Ice Monkey said:i dont care enough to find out exactly who i disagree with in that RPS article, but i do know that one thing was hilariously misconstrued: he said something about how SC2 doesn't care to follow the recent trend of RTS doing something about how inaccessible RTSes are....I wholly disagree with this!
RTSes arent inaccessible that DoW2 for example comes along and makes it more accessible, they just get rid of the traditional/normal way to play an RTS! It isn't an rts at all barely anymore in DoW2's case as much as it is an RPG where you can control maybe 50- characters at once, like baldur's gate with 50 party members.
CNC4 is more of an RTS than DoW2 will ever be, just because basically what they've done is take the tech tree and put that into MW2-style experience points that carry over game after game, and put all the buildings into the godforsaken crawler. DoW2 matches are more like an arena battle in wow or something, whatever it is though I don't prefer it to a "traditional" base-building RTS.
I don't have anything against DoW2 for what it is, but the gameplay is basically like war3 with the altar of heroes mixed with a barracks and you just build like 25 total units then go have a brawl in the middle of the map. Then resource gathering is restricted to staying near a gold mine long enough for some magic-user to summon in 30 seconds a haunted gold mine on top of the mine with 5 acolytes pre-attached.
When you figure that you can take war3's multiplayer gameplay and mod it into what i just described above and you basically have the gist of DoW2, doesn't it seem upon first inspection this doesnt make the RTS more accessible but rather just remove a few steps that werent challenging to begin with? How hard is it to build a hatchery/cc/nexus near some resources anyway?
I KNOW many people might disagree with that but please understand its just IMHO. I'll tell you one thing, I would cry out in terror if blizzard decided with sc2 for example to have an alternate win condition that you win the game if you just control 66% of the map's expansion spots. I'd just hate the fact that it even existed as an official alternate win condition, despite the fact that if you have that much map control you're basically going to win anyway.
The gameplay in Dawn of War 2 is not like Warcraft 3 in any way, shape or form.
I do agree that DoW2 probably shouldn't be classified as an RTS, though. More of a "tactics" game if that means anything at all.