Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III (Revisited)

For a few years, I had been wondering why the number of games I had achievements in wasn't matching between my Steam library and the achievement showcase on my profile: the showcase had 2 games more than I could find. Late last year the mystery finally started to unravel. I had figured that by playing Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III during a free weekend back in 2017, it had been added to my permanent achievements record, even though I had had access to the game only temporarily. And that indeed proved to be the case when I bought the game from a sale and it came with partial completion -- kind of mean for Steam to be like that.

Return to the worst Dawn of War

And thus, on my quest to get my average game completion rate on Steam to as high as possible -- the ultimate goal being the still achievable 99% -- I forced myself to actually beat the panned sequel. Fortunately this third game is at least more straightforward an ordeal than Dawn of War II and its expandalones which each have all kinds of problematic co-op and multiplayer achievements if you want to 100% them. (I have not -- at least not yet.) Dawn of War III you merely have to beat on its Hard difficulty (unlocking 3 difficulty achievements at a time for each of its 17 missions) and then grind all the elite units to the maximum level of 10.

The grind is not a casual task: an incredibly time-consuming undertaking, in fact, if you were to do it as the numbnuts at Relic Entertainment intended. The community has stepped in, however, to fix the ridiculousness and created an elite grinder map which combined with the XP Mod allows you to max out 3 elites at a time in a single custom online game. It took few games for me to understand how to make sure all three elites were getting enough experience but eventually the process became smooth. I actually needed the XP Mod to get any experience on the elites at all: for whatever reason, all their progress bars were stuck in the campaign. In addition to all its other faults, Dawn of War III turned out to be buggy as well.

Not any better than in 2017

I went through a list of the game's problems on my post many years ago already but there are few things I could add -- and repeat. One of the things I still disliked is how quickly your army disappears. The Hard difficulty may have added to that this time but it's still stupid how units are dead in the blink of an eye. The campaign does allow manual saving in addition to the few autosaves if you feel unsure how an attack will go. If you manage to completely botch it, just reload a save to avoid rebuilding your whole army. Sometimes the save and load buttons are grayed out for some inexplicable reason.

I feel Dawn of War III relies too much on active abilities for units to be most effective. It's like a remnant from the second game but this one has a whole army of units instead of 4 squads. It's way too much to presume a player to cycle through 20 squads to use their abilities. The majority of army doctrines just add more active abilities to the field. The Space Marine Whirlwind also requires manual firing for every single shot! And the Orks could easily have their scrap gathering be automatic if there's a pile close to them: no need for that thing to require so much micromanagement.

Units should have a toggleable aggressiveness setting so that they could automatically defend themselves instead of standing there when they're being fired from beyond their range -- which for melee units is any range. Due to their slightly superior range, an Eldar Shadow Spectre unit, for instance, will kill a Tactical Marine squad unopposed lest the marine player does something. And that is quite frustrating.

Looking at what I wrote about the Dawn of War II expansions, it seems this development started there already, Retribution having normal army units in addition to your hero squads. The same passiveness of the units was a thing in the second game as well. I had forgotten about that.

I don't remember if the previous games allowed you to customize controls and I wouldn't have needed this one to do that either. However, it still would have been nice to see what buttons there are. The first game had . select your builder unit (I remembered that even after all these years) but that didn't seem to work here. I suppose the manual has the buttons listed but they could have included it in-game, too.

Not good enough gameplay for the MOBA hero focus

There was more variation to the campaign's missions than I had expected. Some of them severely limit what units you have, and in the final mission you have only three heroes to play with. That could've been fun if all the heroes had at least three abilities and/or they synergized with each other somehow. Movement speed could've been faster too -- man, if it's annoying when a hero unit gets surrounded by some weak multi-model unit that has faster movement speed.

The final mission turned out to be the most difficult one, particularly the final part. The mission features Daemon Bloodletters that need to be completely wiped out, I guess with two hero abilities at the same time, when they're at like 2 models left or they will teleport away and heal back to full strength. I got through a boss phase with 1 Bloodletter squad surviving and who then proceeded to be an absolute headache in the following phase. Because your heroes will respawn eventually as long as one of them is still up, it is possible to cheese things by trapping the boss -- and possibly other enemy units -- in Macha's Temporal Weave until respawn timers for the defeated heroes are up. Macha is pretty squishy, though, so that trick is risky to execute.

There's a post-credits Necron teaser but that never came to realization with Dawn of War III due to the game faceplanting so hard. The first Dawn of War just got a remaster but I think I played that game plenty enough back in the day already; sharper visual not enough of a reason to buy it anytime soon.

Dawn of War IV was also announced. Instead of Relic, it will be by KING Art, the developers of Iron Harvest. It should be interesting to see how the game turns out. It will have a bit curious at-release selection of factions: Space Marines, Orks, Necrons, and Adeptus Mechanicus.

Oh, yeah: the other missing imperfect Steam game turned out to be Q.U.B.E: Director's Cut, which I had also played during a free weekend -- a fact I was reminded of when randomly reading my post about the game. I picked that game, too, from a sale to get it to 100%. That involved mostly playing its challenge maps. Some oddly thought-out achievement grinds there: 10,000 power-ups collected is way over-tuned. Maybe they thought a player wouldn't look up the routes for beating the secret developer record times and thus set the grindy achievement numbers in the ballpark of such a case. Beating record times is meaningful but collecting power-ups and such just for the sake of it afterwards is definitely not.