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Written by BevoBoy
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Monday, 14 July 2008 19:16 |
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In light of gameh0lic's article of
Nintendo milking all their franchises I felt that we should take a
look at the biggest dairy farmer of them all, Relic Entertainment's
Dawn of War (or better known simply as DoW, kinda like another cash
cow: WoW). As a huge fan of the RTS genre I try to play every
major RTS that my grubby hands can get on. One game that has
continued to elude my grasp is DoW. The reason simply is
because of the ridiculous initial investment required to play the
"full game." Call it whatever you want: episodic
content, expansion packs, semi-sequels... this tactic of selling bite
sized morsels of gameplay is milking at its finest. And why not
milk? You combine a vast gameworld with a rabid fanbase and get
gallons of vitamin-D organic. I guess it all started with the MMO's
(as do many other trends which are detrimental to society). The
granddaddy of them all, EverQuest started releasing expansion packs
to quell the ubernerds who hit the level cap in a matter of weeks.
To see the cool new items and lands you had to buy the
expansion and then another expansion... and so on. Sony Online
Entertainment now had two streams of revenue: the monthly service
fees AND the profits from expansion sales, why would they want to
stop? MMO-ers are the biggest crack addicts of them all. No
matter the price, playing becomes service with inelastic demand. It
is quite easy to see how this is an awesome formula for the bigwigs
up top.
Unfortunately, this formula is starting to creep into
other genres and DoW is the spearhead. DoW has a vast gameworld
based on the Warhammer 40K tabletop universe; it probably tops Magic
the Gathering in sheer numbers of factions and units. And much
like MTG, DoW has a very rabid fanbase. These are the guys who
claim DoW is superior to StarCraft in gameplay *cough* bullshit
*cough*. (These are also the same guys who spend their Friday nights
painting miniature Necron figurines in their basements). So
getting back on topic, the orignal DoW came with 4 factions (3 if you
consider the Space Marines and the Chaos Space Marines to be pretty
similar). The game itself was very good, albeit a bit short. Relic
saw an opportunity and released their first expansion: Winter
Assault. Then we got Dark Crusade and Soulstorm. Each subsequent
expansion had less and less creativity and you could clearly make
references to recycled Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and Dan brothers for inspiration.
Hell, the Sisters of Battle are basically the Imperial Guard with
breasts. If you were gonna make Imperial Guards with breasts, at
least you could've made them a bit sexier. When it's all said
and done, you have spent around $200 on a single game that's about to
be 5 years old. But hey, it's your money. If you want to encourage
publishers to engage in these activities, go right ahead. Me,
I'll be playing Brood War which recently received a free patch to
remove the necessity of having a disc in the drive.
Not completely related, but 4 cities
and 4 classes were also cut from the Warhammer MMO .
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 15 July 2008 08:36 )
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