Editing Dawn of War III (section)

===What went wrong?=== 

''Dawn of War III'' suffered pretty terribly from Relic basically having lost all the staff who made the original two ''Dawn of War games'' in the intervening years and had to be replaced by a bunch of people less familiar with the genre or the expectations of the series. Like a lot of companies, the focus on the brand name obscures the fact that few people actually remain with a company over a long period of time, especially when Relic transferred over to Sega after THQ bit the dust and a lot of Relic's former talent left the studio with the collapse of their former publisher. This more than anything, hit the development cycle of ''Dawn of War III'' pretty hard, as well as a confused set of developmental priorities and the loss of the people who gave the previous two games their strong art direction, leading to a much less eye-catching aesthetic. While not an Aliens: Colonial Marines scale disaster in terms of development cycle, ''Dawn of War III'' was in many ways hamstrung before it ever left the gate. 

There were clearly a lot of interesting and good ideas, there was the potential for a great traditional base-building RTS game to revive a genre many publishers regard as no longer worth major investment into. It's just that the execution was left in less-than-capable hands, revolving around a brand they weren't ready to bear the burden of. ''Dawn of War III'''s failure hurts not because it's irredeemably bad, but because beneath all the many horrible flaws is a lot of wasted or unrealised potential for something that could have been as good or better than its predecessors. All it needed was that same strong sense of direction they had so that it wouldn't end up as a confused mess thrown together by a relatively inexperienced team under corporate mandate to get ''something'' out for early 2017 on the PC market, while the golden child of Creative Assembly was still putting ''Total War: Warhammer II'' together.