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elevatorelevenhatesyou · 2 years

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Unification Is All Goddamn Over The Place

I need to yell at another popular thing. This time it's a fan made mod for this old strategy game called Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War, specifically the Soulstorm expansion.

The last few months have been a fucking nightmare. I've sunk deeply into an old project to keep myself busy.

I made a personal mod for this game called Dawn of War. It started as a simple idea. We always wished that Imperial Guardsmen would stand closer together in their formations so that more of them could be stacked in a tight defensive line.

One day I decided, well I've heard of mods for this game, maybe I could figure out how that shit worked. So I did, and it was a long and often painfully tedious and frustrating process that involved dealing with a lot of stupid problems that didn't make any sense, as is always the case with modding things, or with programming in general. But it paid off, and I made guardsmen stand closer together.

From there it just kept snowballing. We would be playing against the computer and would say things like "I feel like X should be stronger", or "Why can you only have one Y?" or "It'd be neat if you could do Z," and then I would go AH HA! I SHALL MAKE IT SO, WITH MY MOD POWERS!

And after several years of this, the result is something that's quite an expansion on the original Dawn of War: Soulstorm. I've added some new units, tons of new abilities, and changed hundreds of other little things, and I polished it all a great deal with custom icons and tooltips and that, because it didn't feel complete otherwise.

But there was always this looming shadow just out of my sight range. For the longest time I'd heard mention of other major mods for Dawn of War. Mods that added whole new races, with custom models and some even with their own voice acting, with expansive new AI tactics. Names like Titanium Wars, Ultimate Apocalypse, Firestorm Over Kronus, Dawn of War Redux, or the much more succinctly titled Tyranids Mod.

It adds the Tyranids, you see.

I never tried any of that though, because I wasn't interested in opening that can of worms. I have no ability to make models or rig animations, and coding is horrifying witchcraft to me. A while ago, though, I decided I'd give a few of those big mods a look, starting with the mod of mods, Dawn of War: Unification. Maybe I could find stuff to steal.

Unification is a little less of its own alteration project and more of a big tool that combines a whole bunch of New Race mods into one big single thing, and I'd seen some article headlines lying around gaming websites saying things like 'Unification mod breathes new life into this fifteen year old game' or some such, and it always would feature prominently on various "top x best Dawn of War mods you should totally try out" lists.

Turns out Unification sucks and I hate it.

Like holy shit. What an ungodly mess it is.

Firstly I should say, I haven't looked into the credits at all, and each of, or at least some of, these new races was a separate mod before being compiled into Unification, so when I shit talk Unification in general, I'm not specifically blaming anybody in particular because I don't know who was responsible for what. I won't name any names, because I don't know any. When I use "they" or "the authors" or "the creators" or what have you, I'm only referring to whoever was making the given part I'm currently talking about, and I'll try not to make sweeping statements as though a single group of people did everything.

Secondly, I'm aware I'm talking about a free mod for a really old video game. You might say well it's just groups of fans, these are made by like at best indie developers, it's all passion projects, don't you think you're being really harsh here?

To which I say I USED THE SAME FUCKIN SOAP YOU DID As mentioned I have a mod project of my own, it started years ago, recently picked it back up, been working on it basically nonstop for the past three or four months because it's really comfortable busywork for my hands to occupy all the parts of my mind that otherwise won't shut the fuck up about how worthless I am as a person.

I'm not sure if it's frustrating or gratifying that other modders have had bunch of the same ideas I had, like adding conscript squads to the Imperial Guard or Retributors to the Sisters of Battle. I hadn't planned on ever making like a public release of the thing I've made, it's just something to play by myself or with my brother and a buddy or two, but maybe I SHOULD try turning it into a big public downloadable thing, since I've now seen some of the competition and it was so jarringly terrible that it somehow made me hate myself less, which I didn't even know could happen. Maybe I can supplant Unification and become lord of Dawn of War mods and then my fanfiction ideas will get so popular they get written into the Warhammer 40,000 canon, and then all the money will be mine and I won't need to get a fucking job, Mom!

anyway

PART 1

WHAT'S THIS GUY? HE IS UGLY!

Despite what I just said about not making sweeping statements, I do have to say there are a few problems that seem to be omnipresent throughout, or at least throughout most everything but the Witch Hunters. The Witch Hunters one is pretty solid.

I think I can say as a general summary: It's mostly highly technically proficient with no taste whatsoever. Great effort was put into things that should not have been done, and not enough effort was put into polish or actual game design.

Spelling errors? For real?

"He" is the only leader they'll accept, even though that looks and sounds like a woman.

Overindulgence is a recurring theme. I'll start with the User Interface because that seems like the least important thing to complain about.

The UI is ugly. It's hideous. I mean obviously ugly comes down to personal taste, but this goes past that because this is seriously so busy that it interferes with one's ability to actually read the buttons.

So many details, so much contrast, everything is a mess of high saturation colors.

I did not edit any of these images, this is how it looks in the actual mod. This insane loud blaring shitty nightmare.

Here's what the game looks like normally, by the way, without fanwank all over it.

Why are the icons changed? I mean first of all, why did you even bother to do this? Secondly, why did you make them worse? They're just ugly and obtrusive now like everything else that was changed for no reason! So obtrusive that it actually damages my ability to concentrate on the game, in two ways. A, it's the first impression a new player gets, and boy is it negative when it looks this messy and stupid, and it is stupid because B, it actually obscures other parts of the UI, which is such an unbelievably boneheaded and amateurish thing to do that I can't quite believe it's still like this. Did I miss a patch or something? The files on ModDatabase seemed pretty recent.

This does not inspire confidence in the rest of the mod. AH HA, turns out the interface WASN'T the least important after all! But people might THINK it was the least important because they think it has no tangible effect on gameplay! Except it DOES! Because it affects the feel of the whole experience when you're playing a game that might take hours and a lot of it is about careful management but part of your visual cortex is screaming the whole time about WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BIG ORANGE BLOB DOWN HERE, IT POPS OUT SO MUCH AGAINST THE REST OF THE BACKDROP, DO I HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO THAT!? and it's sucking up some of your concentration without you even knowing it! This shit is exactly why nobody can remember anything that happens in Michael Bay movies! Where was that bit of Lindsay Ellis explaining this shit..

Continuing with the theme of ugliness and lack of taste, on to the custom 3D models for new units and buildings.

Gotta say first, some of these custom models are amazing. I really like the look of some of these buildings, especially Thousand Sons.

Not all of them though.

Yikes.

Are these imported from Tera Online? I mean Tera IS a monument to Slaanesh, but still, you don't think this is really out of place?

The naked lady mannequin mounted on this guy’s pauldron is a nice touch, but her head is literally always clipping through his back spiky thing.

is that desmond miles

Animations especially are almost uniformly bad. And I mean, I'm sure this shit's hard, but like.. I don't think it's unreasonable to say wow this looks gross. This is a janky mess, and sometimes some animations are even missing entirely.

Lots of models scrape along the ground when they move because their walk cycles don't sync up properly with their speed.

I don't know much about 3D modelling so I can't really articulate in detail why some look good and most look bad, but some of them are really good, and not just the ones that are taken from Dawn of War 2.

Even though I'm about to go on a huge tangent about how many goddamn Space Marines there are, there's actually been some real work put into making some of these chapters look distinct. Black Templars, Blood Angels, and Space Wolves Thirteenth Company could use a bit more maybe, but a bunch of Dark Angels have hoods or cloaks, and most of the Imperial Fists have big clunky heavier looking helmets and armor. The Thousand Sons are all angular and weird. And of course, the World Eaters and Emperor's Children are covered in garbage because they're all fuckin crazy.

Good stuff.

Anyone want to take a second pass at some of these Daemons of Chaos models though? Please? They are awful. I think they may have been awful for a very long time. Does anyone care? No? You're all too busy making even more fucking space marines? Ahkay.

PART 2

THE "I'M SICK OF SPACE MARINES" TANGENT

This is more of a thing I have against the state of Warhammer 40,000 in general than against these mods specifically, though I can still level it at them too. Literally more than half of the playable races in this thing are some form of space marine. Higher if we broaden it to also include the Sisters. And we should, because they're basically also space marines.

DON'T give me one single shit about how the Sisters of Battle and the Space Marines are totally different factions as far apart as Space Marines and Orks or Space Marines and Necrons. If you think that, you are wrong, and I don't want to hear that stupid pretentious gatekeeping bullshit. They're humans in heavy armor, they serve the Imperium, they worship the Emperor of Mankind, they have a really strong religious theme, and they always go on about crushing the heretic. They are both from the same Priest/Cleric/Paladin "Holy Warrior" Archetype. They even have a ton of the same weapons and use a lot of the same tanks.

If it were up to me there wouldn't even be a Sisters of Battle organization, some Space Marines would just be girls.

And don't give a single shit about THAT either! It'd be EASY, here let me show you. The lore says something something the genetic modification process to turn a normal human into a space marine only works on men because it comes from the genetic templates of the Primarchs who were all men because they were clones of the Emperor, oh my would you look at that, we just uncovered some Dark Age of Technology stuff deep inside Mars or something that improves the process a whole bunch, fewer candidates are dying from the process than ever before, what good news, and oh wow look at that it even works on women now, they get huge and muscular and most of them go bald and we put them in exactly the same heavy armor as every other space marine, bam, done, girl space marines, no fucking problem. Yknow all that stuff I just said about why it doesn't work on girls? You know that stuff is fantasy bullshit that was made up right? Like it's not true, it was written by writers, they can just WRITE MORE THINGS. And it'd even be easier now since they just did that whole thing where like a bunch of Primarchs came back. Fuck all that deteriorating geneseed shit, we have access to actual Primarchs now! Hey Robert, roll up your sleeve for a second!

Erm. what was I saying

right too big a focus on Space Marines. More than half of all the races are minor variations on space marines. Let's have a look at the math. Here's a complete list of the races included in the current version of Unification:

Dark Angels, Imperial Fists, Daemon Hunters, Legion of the Damned, Salamanders, Sisters of Battle, Space Marines, Blood Angels, Black Templars, Thirteenth Company, and Witch Hunters are all Space Marines or Basically Space Marines, and Chaos Marines, Emperor's Children, World Eaters, and Thousand Sons are all Evil Space Marines. And then Imperial Guard, Adeptus Mechanicus, and Steel Legion are all still humans, just not actual Space Marines.

1. Dark Eldar 2. Chaos Daemons 3. Eldar 4. Harlequins 5. Necrons 6. Orks 7. Tau Empire 8. Tyranids Out of twenty six factions, EIGHT of them are aliens, and five of those eight are aliens that were included in the base game and didn't come from any mods. THREE out of SEVENTEEN custom races included in the Unification mod are actual aliens, and ALL of the rest are different flavors of human. Less than a fifth. It's like fucking Mass Effect 2 and 3 in here.

I hear they're working on adding the Death Guard next. They too are Space Marines.

Remember when this galaxy had aliens in it?

Yes I'm counting the Chaos Daemons as aliens at the moment, because they're at least non-human. And that's really generous, because they're still Chaos, which is the same faction as all the Evil Space Marines, which means like three quarters of this list are the Imperium Vs Chaos conflict.

But like I said this is more a stupid annoying thing that Games Workshop is doing with Warhammer 40k. Space Marine miniatures are popular, so they write more lore for Space Marines, which makes them more popular, etc, etc, now basically everything is Space Marines vs Chaos Space Marines. GW recently announced the Squats are coming back. While I'm happy about that because they're space dwarves, they're still aligned with the Imperium, and it's looking kinda like they're basically more humans in power armor AKA more Space Marines.

Anybody remember Genestealers?

I think they actually got a new tabletop rulebook recently, plus they were the bad guys in that Space Hulk Deathwing game, and seems the Dawn of War community cared so little about them that nobody's even working on a mod that adds them as a race to Unification.

PART 3

DO YE ALWAYS YAP SO MUCH, HUMIE?

Gonna complain about the sound now, so nothing to take pictures of.

A lot of new custom units have new custom voices. Some of them are thankfully just made of clips from other Dawn of War games and that's all grand, though the Dawn of War 2 orks do have a slightly different feel, but it's not a big issue. Unfortunately the majority of the custom voice work is pretty awful, obviously. It's to be expected from people who aren't like an actual professional studio or whatever; high variance in acting talent, microphone quality, that sort of thing. I'm prepared to forgive bad acting if it's not extremely annoying, but, much of it is extremely annoying.

I'm gonna single out the Imperial Fists to pick on here because not only is the acting bad but they are also extremely loud. Continuing the theme of lack of polish, it seems like nobody's done any proper volume balancing.

Also, this is a minor thing, but, a lot of the Emperor's Children chaos guys pronounce it, like, "SLANish" or something? Almost like "Spanish" but with an L. I mean it's a made up word that appeared in print for like years before anybody said it out loud or whatever, I don't know if there's like an official pronunciation or anything, but they do pronounce it "Slah-NESH" in every other licensed Warhammer game I've ever seen. Up to and including the very one that this mod is for..

So that's kinda weird.

Continuing the other running theme of problems: extreme self indulgence and poor design choices. The acting would be a lot easier to forgive if there wasn't so FUCKING MUCH OF IT.

These lines are VERY long. They're stuck up their own ass with bad jokes and bits of lore, not to mention the usual Warhammer verbosity taking the place of personality. I click on this Sororitas Landraider and she babbles out like three entire sentences. Every time I click on it. Jokes are bad. I don't mean the jokes they make are bad (I think they're bad, of course, but you can decide for yourselves), I mean making jokes in unit response lines is a bad idea. Lines should be concise and simple, but some dimwit decided that short lines are beneath them. Yeah calling you out specifically this time, whoever that was who wrote that script guidelines bit on the revora forum about "one word responses are okay here and there but you shouldn't have very many." Yeah you, ya idiot, short responses are fucking wonderful. Maximum of FORTY WORDS? Fuck that shit, your maximum ought to be like a third that length.

Lines get repeated in a game like this A LOT. You click on units, and they say a line. You tell them to do a thing, and they say a line. Clicking on units and telling them to do things is LITERALLY ALL YOU DO IN ORDER TO PLAY THIS GAME. You will be hearing the same lines over and over again, forever. Lines become memes basically automatically. Short responses that are simple and concise don't take up room in your head. They can be repeated any number of times, and it doesn't ever become tiresome.

Jokes, on the other hand, even if they are actually funny, are never funny the second time. This can only work if they are not self indulgent and out of place, and still fit the character, and above all, again, are VERY SHORT.

Dawn of War 2 loved putting little jokes and memes and references in dialogue. The Imperial Guard Inquisitor sometimes says "My chief weapons are surprise and fear!" Oh hey a Monty Python reference, lol, funny. The first time it's funny, but after that it just becomes a thing the Inquisitor says sometimes, so it has to fit that role too. And it does, because it still fits her character, it isn't obtrusive if you don't know the reference because it still works in context, and it is VERY SHORT.

Incidentally over in Ultimate Apocalypse they gave this line to this lieutenant lady because ha ha monty python funny joke except the joke is that this line is said by the INQUISITOR in Dawn of War 2 so why the FUCK did you idiots give it to this lady, it isn't even a joke about her being an inquisitor quoting monty python spanish inquisition anymore

Yeah Ultimate Apocalypse also sucks, but it has a much more specific focus, ie bringing in all the superduper giant units, so if that's your bag, go nuts I guess. I think they're rubbish too, obviously. That's a different rant.

The only real exception to the length issue that I can think of is if it fits the character to talk for a really long time, and more importantly if it doesn't become obtrusive. IE, Thule in Dawn of War 2 talks a lot, but he's a dreadnought, so 1, he's like a messed up brain damaged half asleep sorta guy so it fits for him to ramble a bunch about weird shit all the time, 2, he speaks in a very deep low mumble that easily gets drowned out by more important things, and 3, his voice is really cool.

If your voice isn't as awesome as the Dawn of War 2 dreadnought, fuckin keep it short.

Lore can similarly be worked in only if it's really short. In the Dark Crusade expansion these special marines got added called Grey Knights, and if you click on them sometimes they say "The Ordo Malleus has sent us to aid you." Ah ha, these guys who look different come from something called the Ordo Malleus, and they're special somehow. Lore understood! But most importantly, again, for the cheap seats in the back, this line is one sentence of nine words and takes less than two seconds to say.

Oh, and of course it's not just the voices. Tooltips are also written with lore and jokes and in-character blather. Tooltips! Like, the little descriptions that appear when you mouse-over an icon! This too is very up its own ass.

It's pretentious, it's super proud of itself, it sounds just like the goofy walls of text from the Warhammer rulebooks that talk for multiple pages about how goddamn amazing these units and their weapons are, they know no fear and their mighty blades rend flesh and armor alike, etc, etc, etc, on and on and on and on, and by know no fear I actually mean they have a morale check leadership score only one better than the regular-ass-human Imperial Guardsmen.

And that stuff is fine if it's confined to those preliminary pages about dispensing background information. I mean I hate that style of writing but again, that's up to personal taste so whatever. But the most important thing to take away from those parts of the rulebooks is that they are SEPARATE from the ACTUAL RULES.

Oh look! USEFUL INFORMATION! Thanks, Warhammer rulebook!

If you stuff this shit and this style into the actual descriptions then it's just a useless waste of time that gets in the way when I'm trying to learn what the fuck this button does!

You know who got this right? Dawn of War Redux got this right.

Ahh it's beautiful.

Ahg no fuck take it away

PART 4

IF ANY DICE MATCH, THEY EXPLODE

SO SPEAKING OF THAT GAME DESIGN STUFF. Much of it is overcomplicated pointless shit.

Lore is a crutch. For my mod I always first and foremost tried to make it, yknow, fun. Like, to play. Stuff like, I tried to give each race a unique theme and playstyle that fits their personality. Lore accuracy was never a priority. I looked at the rulebooks for inspiration, not as a bible. These mods were made by people who care more about adhering to lore than making a polished well designed game. I know, because they've all made scout marines a melee unit that must be upgraded to have a decent ranged attack, even though scout marines are fucking garbage in melee and they should never try to fight things in close combat or they'll die instantly. Why the hell would they make them a melee unit first? Because that's how it is in the space marines rulebook.

Why the hell does the rulebook do this? I do not know. Nobody knows. It's a dumb idea.

The tabletop rules have a LOT of customization options. Because, like, it's a tabletop game played with miniature figures. Games Workshop heavily promotes customizing your army however you want, like with lots of units to choose from and lots of weapons and equipment for each unit, but also with lots of color schemes for different groups within each faction, and of course with lots of different factions too. They do this partly because that's a big element of the appeal of tabletop games and the Warhammer 40k franchise in general, and also because, yknow, they want you to buy more miniatures.

But an unfortunate consequence of having lots of options and promoting the Space Marines so much over the years is that now there are a billion and a half possible permutations of a Space Marine army, and for some reason the kind of people who love the Space Marines so fucking much that they want to add specifically the Thirteenth Company of specifically the Space Wolves chapter of the Space Marines faction specifically during the time in their history where they were trapped in the Eye of Terror so their primary headquarters building is a hijacked chaos warp portal

have decided that they want to include ALL OF THEM.

Jesus Christ, Dark Angels. Calm the fuck down.

Since it’s hard to tell from just a screenshot, there are twenty two different types of squads here. Some of them are made up of more than one type of unit, ie a bunch of marines and one marine sergeant. Additionally, there’s a force commander there, but there are four other kinds of commander that I could choose from, I’m just limited to only one commander at a time. ALSO additionally, this is just one of three branches that I could have taken this faction, which would have replaced some of these unit options with other ones.

Most races have some kind of branching mutually exclusive options thing. Like you'll have to pick one of three different researches and each one opens up some units but closes off others, like the Dark Angels here who can choose between putting all their guys on bikes, or getting the heavy armor guys, or all of the flying units. Or something. I didn't read all of the text, my mind started to glaze over.

So, altogether the Dark Angels faction has like sixty or seventy different units available. In the above screenshot I opened up the files in the mod editor program and the list of Dark Angels units literally doesn’t fit on the screen. Look at all those units in one race. This is ridiculous.

For comparison, here's the normal Space Marine faction from the base game. And many of those aren’t units available for regular multiplayer games, like all those _sp ones or the _prisoner ones, those are only for the single player campaign.

I suspect that many of these inclusions are largely because they wanted to add every unit idea they could think of, but then they realized that doing so would result in a roster of like forty types of unit available to one faction, and the mutual exclusivity was the go to method for reducing the number of units a player has access to in a given match. They did not appear to consider the possibility that a new player would then have to learn all of this shit and get overwhelmed and annoyed.

Since I praised Witch Hunters before I'll balance it out by picking on it here. What's really the point between choosing between making the Inquisition Path get Arco-flagellants and the Sororitas Path get Sisters Repentia when both of them are high damage high health slow melee focused heavy infantry? They both get slightly different versions of the Exorcist artillery tank too. In the base game there's only one instance of mutually exclusive build choices (well two I guess, the Necron Lord's artifacts, but they only change what abilities he has, not what units the player has access to so it matters less) and that's the Tau Empire having to choose between the Montka Command Post or the Kauyon Command Post, one of which lets you have Kroot Hounds, the Krootox, and better regular infantry, and the other lets you have Crisis Battlesuits and Hammerhead Gunships, but those two pairs of units are REALLY different. Crisis Suits and Hammerheads are huge ranged damage powerhouses while Hounds and Krootoxes are both pretty much melee only. Crisis Suits can jump, which opens up more tactical options, while Krootoxes have an assload of health, much more than (nearly) every other Tau unit, which gives you a solid front line that can draw enemy fire.

Personally I don't even like the exclusivity thing when it's done well because I'm an anxious wreck who can't handle important decisions, so in my mod I just let the Tau build both command posts. It's fine, really, I mean they're still limited by the same vehicle cap and shit.

What is the point of these changes? The Imperial Fists have some kind of different way to upgrade their resource acquisition, but I never really noticed it mattering. The Chaos Daemons have this thing where the power resource is replaced with "daemonic power" which is used to cast abilities mostly instead of building big vehicles, and they have a different method of spending the other resource to get it instead of building power generators, but this too doesn't really change the way they play. You still build the trade building just like you build power generators, and you get enough of it that you're hardly ever in danger of actually running out once a big battle gets going. It's a new system, but the player interacts with it in exactly the same way as before, so what's the point?

Oh but the World Eaters have a thing I unironically think is awesome. Their resources go up when they hit people, that's excellent, and actually does change gameplay. I do think all the extra Blood resource stuff and the fifty different types of units is still in the same bad habits category as the rest though. I know they're the World Eaters Legion but we really don't need like six different flavors of Berserker.

Pictured, from left to right, guys who hit stuff, guys who hit stuff, guys who hit stuff, guys who hit stuff, and guys who hit stuff.

Again, I get the feeling that these are ideas that sounded cool, so somebody made them, but then they didn't really think about how they would actually play. Like I said, this stuff is fun to make and it's cool to show that you made it. And like, I get that, I did a bunch of that too. I just also get neurotic about creating a thing that's polished enough to pass for professional work because of all my self worth issues, and very little of this looks like it'd pass for Not Obviously A Fan Mod.

As for how each of these races is balanced against each other, I have no idea, I haven't played much of it, and certainly never against other people. On one hand my instinct says the balance is probably awful since balance is difficult and time consuming and everything else seems flimsy and unpolished, but on the other hand I know some species of PvP Asshole care more about balance than about lore, so maybe that's the thing they've actually put effort into. I wouldn't know, I don't touch PvP in anything.

I'm running out of concrete things to complain about in the gameplay since I haven't played much of it, what with the first impressions being so terrible, and this is getting too long already. Unification is such a mess that I don't even know if I'm going to bother scavenging bits of it for my own mod. It makes me angry because this modding community seems to know how to do all the things I wish I could do, but this mod sucks at all the polish stuff that I'm neurotic about. Perhaps we could make something truly amazing if we worked together, but I'm a really unpleasant person to be around even if I weren't riddled with crippling anxiety and depression, so, yknow. And I can’t learn any of the other stuff like models and animation and sound because these people also can’t write tutorials worth a damn.

Oh yeah and sometimes the game just fuckin crashes. Brilliant.

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