Last night I was playing Dawn of War, specifically the single player campaign in the First version. The one where you play the Blood Raven space marines kicking seven types of crud out of a bunch of Orks (and Ooo it’s just been revealed that there’s some Chaos guys). As I was playing it I got to thinking why I prefer the original Dawn of War games to the newer Dawn of War II. One major reason is that Dawn of War is one game, you can play the single player campaign mode (4 different types of them if you’ve got all the expansions) or the single player versus AI battles or multi-player on-line battles and it’s the same gameplay. OK in the first game you get a cut down tech tree for the first few missions but that’s fine.
In Dawn of War II on the other hand the single player campaign and multi player missions are very different. So if you’ve played through the campaign (with your teeny tiny squads of marines, one dreadnought and a distinct lack of tanks) you’ve learnt absolutely nothing about the multi player version of the game. Which I found a bit annoying. Plus I found the multi player a complete pain to play as unlike most RTS games it’s about keeping people alive as opposed to building huge armies and crushing all before you. Every time I played it I’d find the opponents bulding stuff way faster than me and kicking the crud out of which every units I wasn’t looking at.
One thing I find funny about the whole thing is one the reasons given for not having Tyranids in Dawn of War was that the Engine couldn’t cope with the unit sizes. But then when Dawn of War II came out the numbers of troops you can control dropped like a stone. Where’s my 5 units of marines, each 8 man strong tooled up with heavy weapons?
So for this reason I’ve gone back to playing Dawn of War. This by the way, is after I tried to play Mass Effect again, giving it the benefit of the doubt after the last hellish time I tried to run it on my PC. So I went and managed to find the patches (and that is an epic quest in of itself, go on, give it a try) got them installed, went out and started playing and lo and behold the game crashed.
This is why I’m not buying Mass Effect 2 unless it comes out for the PS3 and probably not even then. Only Dragon Age has stopped me from completely giving up on Bioware and the Return to Ostagar issues are not helping there. Of course at this rate I think I’m just going to wipe the PC, install Ubuntu and just get back into some coding in the evenings instead. Hmm apparently Dawn of War and Civilisation work on Cedega, anyone know about Steam?