Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Impressionist RTS!

Warcraft 2 planted the seeds of asymmetry in the RTS, offering up a series of almost identical units which, late game, could develop in dramatically different ways in line with the “theme” of their side. But Warcraft 2’s asymmetry was crude, if functional. It was a little lazy. Identical units would battle one another and have access to different upgrades. It wasn’t ground breaking by any means.

Fast forward to Starcraft, completely ignoring its long and painful design cycle and leaping right into its remarkable gameplay. This was the great rise of asymmetry. Three sides with very little in common, completely different play styles and progression through the game, and we can see the archetype upon which every modern RTS since has been based.

Starcraft was ground breaking for a number of reasons, but one of the most apparent to older gamers is that it completely changed the rules of how a game was made. No longer were identical sides with different unit skins the norm. Certainly games would keep using the outdated mirror model for some time, some, like Sword of the Stars, to great effect, but for the most part games after Starcraft have aspired to those impeccably balanced factions which have a very different play style from one another.

Sometimes the attempt is too blatant and ham handed. Relic’s first entry into the Dawn of War had dreams of asymmetry which were largely cosmetic and numeric. In fact, most of the units in the original Dawn of War feel very similar to one another. Not to say Dawn of War is a bad game; it just relies on subtle differences between units in order to make play interesting and balance factions. Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines (the units, not the faction) feel the same. Sure, they have access to different upgrades and their “stats” are different, but you pretty much use them in the same fashion.

Dawn of War 1, in its original manifestation at least, also tried to carry over a number of Starcraft’s tropes for better or worse; things like Zerg ground control bonuses and Protoss pylons. Before Dark Crusade it seemed a good amount more concerned with capturing the gimmicks of the previous generation than with coming into its own. It was a fun game, but it didn’t manage to wholly capture the schizophrenic personality that makes the Warhammer universe great.

Dawn of War II doesn’t have this problem, which is funny because this game has had every other problem imaginable. A population cap bug that occurred while reinforcing squads, something the game encourages you to do like nothing else, and would render the game unplayable, especially later on. A matching service which randomly drops, crashes, barely functions and seems to almost completely randomly bunch players together. A stat tracking mechanism which fails as often as it succeeds.

Many of these problems, to Relic’s credit, have been corrected, but Relic still published a multiplayer game with crippling bugs that rendered the entire thing largely unplayable. But even at least, I didn’t care. Because Dawn of War 2 is so god damn compelling.

It manages to deliver the sort of unique interplay of units that Starcraft brought to us so long ago, updated with an amazing physics engine and imbued with the amazing personality that makes Warhammer such a great intellectual property.

Playing each of Dawn of War 2’s factions is like playing a new game each time. The Eldar, for example, play an awful lot like more traditional RTS units. They have a weak general purpose unit which can be incredibly useful throughout the game, and they unlock specialist units who are excellent at killing one kind of target or fighting one kind of combat and awful at everything else. Orks, on the other hand, play like a gang of soccer rowdies, their slipshod units moving en masse, ham-handedly completely tasks. The Tyranids have a feel unlike any other race I’ve ever played in an RTS – including Starcraft’s Zerg, oddly enough. And the Space Marines play like a conventional tactical army – one very tough general purpose unit who can fight off the enemy for the entire game if used properly, and a whole mess of very tough specialist units who will “do in a pinch” if forced into new situations.

My point, with that long “review” of the races is that they’re all unique, and that this uniqueness extends past the little fiddly numbers attached to their units. When I play Tyranids I’m playing a different game than I am when I’m play Space Marines, because the races are possessed of such different mindsets and play styles.

The only thing that really compares to it is the original Starcraft, where each race was unique in both form and function. And this is the meat of the contemporary RTS. Games that discover and realize this tend to do well, and rightly so. They create compelling multiplayer narratives on the fly by letting the smaller pieces of the game interact in original ways, ways that can change dramatically based on the addition of various new tiny bits.

Sins of a Solar Empire does the same thing on a larger scale with far less accessibility, creating asymmetrical sides that fit together and constantly rebalance. I’d love to discuss Sins more, but I still haven’t played it. I’ve heard Tom Chick talk about it enough to feel like I’ve spent several years on its professional circuit (yes, I know it’s from 2007) but by all appearances it upholds the tradition of what makes great RTSes great.

And Dawn of War 2 does so as well, in an absolutely brilliant way. Its fiddly bits, as Tom Chick would say, interact in interesting and original ways. And these fiddly bits all feel very different, act very different, and fit together impeccably. Add to this delicious chocolate interior the delightful candy shell of Company of Heroes’ revamped and improved cover system and you have what could be the best multiplayer RTS since Warcraft 3.

Not every game has to have this wonderful asymmetry in order to be fun. Homeworld and Sword of the Stars both almost completely avoided it and those games were still amazing. But multiplayer games that can sustain themselves tend to be designed around this principle of interlocking, irregular pieces.

Starcraft had it, Myth had it, Warcraft 3 had it, and Dawn of War 2 is the latest game to bring it to bear. And it’s well worth spending time with while you wait for Starcraft 2 to come out and do it again, in another wonderful, original way.