Breaks my heart.