Guess what? It's here!

There's something about this image that reminds me of Nicholas Cage...

I wrote a brief post a few months back (or was it last year? I can't recall anymore...) talking about how I was introduced to Dawn of War and the Warhammer 40,000 universe in general. It was a chance encounter with a box copy of the game (back when they still had box copies of PC games) at a local Best Buy that hooked me on this strange and over-the-top franchise.

Now, over 15 years later, they've remastered the game that I've spent so many hundreds of hours playing through. But I have to wonder...

Is it really any different?

I have no idea. I didn't buy it.

However

I've seen some of the gameplay for it and it certainly seems...updated. Like, the lighting looks better (within the limitations of the engine) and the camera can zoom out much further so that it's not stuck to the ground.

Definitive Edition

Dawn of War: Soulstorm (Original)

Looking at them side by side, there does seem to be a bit more visual clarity or crispness to the Definitive Edition of the game. In in-game, I suppose the game runs a bit more smoothly, although this has some conflicting reports. Some players have run into issues with framerate drops, especially when many units appear on screen at once. This is concerning since performance was one of the main things that drew my attention to this game. Sure, the enhanced textures are niceties, but it wouldn't be a whole lot better than looking at screenshots if it didn't run well.

One of the biggest issues with the original game was that it was a 32-bit program, meaning the game was limited to around 4GB of RAM, and the engine was coded to use single core CPUs

Those technical limitations would prevent the game from utilizing modern hardware, and cause mods to chug, especially larger ones like Unification and Ultimate Apocalypse. The developers of this remaster promised that they were going to update the engine to improve its performance on modern hardware, but it seems like it falls a bit short on that end. Maybe it's just something nested too deeply into the aging engine. Maybe we just didn't anoint enough scrolls to appease the machine spirit.

The game unfortunately has some setbacks preventing me from fully committing to a purchase.

That being said, this whole release actually led me to reinstall the original game and reminisce about older times, back when I had plenty of hours in the day to spend mucking about on skirmish matches against bots.

The Dawn

I think one of the main things that really drew me in to this game originally was how chunky and unapologetically over-the-top everything was. The units did not have normal human proportions. Everything was loud. The soldiers, these Space Marines, spoke with such zeal and fervor, that to this day I can still hear their voice lines clearly in my mind. The battles were large-scale. Spawning a unit usually wasn't just one, but an entire squad of soldiers. They would play visceral melee finisher animations when killing enemies, and bodies would explode into chunks.

There was also the strange vocabulary of the universe. Why were these soldiers called Librarians and why can they shoot lightning bolts? Why are their builder units these strange, half-human, half-robot slaves? Why, if they are so futuristic and high-tech, do their warmachines and buildings look like Catholic churches?

In short, it just felt different and made me want to learn more about the lore and the universe. I began reading up on the background of these characters on the WH40k Lexicanum. Read all about the Horus Heresy and the splitting of the Legions into different Chapters. Read about the various alien races and all of their intricacies. I must've spent dozens of hours over the course of that summer back in 2012 just reading this stuff in between schoolwork.

And of course the game.

The game ate up so much of my time, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't think any other game has captured my attention as much, besides probably TES: Oblivion or Garry's Mod. I loved to play the skirmish matches, setting up impossible battles between me and my friend (at the time, we shared a single copy and just played co-op in LAN matches).

I booted up the original game again the other day once this remaster released. I was originally just planning on testing out some things to compare the performance and visuals to the new game, but I found myself absorbed into a couple of matches. Just like that, it was as if I never left.