So, I've been thinking about the original Dawn of War.
Specifically: I've been thinking about how it was my introduction to the setting of Warhammer 40k. It feels like it was a damn near perfect introduction, and it accomplished this... with the use of the loading screen maps.
When I first played the game back in 2004, I knew nothing about 40k. I didn't know about Grim Darkness, or that the Imperium is a fascist theocratic nightmare, none of that. All I had for context was the maps on the loading screens and the pre-mission briefings.
The game starts off very simple, and very easy to understand. Here's the mission location, here's the space marines, here's the orks, etc. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it draws you in with a very understandable conflict that you can immediately get behind.
Now, I will say: that opening is both a strength and a weakness. Because, the one problem I do have with the original Dawn of War is that they really kinda gloss over just how fucking terrible the Imperium is, as a means of easing new players into the setting. Like, on the one hand? I kinda get it, you don't want to scare people off immediately by forcing people to play as someone they find reprehensible. But I also absolutely understand how someone might think the Imperium are the "good" guys if all they ever played was Dawn of War. And that's a problem.
Feels very black and white, and unambiguous, y'know? I mean, hell, a lot of the early missions are explicitly about the space marines running interference, so the orks can't slaughter civilians who are trying to escape the planet. But I'm getting slightly off topic.
See, what you may be noticing from these pre-mission briefing maps: as the game goes on, things get progressively worse. You're succeeding in your mission objectives, sure... but the overall picture of what's going on in the planet is becoming more and more bleak. It's almost like what you do in missions doesn't really matter.
Quick side note: when I first played this game, and I saw all the numbers of orks steadily increasing? My thought at the time was "Oh, this planet must have a lot more orks than we previously thought," because, at the time, I knew nothing about 40k. I didn't know about the orkoid reproductive cycle, and how they're a bunch of fungus boys who shed hundreds and hundreds of spores in the air to produce new organisms in the orkoid ecosystem: orks, grots, squigs, etc. And I also didn't know at the time that, when they die violently, they release something like 10 times as many spores as they do in the rest of their life.
I remember coming back to the game, once I had that context, and it retroactively made these briefing maps even more horrifying, because it dawned on me: "Oh. OH. Oh no! All these orks are our fault! It's not just that things are getting worse! Everything we've been doing has been making it worse!"
Either way, around mission 6 or 7 or so: that's when things start getting a bit more complicated. The orks are the most visible threat, sure. But then the eldar show up out of nowhere, with some mysterious agenda. The evidence that the forces of chaos are here become more obvious and harder to ignore.
You start to see the trails of refugees trying to flee the planet that appear, and then just as swiftly vanish. And, yeah, you could try and tell yourself that they escaped the planet safely, but... I think we all know the truth.
Every victory, things get worse. Things are rapidly deteriorating, and you even have to deal with traitor guardsmen, corrupted by the forces of chaos. Things are getting very grim indeed.
Then we get to Mission 10. Second to last mission. The map zooms in. We don't even need to see the rest of the planet. All we care about it is stopping whatever chaos has planned. Because if they succeed, the orks overrunning everything is the LEAST of our concern.
We don't even get a map for Mission 11, the final mission in the game. This is how truly fucked everything has become. The planet is lost, the people who used to live here are either long since evacuated or very, very dead. The planet is about to be consumed by a warp storm...
And then, at the very last moment, you get the "mission complete!" notification.
The victory is an incredibly hollow, pyrrhic one. Sindri and the rest of the chaos forces lay dead at your feet, sure, but your actions played right into their hands. The demon escaped from its prison in the Maledictum, because Macha refused to tell you directly what would happen, and as a result you smashed it open like an idiot, inadvertently completing the ritual. The civilians on the planet are dead. The imperial guard are dead. Most of the eldar are dead. Most of your men are dead. Isador, your best friend in the chapter, is dead by your own hand after he fell to chaos. The very planet itself is dead, consumed by a warp storm, and you barely escape with what few survivors remain, knowing that you ultimately failed.
There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Welcome to Warhammer 40k.
vaporwave
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