"And then it's also about putting ourselves in that science fantasy space. "Clarity wise, we're all about creating gameplay spaces you can understand, using brightness where it makes sense to draw attention about specific gameplay mechanics. "The art style is completely driven by that idea of clarity and the aspirational fantasy of the IP," Boulle said. The ideal situation is with a click they'll jump into cover, kick everybody out then capture that cover.
When everything is kicking off, being able to differentiate your Assault Terminators from other units on the battlefield is crucial, because you need to use them in such a reactive way. The teleport lets them relocate and disrupt enemies, and the hammer slam lets them clear enemies out of an area. They're a slow-moving, tough melee unit which act like tanks, but they're two abilities see them spring into action. This beam gains in size and power the more targets it vaporises, so you can imagine just how busy your average Dawn of War 3 scrap can become.ĭawn of War 3's new art style, then, is as much about helping the player make sense of all the on-screen chaos as it is making the game feel more responsive to your clicks.Īn example: one of the Space Marine's elite units (you pick three before each battle) is the Assault Terminators. And when you trigger the Space Marine's super-ability, the Orbital Bombardment, a laser fires from orbit. In a gameplay demo, I saw a large-scale battle with all the explosions and screen-shaking special abilities you'd expect, but things really took off when the huge Imperial Knight appeared on the battlefield. So the game moves faster and responds more quickly than it ever has before."ĭawn of War 3 fuses the massive armies and base building of Dawn of War 1 with the powerful hero units of Dawn of War 2 to create a hybrid RTS that really pops. That's one of the things previous games in the franchise have had a few problems in terms of, you would issue a command and there's very subtle things happening in terms of animation transitions, but the player doesn't really see those so it feels more sluggish than it should - or that the audience has every right to expect now. "And things like abilities execute more quickly and have less of a hidden windup. So when you click the animation starts, you get that feedback that okay, I'm moving, the audio cue comes in, the game tells you, yes, I understand that order and I'm starting to execute it. "She is slower than other units, but that's part of her gameplay. "Think of a large unit like the Imperial Knight," Boulle said. For Relic, a lot of it has to do with how quickly units respond to player commands, and how clearly those units tell the player they're responding. Responsiveness means different things to different people, of course. So, what's developer Relic going for with Dawn War 3? Game director Philippe Boulle told Eurogamer the new art style is all about making the game more responsive - and yes, that's an approach in part inspired by MOBAs.
There's less detail in each unit, too, particularly compared to the highly-detailed soldiers of Dawn of War 2, which sacrificed big armies and base-building for micro-management of hero units.
Dawn of War 3 arrives with big armies, base-building, massive elite units and a new art style that on the face of it looks a lot more cartoony than the previous games in the real-time strategy series.