Warhammer 40k Dawn of War 4's "guiding star" is the original RTS, dev says

Warhammer fans across the world are celebrating the surprise news that a new Dawn of War instalment is on the way. What's even more exciting is the fact that developer King Art is going back to the series' RTS roots. After Dawn of War 2 lowered the stakes to small squads and the third instalment attempted some kind of ill-fated MOBA, I couldn't be happier that Dawn of War 4 will return to the original formula. I sat down with creative director Jan Theysen and senior game designer Elliott Verbiest to find out more about the game and its inspirations.

"We really want to go back to the RTS roots, with big armies, base building, research, and economy," Theysen explains to me over video call. "[We thought] let's take Dawn of War as our guiding star and try to do a modern interpretation or evolution of the first [game]."

The original Dawn of War is widely considered to be one of the best Warhammer 40k games ever made, and my Dawn of War 4 preview is glowing, too, largely because it reminds me of what the series used to be. For Dawn of War 4, Theysen says that King Art made its mantra, "What would Dawn of War 1 do?" However, it wasn't always that simple during development, as Theysen explains that King Art has to live up not only to high expectations but also to nostalgia.

"You have to compete with nostalgia, right? With how people remember the game, not how the game actually was, which is two different things." However, King Art received a lot of positive feedback from its last game, Iron Harvest. A less traditional RTS game, King Art worked closely with its players throughout its Kickstarter campaign, taking on board ample feedback as development progressed. While the dev couldn't implement everything on that game, Verbiest noticed the same requests time and time again.

He says there was a "very clear hunger from the real-time strategy community," for mechanics like base building, economy management, and using bigger armies. King Art is happy to bring those mechanics back to the storied battlefields of Kronus. However, both Theysen and Verbiest are keen to point out that Dawn of War 4 won't just be a nostalgia-fest. The classic RTS mechanics will be updated for a 2025 audience. The standout feature from my time playing the demo is the kill animations - a classic Dawn of War feature - which now extend to every moment of every fight. These animations were something that Iron Harvest was praised for, and Theysen believes is King Art putting its own fingerprint on the series.

For the real-time fights, King Art had to create custom animations for each of the game's ~110 units and buildings. Every one needed a different animation for every possible enemy it could fight, and those animations needed to transition smoothly if another unit joined combat, an explosion battered the fight, or any number of other permutations occurred. The result is over 10,000 different animations.

Theysen credits this system to the game's head of animations, Thomas Derksen. "If we do Dawn of War, we do it right," Jahn told the team early in development. He explained his plan to create the custom fight animations, but Theysen was sceptical: "everybody was pretty sure that it was insane, it cannot work," he says. For the first year, he admits, he "didn't believe that it was possible". However, Jahn and his team put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the tech, and the final product is mighty impressive, even in the game's current pre-alpha state. Have you ever wanted to see what it looks like when a Redemptor Dreadnought fights a Tomb Spider? Now you can.

King Art has taken a lot of learnings from its last RTS to create a refreshed but classic Dawn of War experience. However, there's one more part of Iron Harvest's development that they want to include in Dawn of War 4.

"The plan is to look into how we can get community feedback or player feedback as early as possible so that we can actually incorporate that stuff," Theysen tells me. "It's not like a marketing thing where you have a beta five days before release, but how can we actually make sure that we're making the game that the people want to play."

He and Verbiest are clear that there are no finalized plans for public tests at present, but the latter agrees that an open beta "might also be cool." With all its classic systems combined with King Art's modern tech, Dawn of War 4 has every chance to blow players away. If the developer can implement feedback on top of that, most will surely be thrilled.

If you can't wait until 2026 to play Dawn of War 4, check out our list of the best strategy games to while away the hours for the next year. Alternatively, the best Warhammer games are bound to offer up some xenos-cleaving action.

Drop by the PCGN community Discord and let us know your must-have list for Dawn of War 4.