Dawn of War Soulstorm

About

The Dawn of War Soulstorm was third and final expansion of the first DoW game set in the grimdark future of the Warhammer 40 000 universe. It used to be viewed by many as the weakest entry in the franchise due to some it's single player campaign's story having writing that ranges from uninspired to what is by many considered lore-braking and gameplay choices that made quite a number of normal battles boring and stronghold battles either boring or frustrating. However it rose to the spotlight of meming community due to goofy writing and/or voice actor performances of some of it's characters such as Indrick Boreale or Firaeveus Carron. This earned it nicknames that include but are not limited to: Memestorm, S**tstorm or Baldstorm.

Trivia

Since the previous Dawn of War expansions were met with high praise and THQ was at it's peak they decided that instead of focusing fully on a sequel (at least initially) they will release another expansion for their current game. The task of making this expansion befell to the studio Iron Lore and since this was to be the last game they will develop, they wanted to be a smasher hit so they took a lot of the community's input to heart. For example they improved most of the balancing and even made sure their two new playable races would not come off as "The new OP kids on the block" like the last time. Despite their effort many new problems arose (and I'm not just talking about balancing). For example: Games Workshop, the owners of the Warhammer 40 000 IP, were at the time pushing their new line of airborne units and wanted THQ to include them in their upcoming game despite is't engine not being designed for such units resulting in them being either entire base-leveling monsters or a complete waste of vehicle cap. Other issues soon followed as THQ was hard pressing the game's release while straining the budget. These included:

• Unlimited Faith resource exploit fot the Sisters of Battle race
• Observers being able to activate Dark Eldar's soul abilities
• Completely broken matchmaker
• Non-functional Merit System (basically achievements)
• Rampant cheating in online lobbies

Developers promised to fix these issues but previously mentioned budget restrains caused many delays for this patch. After almost nine months of waiting when the patch was finally released there was nothing to save because the game's competitive online scene was non existent and those who remained of it's player base were using the game as a platform for modding. THQ took this as a que to abandon the project and turn their gaze back to the development of Dawn of War II thus leaving Soulstorm at the sidelines where it remained until Sega bought what remained of the the studio after it's bankruptcy. They decided to put
the game up on Steam and update it but this only removed the game's option of LAN multiplayer and brought no support for the modders that the fans hopped for.

Memes

Another thing that resulted from Soulstorm's budget cuts was a shortage of voice actors. This meant that the ones available had to voice more characters than originally anticipated which resulted in them switching to weird and ridiculous accents.
The most notorious ones being the handywork of Scott McNeil who brought us many memorable characters such as Sindri the Sorcerer or Chaos Lord Bale plus something around 60% of all the units voice lines in all of Dawn of War (including all expansions and considering the fact that most of the Necron units may as well be completely mute). It were his vocal cords and unwillingness to read all the shody hogwash presented to him as a script that brought to life all the cheesy lines you remember such as SPEHSS MAHRENS or METAL BAWKSES!