The studio behind Iron Harvest was given the DoW franchise and they've been cooking. Slated to release next year they dropped the trailer and gave early access demo to some people. So far all the reviews have been extremely positive.
Trailer:
Early demo review:
Developer interview:
I have to say I haven't been more hyped for a game in a very long time.
Some features:
4 playable races at launch (SM, AdMech, Orks, Necrons). 4 separate campaigns forming an overarching story (written by established GW author John French). Multiplayer with ranked and custom games, Last Stand mode too. Seems like a mix of best features from DoW 1 & 2.
On August 22 2025 19:26 maybenexttime wrote: I can't see it becoming a major competitive RTS, tbh. Four races is a lot to balance. Adding more in expansions would be a nightmare. But we'll see.
WC3 is relatively balanced and all races won major tournaments back in the day.
On August 22 2025 19:26 maybenexttime wrote: I can't see it becoming a major competitive RTS, tbh. Four races is a lot to balance. Adding more in expansions would be a nightmare. But we'll see.
WC3 is relatively balanced and all races won major tournaments back in the day.
Wasn't Undead underperforming most of WC3's history? IIRC, there were a couple of Undead players who were winning major tournaments (MaDFroG comes to mind), whereas other races had a wide cast of well performing players.
On August 22 2025 19:26 maybenexttime wrote: I can't see it becoming a major competitive RTS, tbh. Four races is a lot to balance. Adding more in expansions would be a nightmare. But we'll see.
WC3 is relatively balanced and all races won major tournaments back in the day.
Wasn't Undead underperforming most of WC3's history? IIRC, there were a couple of Undead players who were winning major tournaments (MaDFroG comes to mind), whereas other races had a wide cast of well performing players.
There were times when some races were more dominant than others but typically each race could win at the highest level. It's often down to player skill alone (like Happy dominating WC3 as Undead for a long time now even though other UD players aren't faring as good). Sometimes there's also a period when a new dominant strat is introduced and it takes players a while to figure it out and stop the onslaught (like the recent pally/rifle for HU owning everything).
Overall the balance is fairly good in WC3.
Dawn of War 1 had 9 playable factions and there weren't that many imbalances.
Dawn of War 2 had 6 factions and the balance wasn't terrible either.
I also think that balancing so many factions is super difficult but I guess that if you have that many factions your goal in balancing is to simply not make one faction good vs all the others, this way even if you do have favorable matchups you also have some unfavorable ones so it balances itself out. Just need minor tweaks then so it's never a completely one sided roflstomp even in favored vs unfavored matchup. No need to go for perfect win ratio between all the factions.
And I don't know why you can't see it becoming a competitive RTS. DoW2 had a tournament match posted on YouTube no longer than 22 hours ago as of me posting this. The competitive scene for it isn't big but it's there and has been active for the past 16 years. I don't see a reason why DoW 4 can't also have a competitive scene if it's a well made game.
Any 40K game almost automatically gets a +1 from me to its rating. A weakness of mine.
But I think a good central gameplay loop, fun campaigns and multiplayer that’s at least decent, even if it’s not gonna replace Blizz games in my affection would be a pretty good result all-round
On August 23 2025 00:27 WombaT wrote: What is Last Stand mode?
In DoW2 it was 3 players PvE, each controlling a single hero and fighting waves of tougher and tougher enemies including boss rounds. You got to score points there (for rankings potentially) and also got xp so your hero "leveled up" (no stats increases or anything but you did meta-progression by unlocking more wargear options which changed your heroes stats and gave them different abilities so you could customize your hero in a myriad different ways - customization was before the game starts so once the game starts you're locked in to your build).
Cool and fun stuff, was quite popular and a lot of epic moments.
I remember once I built my hero to be high single target dps, for sniping big baddies but then there's one round where you're fighting your clones and if we didn't gank my clone first it would one-shot us all
On August 23 2025 00:27 WombaT wrote: What is Last Stand mode?
In DoW2 it was 3 players PvE, each controlling a single hero and fighting waves of tougher and tougher enemies including boss rounds. You got to score points there (for rankings potentially) and also got xp so your hero "leveled up" (no stats increases or anything but you did meta-progression by unlocking more wargear options which changed your heroes stats and gave them different abilities so you could customize your hero in a myriad different ways - customization was before the game starts so once the game starts you're locked in to your build).
Cool and fun stuff, was quite popular and a lot of epic moments.
I remember once I built my hero to be high single target dps, for sniping big baddies but then there's one round where you're fighting your clones and if we didn't gank my clone first it would one-shot us all
On August 23 2025 00:27 WombaT wrote: What is Last Stand mode?
In DoW2 it was 3 players PvE, each controlling a single hero and fighting waves of tougher and tougher enemies including boss rounds. You got to score points there (for rankings potentially) and also got xp so your hero "leveled up" (no stats increases or anything but you did meta-progression by unlocking more wargear options which changed your heroes stats and gave them different abilities so you could customize your hero in a myriad different ways - customization was before the game starts so once the game starts you're locked in to your build).
Cool and fun stuff, was quite popular and a lot of epic moments.
I remember once I built my hero to be high single target dps, for sniping big baddies but then there's one round where you're fighting your clones and if we didn't gank my clone first it would one-shot us all
nice, sounds like good news for co-op fans ^_^
There's also co-op campaign (not sure how this works but it's supposed to be there).
One thing that kinda blows my mind when I think about it is that they've made sync animations for close combat for every unit fighting every other unit (so your close combat will look different depending on what's fighting what).
Like this tomb spyder climbing the dreadnaught arm:
This is going to be awesome from the spectator point of view or when making montage videos.
Yeah, looks pretty good actually. I hope I can revise my statement about this becoming another failure.
On August 23 2025 07:12 Manit0u wrote:
There's also co-op campaign (not sure how this works but it's supposed to be there).
But there was a coop campaign in DoW2 already. I assume it will be similar. At least that's what I'm hoping because it was literally the only thing DoW2 had going for it.
King Art Games made Battleworld Kronos 13 years ago. If you like Advance Wars you might like BWK. It is on sale on Steam for $4. For such an old game it does not go on sale very often. To get an idea of the talent level of King Art Games....check it out. https://store.steampowered.com/app/237470/Battle_Worlds_Kronos/
Ok, buckle up 😉 In general, melee combat is kind of a big deal in DoW4. Units that focus on melee always have the disadvantage that they must reach the enemy before they can deal significant amounts of damage. To make them competitive, melee units on average deal more damage. But we also gave them the ability to “bind” enemies in melee. When units fight in melee they kind of “stick” together as long as one of the participating units wants to stay in melee (e.g. a weaker range unit can’t just run away, the melee units tries to keep them engaged).
Copying the Realms of Ruin melee lock mechanic is certainly a choice. Please tell me I'm misreading this.
Ok, buckle up 😉 In general, melee combat is kind of a big deal in DoW4. Units that focus on melee always have the disadvantage that they must reach the enemy before they can deal significant amounts of damage. To make them competitive, melee units on average deal more damage. But we also gave them the ability to “bind” enemies in melee. When units fight in melee they kind of “stick” together as long as one of the participating units wants to stay in melee (e.g. a weaker range unit can’t just run away, the melee units tries to keep them engaged).
Copying the Realms of Ruin melee lock mechanic is certainly a choice. Please tell me I'm misreading this.
Well, that has also been a part of Dawn of War since forever. If you engage in melee you typically can't just run away as easily because members of the unit get stuck in animation locks, knocked down, move slower etc.
Nothing new really.
And it also presents some interesting strategy choices. If you're heavily outgunned you can force one of your weaker shooting units to engage stronger shooting unit in melee and thus reduce your casualties etc.
EPT
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