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Dawn of War III likely to get no more major updates as it hasn't sold well

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It seems Relic won't be putting out anymore content for Dawn of War III [Steam] as it hasn't sold well enough to continue.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Relic said this:

While Dawn of War 3 has a dedicated player base, it didn't hit the targets we were expecting at launch, and it hasn't performed the way we had hoped since. It's been tough for us as professionals who want to make great games for our players, and for us as people who care a lot about what we do.

When a game underperforms, plans need to change. With Dawn of War 3, we simply don't have the foundation we need to produce major content. We're working in close partnership with Sega and Games Workshop to determine the best course of action, while shifting focus to other projects within our portfolio.

This has caused the game to have a spike in negative reviews, with the recent overall score being "Mostly Negative" which will pretty much solidify the position of poor sales now.

Dawn of War III was a very different game to the previous incarnation, which I've seen many people unhappy with. I'm surprised Relic didn't see this coming, with them forcing players to play a MOBA-style map in the online play. In my own review I said "Honestly, the multiplayer mode is like they gathered a list of features from a bunch of games, threw them up in the air and put in whatever landed face-up, it’s such an odd mix." and I stand by that. They did later add in a more traditional mode, but it was already too late by then as the damage to fans expectations had already been done and it's hard to bring people back to a game if they weren't a fan at release.

Likely a bit of a blow for Feral Interactive too, who ported the game to Linux not too long ago. Hopefully future ports from Feral will do better!

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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32 comments
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Tchey Feb 12, 2018
Loved DOW1, not much DOW2, tried and refunded DOW3.

I too want DOW "1.5"...
NovenTheHero Feb 12, 2018
I preferred the first game with the RTS aspect.
Spud13y Feb 13, 2018
From this I learned that there's going to be an Age of Empires 4 and my heart aches because Microsoft owns it :(
TheSHEEEP Feb 13, 2018
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Quoting: omer666So the rampant negativity won in the end. Well, whatever...
There's no rampant negativity here.
Just a game that's all-around pretty underwhelming, developed with a mystifying lack of vision or understanding of what people actually liked about the previous games and design decisions that are borderline inane (mobile-junk-like unit unlockables in my RTS game, no thanks).

Even developers themselves are aware of that.

"Professional" journos liked the game somewhat because they never really play games for long and are mostly just amazed by pretty or pretentious things.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 13 February 2018 at 9:07 am UTC
TheSHEEEP Feb 13, 2018
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Quoting: Spud13yFrom this I learned that there's going to be an Age of Empires 4 and my heart aches because Microsoft owns it :(
Yeah, that is the worst takeaway of this whole situation.
Who knows what they're going to do to the series...

But AoE being Windows-exclusive is not really news. It has been since the inception of the series.
cRaZy-bisCuiT Feb 13, 2018
I paid the full price as well since the game looked awesome. I shouldn't have done this since I've known in advance there's a dead multiplayer and a average single player at best.


Why didn't they step up their game and made a nice looking and fun to play DOW III? But it's not only them, it's also Feral who didn't manage to work together with relic to get Multiplayer working. They might have this mentioned troubles because of the static game engine, but anyways, people could talk and there're possibilities like Github so they could collaborate and Feral could have sent in commits and so on.... Many possibilities, they took none and surrendered. It's a shame.
Kohrias Feb 13, 2018
I like the game. Sad to hear it didnt sell well.
fractal Feb 13, 2018
My 40k fanatic friend got bored of it within 3 hours and we both played DoW1 and 2 for hundreds of hours. It was a major disappointment for me as well, it's like every decision they made was the opposite of what I wanted from a 40k RTS:
- the art style looked nothing like the content of 40k codices, it's hard to describe, it's like they took the comical heroic proportions of objects in 40k and tried to made them more realistic while keeping the ridiculous gothic look and making everyones faces look like they're made of play dough
- the audio was ok at most, just as safe and bland as gameplay, it wasn't Jeremy Souls orchestra blasting away while the worlds best AND worst voice acting confirms my commands
- I'm not going to comment on gameplay as I played maybe through half of the campaign and a few skirmishes before giving up, what I saw was slow, safe and boring and felt like being designed so people coming in for the new experience won't get offended at being exposed to pesky RTS features. The peak of DoW for me was playing IG with a SM friend and pushing a bloody grinder forward against 4 AI Ork players teamed up against us. I got none of that in DoW2, but it was still pretty entertaining to coordinate our squad members to take down targets. In the meantime I got none of these with 3.

All of these things would have been forgiven if they finally ditched the skirmish level of gameplay. It made sense in DoW1 due to hardware limitations especially considering how pretty that game was on release, DoW2 was forgiven due to focusing on a mix of small squad gameplay with RPG elements all wrapped in a neat story. DoW3 kept the DoW2 scale with nothing that made DoW2 actually good while stripping features that made DoW1 stand out as an RTS.

What I would like to see, now that we have the hardware for it, is a DoW game that actually reflects at least some of the scale present in 40k lore with massive battles with hundreds of units, there's reasons why Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander are still considered to be some of the best RTS games despite not having much else to offer other than their grandiose (IMO). Less 5 man tactical squads, more Ultimate Apocalypse mod type gameplay. What I should note is that I have the same piece of criticism about CoH, nothing made me feel more immersed than taking Reichstag with 3 early war tanks and 20+ penal battalion troops.
omer666 Feb 13, 2018
Quoting: TheSHEEEP
Quoting: omer666So the rampant negativity won in the end. Well, whatever...
There's no rampant negativity here.
Just a game that's all-around pretty underwhelming, developed with a mystifying lack of vision or understanding of what people actually liked about the previous games and design decisions that are borderline inane (mobile-junk-like unit unlockables in my RTS game, no thanks).

Even developers themselves are aware of that.

"Professional" journos liked the game somewhat because they never really play games for long and are mostly just amazed by pretty or pretentious things.
Yeah, good old conspiracy theories about magazines getting paid for producing free advertising. That's why in France, Le Monde disliked it so much... As I said, I don't mind people not liking it. I have the feeling that user bashing prevented the game from having a second life, because there are things done right in this game.

Also, considering I love DoW III's game mechanics and that I hate MOBAs, well I come to the conclusion that I am an E.T. Which is fine, really.
Colombo Feb 13, 2018
QuoteYeah, good old conspiracy theories about magazines getting paid for producing free advertising.

Bullshit.

Its not a conspiracy theory, its a fact. Many people talked about it. If journalist won't write positive review, he might no longer get the pre-release copy to review. Which means that he might not be the first or one of the first to review it (since he will have to review it after release), which means that people waiting for said game will not buy that magazine for that review.
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