Editing Dawn of War (section)

===Soulstorm===
[[Image:Soulstorm.jpg|200px|thumb|right|''Dawn of War: Soulstorm'']]
Hopes were high for Soulstorm. Whilst it was obviously going to have difficulties from the first two games, it was being produced by Iron Lore, which took community input extremely seriously and added a number of new features intended to make the game the most balanced it had been since Vanilla. And in many ways, they succeeded. Balance was considerably improved, though the problem with Tau tech remained. A number of problems were fixed, and serious consideration was made to ensure that the two new races - the Dark Eldar and Sisters of Battle - would not fall into the trap of the old. This would be Iron Lore's last produced game, and they wanted it to be a hit.

Unfortunately, Relic and THQ had other plans. The developers were forced by THQ to put in Flying units - something the Dawn of War engine was ''never designed for'', cutting out a lot of units that had been heavily-demanded by fans (Wraithguard, Leman Russ Demolisher, Chaos Dreadnought, Techmarines, Wyrdboyz, etc) in favor of the aforementioned flyers. Said flyers were notoriously buggy, absurdly unbalanced (The Tau Barracuda for example, were capable of leveling a base on their own) or fulfilled a completely unnecessary purpose (Marauder Bomber for Guard when everyone and their grandfather wanted Valkyries, which would have been actually useful considering that bombers were of no purpose when one factored in [[Basilisk]]s). The budget was slashed repeatedly and the amount of time Iron Lore had was stripped bare, forcing the developers to create a cut-rate campaign that felt like a total rehash. And of course we should not forget the voice actors and scripting that were either so terrible or "good" that they produced 3 famous memes within the WH40K fanbase: "[[Space Marines|Spehss Mahreens]]" and "[[Emprah]]" as said by [[Indrick Boreale|Indrick Baldeale]] and [[METAL BOXES|METHUL BAWKSES]] as said by [[Firaeveus Carron|the Champion of the BAWKS GAWD]], all of whom were voiced by [[Scott McNeil|Scott Fucking McNeil]] (who also brought us [[Cornholio the Cultist]], bringing the total number of [[meme]]s brought about by this game to at least six). And then, just to add insult to injury, Relic released the game with an earlier beta version of the program which had numerous bugs and balance problems, including a refresh bug for the Dark Eldar Dais Dark Scythe ability, which would cause it to deal thousands of damage and vaporize entire armies.

Still, even on release, the game was very well-received - and then, it happened. 19 hours after the game's initial launch, an infinite resource exploit was uncovered for the Sisters of Battle. By queuing up an upgrade for their listening post and then cancelling it, it was possible to get double the normal resource amount - ergo allowing you to do it rapid-fire for colossal amount of resources very, very quickly along with having infinite faith resource by simply auto-casting a faith ability so in-theory, a simple Celestian squad with a missionary attached could very well turn their durability like those of an Assault Terminator Squad with a Chaplain attached. After initially dismissing this as [[Wat|"not a real bug"]] and prattling on that players "should be happy with what they've got," a "hotfix" was promised within "one, maybe two weeks."

That one to two weeks turned into a nearly 9-month wait, whilst the game suffered horrendously. The "merit" system which was designed to award players with little collections of in-game multiplayer achievements was completely non-functional not only during this time, but after it. The lobby at launch read: "This is stand-in-news. Replace this with real news," and kept this for 6 out of the 8.65 months it took for the patch to hit. During this time, Automatch was broken and the use of a trainer (The Company of Heroes CheatMod, if anyone cares) allowing players to switch races on the fly and delete enemy buildings ran rampant, destroying anything that remotely remained of the game's competitive multiplayer environment. Smaller bugs and problems kept popping up during the wait: using dance of death would set Eldar players' resources to Zero. Charming an Ethereal with a Deceiver would give the Necron Army billions of hit points per unit. Observers could activate a Dark Eldar player's Soul Powers.

After 8.65 months, there was nothing left. The game was deader than a [[Sisters of Battle|Sister of Battle]] at [[Matt Ward]]'s place. But again, after 8 months of waiting and leaving the game to die, a small shard of hope appeared: the hotfix finally DID arrive which addressed most of the early problems present in the game, including the ability to use trainers in a multiplayer game and most of the SoB/DE bugs, which made the game relatively playable. However, much like how Zelda to the Nintendo Gamecube, it came too late and Soulstorm basically died out as many players just gave up on the game, while small pockets of players remained. 
Fortunately, the Steam port of Soulstorm restored the servers, and Soulstorm's vanilla multiplayer is alive to this very day.

Relic had blamed everything from Steam to Gamespy to the black hole at the center of the galaxy for the delays, but everyone and their grandmother knew the full truth: they didn't give a shit because they were working on [[Dawn of War II]]. After the patch, the game remained broken with a lot left to fix (the Eldar remained blatantly overpowered and there were dozens of smaller problems plaguing each faction - all of which were easily fixed), but Relic was done with it and Dawn of War 2 was here. So if by some Emperor only knows reason you still want to play this game, you better just [[Dawn of War Mods|mod it out]].

To this day, mentioning Dawn of War to certain users of /tg/ will result in a rant that makes this article seem like a U MAD? in comparison. 

You have been [[Exterminatus|warned]].