Dawn of War III

Skulls for the skull throne

"In darkness, I shall be light

In times of doubt, I shall keep faith

In throes of rage, I shall hone my craft

In vengeance, I shall have no mercy

In the midst of battle, I shall have no fear

In the face of death, I shall have no remorse"

- The voice in the trailer.

Announced on 3rd of May 2016, Relic Entertainment (under Sega's wing) finally showed that they were actually doing it. Dawn of War III is the third entry in the popular Dawn of War series.

Even though most of us have been waiting for this game for quite a long time, beware of the fact that because there are only 3 races available from the start, our wallets may become alarmingly thinner if we would want to experience the full glory of the W40k universe this game could offer us. It has been done before with the expansion packs in DoW 1 and it can be done again, although not to include Chaos as one of the starting races has got to be one of the biggest hypocrisies so far.

My point is: take great care and have faith in your respective God so that your money won't be thrown away needlessly before knowing what you are buying.

Plot

Coming back with a new look and much closer to the first game while having elements from the second, the third installment will see the return of some of the more popular characters. Among them Gabriel Angelos, Farseer Macha and Warboss Gorgutz 'Ead 'Unter (and if the latter isn't voiced by Brian Drummond again, or at the very least gets all the best lines, there will be Rage) will battle for the planet of Acheron for a mysterious super weapon, and unless the trailer's just being artsy for the hell of it, whatever they find down there is going to be driving them to the limit, with mindfucks aplenty.

Differences and New Things

The game is seen to be closer to the first one while retaining certain elements from the second, but also adding new game mechanisms. Relic's aim was to make their latest game the most accessible (nobody knows how accessible it will be, but hoping it won't turn out the same way as a certain game that is slowly dying, yet it is said that battles will simply be easier to read via having the attacks clear enough to see where they are hitting).

Base building and large scale battles make a return and there will only be Space Marines, Eldar and Orks available at start. Armies are now divided into line troops and elites. The first will be trying to fight and survive, while the latter are more powerful units that you can level up to become even more powerful. In both campaign and multiplayer, players will collect said elites and level them up to become even more efficient. Among them there will even be really powerful units that are showing up for the first time in the series (such as Imperial Knights, Wraithknights, and Gorkanauts). Some of these things may be controversial since Relic took some elements from ASSFAGGOT games (also known as MOBA:s, meaning that before you deploy in multi, you choose your commander and elites as counters and what will be great at breaking counters), yet so far Relic did not fail for now, thus it's way too early to judge (inasmuch as DoW3's existence was only just confirmed). At the very least, the presence of troop units to back up the character squads could mean that the rest of the Blood Ravens 4th Company might actually be getting off their asses and doing something this time around.

A thing to wary of is the campaign itself, since the homepage mentions having one linear campaign switching from controlling the Blood Ravens, the Eldar or Orks, so while the gameplay may be closer to Dawn of War I, the campaign itself will be closer to Vanilla Dawn of war II.

However the 12 minute exclusive gameplay has already drawn quite a lot of ire. With many complaining on the way it looks (Being cartoonish as shit), with rumors that the team developing DoW 3 is trying to piggyback Starcraft of all games to the animation lacking the weight and grit of the previous Dawn of War games. Special mentions goes to the fighting style animations of old Gabe whose sudden usage of backflips, frontflips and jumping like a 5 ton ballerina on crack despite wearing terminator armor has drawn accusations that one of the lead creators of this game might be a small, black leprechaun with a fetish of Lascannons and backflipping Terminators.

Later interviews and bits of information released have done little to ease the ire. Including the lead director confirming that sync-kills have been removed, Assault Marines being considered "light armor" units, the dynamic movement system introduced in II being removed, and fall back mechanics are also gone. At this point from a community standpoint, you're either absolutely behind these changes, or are watching something your were previously looking forward to turn into an absolute shitshow; with very little middle ground to be had apparently.

External links

• Actual gameplay, supposedly in alpha, we heard the same with C&C4...
• Old fan Arch Warhammer dissects an interview with DoW3 lead director Phil Boulle
• For those searching from the trailer's the "Clean" version of the soundtrack, is finnally here