Dawn of War 3 Open Beta Impressions
Dawn of War is my favorite RTS franchise and the third game is right around the corner with 5 more days to go before full release. Relic decided to test the servers pre launch and we have been offered to try out the game and test it. I've been testing the game for three days now and here are my initial thoughts about the game.
First I need to mention the hardware requirements, DoW 3 is very hardware hungry game and without 8Gb of Ram, i5 or Ryzen 5 processor and decent GPU forget about high and ultra settings. My PC is having trouble with this game and I'm really thinking of upgrading to new mid range PC.
Beta is Multiplayer only and there is only one mode available that clearly took some elements from Moba games, main objective is to destroy the power generator, turrets and the main core. Other than that, this is full on RTS game and things tend to get crazy pretty fast while playing. Armies and production buildings are using standard RTS formula, expand, upgrade, mass armies and destroy the objective.
There are three resources available, Requisition, Power and Relic Points. Relic points is where this game becomes very interesting, they unlock Epic units, best new feature by far in the game. Every faction can chose between 9 Epic units and take 3 of them into the battle, and they are insanely strong and can turn the tide of many battles. One more interesting feature for the multiplayer are the Doctrines, passive abilities that can improve some of your units, and you can pick three of them just like Epic units. Epic units and Doctrines add complex layer of strategic choices for the multiplayer games and can increase the longevity of the game.
One issue I had since the announcement of the Down Of War 3 is that the game only has three factions, compared to four factions every Down of War game had before this one it is disappointing to see only three, that feature was one of the anchors of this franchise. Why did the relic go with only three basic armies I really don't know, and while playing the beta you can feel that something is missing. Space Marines, Orks and Eldar are the available races, generic and basic races, no balls there from Relic. We will need to wait for DLC's and expansions for some of the more interesting factions like Chaos, Necrons, Imperial Guard or Tau. Available races could be interesting for the new players.
To conclude, I had a lot of fun playing and testing the beta release, but this is not what I wanted to see from my favorite franchise with main issues being only three races, lack of standard multiplayer mode (all we have is this Moba/RTS hybrid mode), no more sync kills and the game is way too hardware hungry, you can see why I'm slightly disappointed. It is a good game regardless and I will play the hell out of it. Stay tuned for my full release review with singleplayer campaign and more multiplayer games one week from now.
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