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Okay, so Retribution has come and gone, and the Blood Ravens Space Marines storyline is over - the Big Bad is dead, the Chapter had survived, and their recruiting worlds had been saved from destruction. With Relic currently focusing their efforts in creating a 3rd Person shooter, Warhammer 40000 Space Marine (which disappointingly don't have a cover system ), no Dawn of War games are coming out anytime in the near future until that too is done and dusted

So what now for the Dawn of War series? What should be the plot for the next Dawn of War game? Which factions should appear? What part of the gameplay needs to be fixed? What should be added or taken away?

Personally, I think we should see new Space Marine Chapters other then the Blood Ravens -like the Ultramarines, Black Templars, Blood Angels, or Space Wolves. Maybe a new Eldar campaign could be made that continues the whole Taldeer - Necron location storyline that first popped up in Retribution. Maybe we could see more factions coming up like in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm (minus the crap for Soulstorm. I mean, which idiots wrote Soulstorm anyway?). So, any ideas?

No smurfs. No crazy templars, no crazy vampires, no crazy vikings, no. Create another new Chapter, because old chapters already have plenty of fluff.

Other than that I really don't have much preference. They'll release three or four races first, one of them will be SPACE MARINES, they'll get Orks, Eldar, and Chaos in there eventually, oh and Guard too. They've got a formula and it works, no need to go changing it around too much.

SpaceMarine93 wrote:Warhammer 40000 Space Marine (which disappointingly don't have a cover system

You're a fucking Space Marine, cover hides behind you!

Seriously, Space Marines shouldn't be going around hiding behind chest high concrete walls because the concrete wall is in no way as durable as the armour the Marine is wearing. Space Marine should feel like Dawn of War 2 did when you were in power armour, cover wasn't something you hid behind, it was something you walked through on the way to where you wanted to be.

"You're a fucking Space Marine, cover hides behind you!"

Not really - it doesn't follow the tabletop rules that allows cover, and even a space marine can't take a direct rocket / bolt blast from an Ork gun. And I think in the lore the Space Marine's Codex Astarte forbids charging headlong into a stream of fire like a complete idiot. Honor should not overwrite tactical sense.

The lack of a cover system would make this inferior to the Gears of War games

I Do like a lot of the elements that DOW2 brought to the table but I still wish for some epic battles like in the first DOW. I especially thought they killed it in Dark crusade when you were limited by what you could build, that was what made DOW and Winter Assault so fun, army customization! after that your just stuck building the set army limited by a few tanks......-.- I remember building an entire army of Ogrins or Kasikrins backed up by 4 or 5 Leman Russ tanks and a Baneblade, now that was awesome....

Well enough ranting as far as what they will do, they probably have another expansion or two slated for after Retribution, As far as the race it will probably be Tau or Necrons, they already wore out the main bad guys (orks, chaos, nids) so Necrons or maybe dark Eldar for the main threat.

Also I havent quite finished the campaign as I am playing co-op with a friend so I may have mispoke abnout the main baddies..... but dont let me know if it is someone new.

Maybe. Though personally I prefer Epic 40000 style skirmish / campaigns with lots and lots of units, I would think it is a bit too risky to implement. Players may get overwhelmed, it would destabilize the gameplay and wreck balance between actions, it would crash the game etc. I think that's the reason they implemented the quota system in Dark Crusade in the first place.

SpaceMarine93 wrote:Maybe. Though personally I prefer Epic 40000 style skirmish / campaigns with lots and lots of units, I would think it is a bit too risky to implement. Players may get overwhelmed, it would destabilize the gameplay and wreck balance between actions, it would crash the game etc. I think that's the reason they implemented the quota system in Dark Crusade in the first place.

Well that didn’t limit the total number of units just the types you could built which means they did it just for balancing issues, but at the same time it seems like they could have left the customization and balancing in place, I don’t want it to be like supreme commander or anything but even with the old table top you had way more units in play than what’s in DOW2, I can honestly say the best thing they came up with in 2 was The Last Stand, other than that, meh.

SpaceMarine93 wrote: Not really - it doesn't follow the tabletop rules that allows cover, and even a space marine can't take a direct rocket / bolt blast from an Ork gun. And I think in the lore the Space Marine's Codex Astarte forbids charging headlong into a stream of fire like a complete idiot. Honor should not overwrite tactical sense.

Remeber that the tabletop game isn't even slightly intended to be fluff accurate.

Also, protip: The presence or otherwise of snap-to cover does not make one game better or worse than another. It's how the whole system meshes together that actually determines whether the game is good. Gears of War's cover system works well because of how it blends in with all of the other elements of the game, and because despite being build like the wide end of a barn Marcus Fenix is still a guy wearing light armour susceptible to small arms fire, not a superman in armour that can stand up to automatic RPG fire.

It simply does not make sense for a Space Marine to be taking cover in the way you do in Gears of War (or even in Dawn of War), because they are very literally tougher than anything available to hide behind.

Collossus wrote:I remember building an entire army of Ogrins or Kasikrins backed up by 4 or 5 Leman Russ tanks and a Baneblade, now that was awesome....

The trouble is that there was no incentive not to spend your entire popcap on one or two unit types. Once you could build kasrkin you would never think about building a guardsman squad again, and the endgame turns into "who can build more of X" rather than who can use their troops more effectively.

Hardcapping the high end units not only makes it easier to balance the various forces (a serious problem already with so many, and not one that was ever really solved in DoW) it also means that the game isn't just "spam Russes" (or local equivalent) but is actually about using those two that you've built to maximum effect, deciding which leader to attach to which of the limited elite squads, etc.

I always found the dawn of wars endgame turned into a bums rush of the best unit available. It just gets dull.

And yeah. Space marines shouldn't be taking cover, they should be walking towards the enemy, singing the emperors praises and shooting Orks in the face. Hell, the main reason they wear such bright colours is so that the enemy can see them coming and shit themselves.

I reckon they'll follow the DOW1 pattern and release one more expansion, shoehorning in a new race or two. I dunno about Necrons, as reportedly they're due to receive an updated tabletop army soon, and I'm not sure if Relic would want to work it's schedule around that or not. Tau would probably suit the DOW2 style of gameplay quite well, and if not them then perhaps Dark Eldar.

A DOTA equivalent? With The Last Stand being as successful as it is, I can see how they might want to implement a hero variant. Simply by spamming 5 heroes from each "race", you could get a large and interesting hero stable.

Fire Warrior 2.

This from the guy who hates Tau wank? Really?

I wouldn't mind another FPS in the 40K verse, but maybe an IG-focus for the next one.

I still want Chaos Gate 2.

Could even use the Silent Storm engine.

Honestly, I'm far more interested in how Dark Millennium Online turns out than Space Marine or the continuation of DoW.

I love me some Black Templars.

I think a DotA game would be a waste, personally the game isn't finely balanced as is and that game type needs at least good or better balance to work. Not to mention that LoL, HoN, DotA, or SCII DotA are already out there and doing it well.

General Schatten wrote:Honestly, I'm far more interested in how Dark Millennium Online turns out than Space Marine or the continuation of DoW.
I love me some Black Templars.

Cynically, it's going to be World of Warcraft in Spaaaaaaace.

And people are going to install it, play it for a couple months, realise it doesn't actually do anything they weren't already getting from WoW, and go back to WoW where they already have level 80s and can play the endgame content.

This is the curse of games trying to break WoW's hold on the market, they don't do anything to distance themselves from the thing they're trying to unseat, so they have no competitive advantage, and a significant disadvantage in that WoW has been on the market for ages and is now incredibly feature rich.

This is also why you hear the excuse that "Well WoW didn't have X when it launched either.", missing the point that you aren't competing with it when it launched, you're competing with it now, so you need to be better than it is now, or no-one will play your game.

Do other MMOs really die that fast? I was looking into TOR because of the story-based content, but if it's just going to turn into a ghost town after a few months I won't bother.

Makes me wish I'd gotten into WoW on the ground floor. There's so much end-game content now that I just wouldn't be able to catch up.

That depends what you mean. The progress to endgame is way faster and less tiresome than it was back in the day, so getting into the 60+ stuff isn't going to take you six months or anything. You'll never catch up to the gear/etc that the highend guys have, but this is true of all MMOs five seconds after they go live.

As for the 40k MMO, I'd like to hope that it's something fresh and new, but even the rather well done Rifts didn't catch my attention one bit because in spite of the crazy class combos it still played like WoW.

Stark wrote:That depends what you mean. The progress to endgame is way faster and less tiresome than it was back in the day, so getting into the 60+ stuff isn't going to take you six months or anything. You'll never catch up to the gear/etc that the highend guys have, but this is true of all MMOs five seconds after they go live.

I brought it up in the Cataclysm thread too, and somebody mentioned that it would be difficult to get groups together to do old story content or raids like Naxxramas or Illidan.

True, but the only reason to do them is nostalgia or curiosity. The gear you get from doing quests killing high-level mobs far outclasses what you'd get there, and they are not end-level content now that the end is 5 or 15 levels higher.

Vendetta wrote:Cynically, it's going to be World of Warcraft in Spaaaaaaace.

They've released enough for us to know they're not doing that, explicitly the inclusion of FPS mechanics.

Darksider wrote:This from the guy who hates Tau wank? Really?

I wouldn't mind another FPS in the 40K verse, but maybe an IG-focus for the next one.

You thought I was being serious? I hadn't even played Fire Warrior 1. I do like the novelization though.

I probably should have posted a smiley, but I thought it would ruin the effect.