Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising

It has been some time since I last played a Warhammer 40,000 game, and even longer since I played Dawn of War II. Thus I decided to replay the original campaign the standalone expansion Chaos Rising comes with as well. To remind myself how it was and also because you can import your save into CR's campaign and have maybe slightly better equipment at the beginning.

What I definitely did not remember happening in DoW2 were the stability issues I encountered. While my new machine had no trouble actually running the game at 60 FPS on ultra settings, the loading times got worse the more missions I played over one session. And then there were the moments of screen going black for couple seconds at least once in every missions. Those usually resolved without a crash while the game violently loaded something from the hard drive for a moment or two.

Trying to change the game's settings usually caused a crash (every time if I had played a mission first) with the error message suggesting an old version of DirectX being the cause. The options menu also has no vsync option and instead you have to enable it from an .ini file. Which I did as the game pushed over 1000 FPS while not in a mission and my computer's fans were going crazy.

I of course tried to find a solution to the technical issues. There were different opinions on the possible cause and some solutions but none that truly worked. Some thought the problems were caused by playing the game on Intel/Nvidia hardware as the game was -- judging by the company logo intros -- developed closely with AMD and ATI. I guess that is possible as my old computer has an AMD CPU and I do not recall it having problems. Although it also has an Nvidia GPU.

In the end, tuning down the graphics options to medium reduced the ridiculous loading times but the blackouts still happened every once in a while. Until at some point they simply stopped for no apparent reason and I played through the rest of campaigns without issues. Computers are weird.

As for what comes to the actual content of the expansion, Chaos Rising introduces the Chaos faction to the game as the name suggests. All the familiar characters are back to fight the heretics and corruption that threaten the sector and the Blood Ravens chapter. Not only is there a traitor among the fourth company, evidently the chapter master, Azariah Kyras, too, has been corrupted. The future of Blood Ravens sure looks grim.

The presence of Chaos also affects the game mechanics. Each squad has a corruption meter that affects their powers at certain thresholds. Some wargear also requires certain level of corruption to be used. You can of course try to resist the corruption -- staying pure in the eyes of the Emperor gives bonuses to squads as well. The game has four possible endings, depending on your corruption level and actions throughout the game.

I really liked the campaign of Chaos Rising. In addition to the mechanics being tied to the story, it is also more concise than the vanilla one -- there are no endlessly spawning optional missions. The lack of annoying boss fights was a bonus as well.

There is also a new character to control, Jonah Orion, a librarian. He brings in multitude of different psychic powers -- if you take him on a mission that is. I am not quite certain he is useful enough to replace one of your four units. Maybe if there had been terminator armor for him to use I would have fielded the librarian more.

The old characters also get more traits. I can now see why I have seen people claiming the scout sergeant, Cyrus, being so good in multiplayer. I even fielded him few times voluntarily during the campaign. Much to my liking, Chaos Rising also adds purple items, and Avitus (the devastator sergeant) finally got a replacement for his Never-Ending Hail of Devastation that I had again acquired.

I read my Dawn of War II post from years back and noticed I had not mentioned the amount of baby-sitting you need to do in the game. Maybe it did not bother me back then or I forgot about it, but it certainly got annoying now. Namely the squads in melee stance should be more aggressive in reacting to being attacked. Multiple times I found either my commander or the assault terminator squad just passively sitting in the open while enemies were safely shooting them from range.

Another gripe I had was how the tactical squad -- in either power or terminator armor -- does not appear very effective. They seemed to mostly stay in their idle animation and only occasionally taking shots with their bolters. I think they should be constantly firing if there is an enemy to shoot at. Their guns have rapid-fire after all.

Also, why do the screenshots seem to have more jpeg artifacts than usual? I wonder if it is because of Steam or the game.