Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War

By 1999, SSI had already released two games under the Warhammer 40,000 licence. Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40,000 in 1997 adapted the Epic tabletop system, fielding armies at a scale where individual Space Marines were barely visible. Chaos Gate in 1998, developed by Random Games, pulled the camera down to squad level and put Ultramarines against Chaos forces in a turn-based tactics format that earned a Computer Gaming World award nomination that year, losing out to StarCraft. Rites of War, released June 30 1999 and developed by DreamForge Intertainment, completed the trilogy by taking a different approach to both scope and faction. It was also the most divisive of the three.

DreamForge was primarily an RPG studio. Their previous titles included Menzoberranzan, Anvil of Dawn, and entries in the Ravenloft series. Rites of War was their first strategy game, and one of their last projects before the studio closed in 2000. To build it they used the Panzer General II engine, which SSI had developed for their flagship wargame series and which had already been adapted for Fantasy General in 1996. The engine was hex-based, turn-limited, and built around unit experience and equipment progression. DreamForge replaced the Panzer divisions and Tiger tanks with Eldar aspect warriors and Fire Prisms and built a campaign around Craftworld Iyanden’s attempt to reclaim a Maiden World, an ancient Eldar colony planet held by forces of the Imperium of Man.

The campaign’s structure had two distinct phases. The first pitted the Iyanden Eldar against a combined Imperial force that included the Red Hunters Space Marine chapter, Imperial Guard, and Sisters of Battle. Midway through, a Tyranid hive fleet arrived and the campaign’s framing shifted, with Eldar and Imperial forces uniting against the greater threat. This was a reasonable approximation of how those factions interact in the 40,000 setting, where existential enemies will sometimes fight alongside each other against something worse. The 24 missions ran in a linear sequence with no branching. You did not choose your engagements or sidestep unfavourable matchups. You went where the campaign sent you.

The Eldar faction was an unusual choice for the player-facing side of a 40,000 strategy game. Chaos Gate had used Ultramarines, the franchise’s default protagonist chapter. Final Liberation had put Imperial forces against Orks. Rites of War gave players a race built around fragile, highly specialised units that required careful positioning and combined arms to be effective. Howling Banshees, Swooping Hawks, Fire Dragons, and Wraithguard each filled specific roles and failed badly when deployed against the wrong opposition. Skirmish mode allowed play as all three factions, giving veteran players the option to approach the same battlefields from a different tactical position.

The reviews were mixed in ways the source article on the Critical Moves website understated. PC Gamer US’s William Trotter praised the art and interface while calling the difficulty “obnoxious.” PC Gamer UK’s Jason Weston was harsher, criticising the dated engine and weak AI and concluding that players would be better served buying a physical tabletop table and painting it green. Computer Gaming World’s Jeff Lackey called the game thoroughly engrossing. Computer Games Strategy Plus found it incomplete and unfinished, and described it as less enjoyable than either Fantasy General or Panzer General II, the two games whose engine and systems it most directly drew from. A recurring criticism from players already familiar with the General series was that the campaign was too short and too easy, something veterans could complete within a few days without serious challenge.

The game performed well enough that it remained in catalogue, and GOG re-released it in 2015 alongside the rest of SSI’s Warhammer 40,000 titles. It is still available there. The source of the criticism directed at Rites of War was less its mechanics than the gap between what those mechanics were and what the licence might have supported. The Panzer General II system was well understood by 1999, and reskinning it for a science fiction property had already been done. The question reviewers kept returning to was whether the Eldar faction, the 40,000 setting, and twenty-four missions justified choosing this game over its predecessors or over Chaos Gate specifically. For players who arrived without prior investment in the General series and with strong interest in Eldar lore, the answer was generally yes. For everyone else it depended heavily on how much the licence mattered.

DreamForge closed the following year. SSI itself was acquired by Hasbro Interactive in 1999, the same year Rites of War was released, and wound down shortly afterwards. The late-1990s cluster of 40,000 strategy titles – Final Liberation, Chaos Gate, Rites of War – has not been matched in consistency of release since.