I finished playing through Dawn of War’s single-player storyline a few days ago…and I’m left wanting quite a bit more. The storyline was far too brief, only 13 missions, and only one playable race for the storyline. It also ends on one heck of a cliffhanger… I sincerely hope Relic is planning on rolling out an expansion of some sort, because I would certainly buy it. I’d love to know what happens after the events of the storyline, love to see where the Commander goes from here. I’d also like to see some of the other races (Eldar please!) featured in a storyline.

I’ve started playing with the skirmish mode a bit, and I’m enjoying playing the Eldar quite a bit. I’m surprised at how different the gameplay is with them. I’ve gotten used to the Space Marines, and the Eldar are completely different. Different buildings, different units, different strategies…

I haven’t dared try a multiplayer game yet…I’m sure I’ll get stomped. Heck, at this point I’m lucky if I can remember which building produces which unit!

I’ve been playing through the Dawn of War single-player campaign some more…and I ran into the Eldar for the first time. What a frustrating experience.

The Eldar have the capacity for extreme mobility. One of their structures, the Warp Gate, allows eldar to teleport both units and buildings from one Warp Gate to another. Then they’ve got a unit called a Warp Spider that is able to teleport over short distances. Finally, there’s an upgrade that increases the speed of just about all the Eldar infantry. Between those three things it becomes very hard to keep the Eldar pinned down for long.

They were constantly attacking me from multiple directions – there was only the one base but they were teleporting from one Warp Gate to another, and attacking from all over the map. Then I’d be moving across what looked like completely open and safe terrain…and some Warp Spiders would suddenly appear in the middle of my troops. Very frustrating. Eventually I was able to tear down all their Warp Gates and work my way back to their base, and then burn it to the ground…but it was a very long fight. Great fun though.

I picked up Dawn of War yesterday at work, got home around 5:30, and I’ve been playing it ever since. I played through the tutorial again, and did a skirmish game as the Eldar, and then I went on to the single-player campaign.

I have to say that I’m quite impressed with the amazing difference in playstyle between the Eldar and the Space Marines. Granted, I knew they were going to play differently from my days of playing Warhammer 40,000…but I didn’t realize how differently they’d be implemented in this game. The mechanics are completely different. You’ve got different key structures, different ways of increasing your unit cap, different places to train units, different places to do research. I was honestly expecting basically a repaint/remodel of the Space Marines, but instead the Eldar are completely and totally different. Took me a little while to get the hang of it…

While I was not originally interested at all in playing as the Orks or Chaos Marines, I’m now very curious to see how differently they play.

I’m up to the 6th mission in the single-player campaign now… The in-game cutscenes are doing a great job of telling the story, and it is actually interesting too. I’ve pushed back the Ork invasion quite a bit, discovered signs of Chaos at work on the planet, and just ran into a group of Eldar. I’ve still got no idea what the Eldar are doing on this planet, there’s no sense of why they’re here at all. The Chaos Marines seem to be using the Orks as a screen to keep me busy, they’re obviously up to something bad, but I’ve yet to discover what exactly. In fact, I haven’t even been able to directly attack the forces of Chaos at all yet.

The gameplay so far is very rewarding. There’s definitely a challenge, but it isn’t too difficult. One of my main complaints about Relic’s previous games (Homeworld & Homeworld 2) was their incredible difficulty. So far, I’ve yet to run into a brick wall like I did in the Homeworld games.

Looks like the WoW Beta Servers are already back up! Personally, I’m surprised by this… Judging from the pictures of the damages I really expected them to be down for longer. I don’t know if the damage was simply a lot less than it looked like, or if they’ve just got some great technicians over there, but I’m impressed.

Unfortunately, the WoW Beta Servers are coming up just in time for me to purchase Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, so I won’t be playing much WoW over the next couple of days.

Well, the WoW Beta Servers are still down… A tornado hit them a few days ago and they’ve yet to get the system back up. It sounds like they may be working again by the end of the week…but nobody knows for sure.

However, despite the fact that the servers are currently offline, the newest patch is available for download. Unfortunately, Blizzard’s still got issues with their Bit Torrent downloader. It is still incorrectly detecting the upstream bandwidth, so I’m having one hell of a time downloading anything with it. Very annoying. Even more annoying is the fact that Blizzard appears to have blocked any 3rd party Bit Torrent downloaders this time around…so there’s no alternative to a long download with the Blizzard downloader.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War shipped out today, and should be in stores tomorrow. I’m thrilled. I’m working a 9 – 5 shift tomorrow, so I should be able to get my hands on it tomorrow morning and then play all night long. The best part is that I don’t work until 1:30 on Wednesday, so I can stay up late tomorrow night! I can’t wait to get my hands on the Eldar again…it has been ages since I played Warhammer 40,000…