For me it’s Diablo II. Granted I’ve played my fair share of D2 since launch, and also recently on a private server with a comrade from hexbear, but I still feel like years later the game didn’t grab me as much as D1 did.
Granted I don’t hate D2, but for a game that I keep coming back to, D1 takes the prize.
Dawn of War 1 & 2 were both great games in their own respective ways, then 3 came out and somehow combined the bad aspects of 1 & 2.
I remember. Relic saw that people generally liked the first game (and expansions) better but could not stick to a direction and came to an unsatisfying compromise between both. And because of that flop, we’re still resorting to modding DC and Soulstorm.
I’ve been holding onto hope for another shot with the successes of Space Marine 2, Darktide and Mechanicus showing that W40K has a future in games, but RTS as a genre has been mired for the past decade. Relic’s less than stellar reception with CoH3 hasn’t helped.
Seriously though a 40K game has the potential to break out of the mire by turning towards the tabletop for inspiration. Imagine if it was kind of like Total War - build and customize your army, have your units gain experience and become elites, have a persistent online league where you can fight for territory with your guild (remember guilds?), etc. Based on how successful Commanders was in Starcraft, I would make a PvE campaign mode the banner feature and advertise it hard to people who like RTS as a concept but don’t go in for competitive PvP.