00:00Playing Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 4 for the first time, I was given access to a mission
00:04where you play as the Space Marines, who have been called in to save Imperial Guard forces
00:08from a warband of Orcs. That was a week ago. I've since spent upwards of three hours playing the
00:13same level over and over again, sticking a small army of Space Marines and Dreadnaughts onto the
00:17Orc-dominated map before winning, usually, and doing it all over again. Yeah, it's good.
00:22While everyone's been busy with summer, we've been studying the Blade and the Balter,
00:26Grins Elliot Verbiest, senior game designer at developer King Art Games. I'm chatting to
00:31Verbiest and Jon Thason, co-founder and creative director, and while neither seem particularly
00:36surprised at how I've been digging Dawn of War 4, both are thrilled to finally be talking about it.
00:40If you do not hear anything from a studio for a long time, you know it's either very,
00:44very bad news, or very good news, says Thason. In our case, thankfully, it was very good news.
00:53Unlike many of its modern contemporaries, Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 4 is not trying to reinvent the
00:58real-time strategy genre for new audiences. Returning to the planet of Kronos, the goal is
01:02to capture resource points and develop your base, all while building and ordering an army to stop
01:07your opponent from doing the same. In this specific instance, a thin row of neutral requisition and
01:11power resource points are all that separate my forces from the rest of the Orc-dominated map.
01:16It's refreshingly straightforward, and King Art Games is under no allusion as to who they are
01:20making Dawn of War 4 for. I'm pretty sure that real-time strategy will not be the big genre again,
01:25explains Thason. It's a niche genre, but it's a big niche, right? For us it's like,
01:30if there's a sizable RTS community and a sizable Warhammer community, maybe that's enough. Let's make
01:35a great game for both of these communities. RTS won't kick shooters from the top of the food chain anytime
01:39soon, but that's fine. We've grown a little bit over the past few years, and we're not a tiny indie
01:43studio, but we're not a massive AAA studio either, adds Verbiest. That's put us in a really sweet
01:48spot for being able to deliver on the kind of production value that players are looking for
01:52in an RTS, and the mechanical and gameplay complexity that maybe a three-man team wouldn't
01:56be able to deliver on. Taking command of my Space Marine units, Dawn of War 4 certainly plays
02:01like a classically-minded RTS. As I fight to win the level back from the Orcs, I'm constantly forced to
02:06think about where I'm sending my Space Marines and why. Each of the game's four launch factions,
02:11Blood Ravens, Orcs, Necrons and Adeptus Mechanicus have differing playstyles, which means that in this
02:16matchup, my Space Marines are incredibly powerful, but almost always outnumbered by Orcs, who,
02:22beside being numerous, can also litter the map with cheap defensive structures. I don't have
02:25enough Space Marines to gather resources I capture, which means my playstyle involves swinging my elite
02:30units onto a point like a sledgehammer, easily wiping out all but the largest groups of Orcs,
02:35then building up turrets and missile bunkers to defend points while my own blob continues on the
02:39offensive. I adore building up defenses in strategy games, so the tactic fits snug,
02:44though my beloved turtling tactic is off the table here, as the ultimate goal is to march out to
02:48destroy the Orcs' primary and secondary strongholds. The Orcs are also working on three superweapons
02:52across the map, each with their own progress bar, so there's a time incentive to wipe them out before
02:57three beefy Gorkonaut Walkers are unleashed. While the nearest falls easily enough, I only break the other
03:02two with help. Command Points, a resource earned from being in combat, can buy powerful abilities called
03:06Stratagems, which for Space Marines range from bonus XP to cluster bombs and orbital bombardments.
03:12I go for the latter two, and both just about annihilate anything they hit. Entire units,
03:17would be Gorkonaut included, are decimated with a carpet of cluster bombs, while their orbital
03:21bombardment proves so powerful I have to pull my own frontline back when they start dying en masse too,
03:26throwing the fact that Space Marines can pay extra to recruit units in reserve, allowing them to be
03:30dropped anywhere on the map in a bullet spewing drop pod, and the faction ends up playing like a 40k
03:35fantasy brought to life. Though I don't play the Orcs, I can see the same appeal there,
03:39creating a sprawling rolling ball of violence, and when a Necron surprise attack and launches
03:43stalking robots and gauze beams into my side, I immediately decide they're going to be the
03:47first faction I play at launch. All of my skirmish matches end the same,
03:52with half-squads of Space Marines, dinged up assault vehicles, and smoking dreadnoughts destroying
03:57the Orc fortress by the skin of their teeth. But even after three hours of green skin stomping,
04:01it's the side of Dawn of War 4 I haven't seen that proves the most exciting. Campaigns. Plural.
04:07Each of the game's four factions will have their own campaign, and Thason tells me that each one
04:11will be longer than the original Dawn of War's campaign. Roughly speaking, we can expect 12 to
04:1615 missions from a campaign, though that can vary. Some missions will be optional, while others will
04:20only be available depending on the choices that players make during the campaign. Having seen the
04:25demand for more single player and narrative elements in the last game Iron Harvest, King Ark Games was
04:29keen to push that further in Dawn of War 4. We basically said, okay, let's not have one Space
04:34Marine campaign, or one big campaign where everybody has a little bit to play. Let's do four big campaigns
04:39for each of the four factions. Let's make the campaign non-linear, or give the player meaningful
04:43decisions on who they want to play in the campaign, who survives, and so on, says Thason. There's even some
04:48cross-campaign relevance, adds Thason. Choose to side with a certain war boss during the art campaign,
04:53for example, and the one you back will become the ruling boss on Cronus, even while playing Space
04:57Marines. Some choices, like selecting a hero to play for a level, are destined to give players more
05:01say over their playstyle. One road you can pick might be smaller engagements, more tactical stuff
05:06offers Thason, while the other one might be full-on war with lots of units. You could basically pick
05:11how you play the campaigns. Ultimately, Thason says Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 4 is intended to be a
05:18modern interpretation of what the first Dawn of War would be today, and while the series' roots are
05:22blatant, as to others' modern additions. Dawn of War 4's flashiest feature is without a doubt its
05:28sync kills, which creates unique animations for fighting units. During my preview, I saw one
05:32arc jump on the back of a Space Marine and attempt to wrestle them to the ground, only for said
05:36Marine
05:36to flip the arc over his shoulder and carve it up with a chainsword. Later, another Space Marine wrestles
05:42their chainsword against an arc's hastily thrown-up gun, eventually knocking it to one side and hacking
05:46the arc to pieces. On both occasions, I stopped what I was doing to watch. Is my base in Tatters
05:51off-screen?
05:51Uh, yes. Have I forgotten to call them our Space Marines? Also yes. But did you see that?
05:57Sync kills have been attempted to some success in the likes of Total War Warhammer, but were often
06:01inconsistent if not outright buggy due to their technical intensity. There are well over 10,000
06:06permutations of Unix fighting, shares Verbiest. And when I tell the pair I didn't think the technology
06:10was there for this level of synchronisation, Thason confesses he didn't either. I was totally with you,
06:15he admits. Three years ago, four years ago, I was also very sceptical that it's possible. But what the
06:20animation team came up with is basically a system that dynamically creates his animations. They
06:24basically have little snippets of animation, and depending on the situations, the system dynamically
06:29puts everything together. Because it's not possible to animate all that by hand, right? It had to be
06:33something dynamic. But they somehow managed to create a system that does it on the fly. You can see it
06:38in
06:38the debug view, you can see the timeline, and how the timeline gets created. Or how the animations get
06:42put into the timeline. It's wild. It's so cool. Though my RTS-loving thumb tips the scales,
06:49Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 4 is already one of my most anticipated games of 2026.
06:55At King Art Games, the same excitement is palpable. Both Verbiest and Thason say that getting to work
07:00within 40k has been a dream come true. Thason, who got into Warhammer through the first Dawn of War,
07:06feels strongly about making Dawn of War 4 an entry point for 40k first timers. Verbiest,
07:10on the other hand, is more excited by the prospect of carrying the original series legacy forward.
07:15I grew up with real-time strategy games. I used to mod Red Alert 2 back in the day with
07:19a bunch
07:19of folks. And I've been a fan of Relic strategy games for a very long time. Dawn of War included,
07:24says Verbiest. So I would consider this a huge honour. It's a really exciting opportunity to be
07:29able to give back to players who have stuck with not just the franchise, but the genre as a whole.
07:33It's an exciting way to contribute and give back to them, and show them what we can do. Strategy isn't
07:39back,
07:39it's never gone away. So are you excited for Dawn of War 4?
07:43Let us know and stick with GamesRadar for the biggest games around.
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