Gamescom’s Opening Night Live is, by its very nature, a show that thrives on big surprises, but few would have tuned in expecting to see Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4. After all, a remaster of the original game had only just arrived days prior, and developer Relic Entertainment – now independent after a decade-plus of being owned by Sega – didn’t seem ready to deliver a massive new Warhammer RTS anytime soon. Not that it needed to be ready, of course. This was a double-hit surprise: not only is Dawn of War 4 real, but it is being developed by a completely different studio from the rest of the series, King Art Games.
How did this happen? And why, in the lavish new CGI trailer, is there no sign of Gabriel Angelos, the Space Marine poster child of the Dawn of War series? Oh, and where are all the Chaos Marines? And why are the Blood Ravens back on Kronus? These are all the questions I had for Jan Theysen, the co-founder of King Art Games and Dawn of War 4’s creative director, when I met with him on the Gamescom show floor. It all started, he explained, when Games Workshop took an interest in his studio’s previous, Relic-inspired strategy game…
IGN: How did you become involved with the project? Was it pitched to you? Or did you pitch it to Games Workshop?
Jan Theysen: So a couple of years ago we developed Iron Harvest, which was a Kickstarter RTS. And we were very open about the production, so we basically shared a lot of our technology and what we can do and so on. Someone at Games Workshop saw that and they basically came to us and said, ‘Let’s say if we were to do Dawn of War 4, what would you guys do with it?’ And so we made a concept and we presented it, and we assumed that they probably asked a bunch of [other] people, so we were not really expecting anything to come out of it. But then Iron Harvest was released and was successful, and so [Games Workshop] came back and basically said, ‘Okay, do you want to talk some more?’ And we asked our Iron Harvest publisher, Deep Silver, if they were interested, and of course they were. And so miraculously the three of us came together and now we’re a Dawn of War developer.
IGN: So what was that pitch?
Theysen: It’s basically what we’re doing now. While we were working on Iron Harvest, we did a lot of surveys and we were very close to the community and talked to a lot of people. And what basically came out is that a lot of people felt it would be great if there would be more emphasis on campaigns and single player and maybe co-op, and not that much on competitive.
And so we said, ‘Okay, we have a narrative background. We like to do campaigns and we like to do single player stuff. So actually let’s do that.’ And we pitched this game where we said, ‘Okay, let’s have four factions, but let’s have a big campaign for each of the factions instead of a Space Marine campaign where maybe every now and then someone joins in or something.’ That was one of the building blocks. And we also pitched in general this idea of ‘Let’s go back to Dawn of War 1’, because we asked a lot of people what they like, and many people asked ‘Couldn’t there be more base building and research and upgrades and all of that stuff?’ Big armies and all of that felt very much [like] Dawn of War 1. And so we said, ‘Okay, what we want to do is sort of a new interpretation or an evolution of Dawn of War 1, with a big fat campaign.’
IGN: Who decides what those factions are? Did Games Workshop suggest you might want to use some factions?
Theysen: Well, it’s a conversation, but it’s also, there’s so many great factions. So it’s more like, ‘Okay, what can’t we do?’ And what are the factions that for some reason we feel strongly about? And basically, if you do a Dawn of War, you want the Blood Ravens. That’s basically a must have. If you want to do a sort of spiritual successor of the first Dawn of War, you need the Orks, really. Then the Necrons. Necrons were kind of promised or teased for the third game and never came out. So we felt that’s maybe a nice thing to do, to basically say, ‘Okay, eventually, here they are, you can play the Necrons now.’
[This] basically left us with just one empty slot. And we said, ‘Okay, is there a faction that was never part of Dawn of War before? Something really new for everyone?’ And there are not that many factions, actually, but one that really jumped out is Adeptus Mechanicus. It’s a big faction in the lore, everybody knows about them, but they have never been part of Dawn of War. So we said, ‘Okay, AdMec it is.’
IGN: And historically, at the time when those Dawn of War games were coming out, AdMec as a faction didn’t have as many miniatures. They were more lore rather than a tabletop faction.
Theysen: Absolutely. But that changed, obviously, because we’re now 20 years later and a lot of things change. I mean, even the Necrons from the first Dawn of War, from Dark Crusade, are very different Necrons from the Necrons of today.
IGN: In terms of the scales of your units, obviously Warhammer goes from tiny Imperial Guardsmen to massive Titan mechs. What is the extent of your scale?
Theysen: It’s from Scarabs up to Imperial Knights, or to Monoliths, or whatever there is in there. One of the big things is that buildings and RTS camps are always a little bit weird, right? Because they’re way too small, obviously. And ours, it’s still not a realistic size, but our buildings are a lot bigger than normal in RTS games, because we felt like it just helps with the epicness and all. Everything should be big in Warhammer, I think. But yeah, we have from 40 centimeters to 40 meters.
IGN: Obviously this series started with Relic. Have you had any conversations with Relic to learn what the important aspects of the character of Dawn of War was so that you could carry that legacy on?
Theysen: Well, we didn’t call them or talk to them directly. Basically what we did is we went back to all the games, but then specifically Dawn of War 1. We tried to figure out what makes this game tick. The first question was, are we going with Dawn of War 1 or 2? Because both of them are great games, but very different. And we said, ‘Okay, Dawn of War 1 it is.’ And then the question is, ‘Okay, what makes Dawn of War 1, Dawn of War 1?’ It’s actually even more complicated because you can’t just go back to that game, take a feature, and put it in your game and expect that it still works or that it evokes the same feelings and emotions, because it’s 20 years old and stuff changes. And so basically what we really try to do is figure out how you felt 20 years ago when you played the game, and how can we make sure that it feels like that again. And so yeah, we did that a lot and figured out, what is our version of something that they did 20 years ago?
IGN: Generally when Relic launched its games, it told a short story in the CGI trailer, whereas yours is a montage of all of these many things. Is it because you wanted a montage, or is that a montage of cinematics from the game?
Theysen: It’s a little bit of both. We have four CGI [cinematics], so one CGI for each of the campaigns and each of the characters. And then inside the campaigns we have something like 40 minutes of 3D cutscenes. Basically what the trailer is showing is shots from the different CGI intros with this little bit of the framework story, the outline.
IGN: Games Workshop is quite protective of its IP. Have you had any conversations where they were like, “Oh, that animation you’ve done doesn’t quite work?”
Theysen: I think first of all, we are totally aligned with them, that we say the game should feel like Warhammer, right? So the look and feel is very important, and it’s Warhammer but it’s also Dawn of War, right? So we basically said, ‘Okay, we definitely want to make sure that it feels right.’
And then of course the whole IP is so complex, and there’s so much stuff in there that even if you’re a big fan, you don’t know everything. And so what happens a lot is basically we ask them about this weapon: ‘Lore wise it says this, but in this game it looks like this. What colour is the beam supposed to be?’ Or whatever it is. And with that stuff they’re great, because then they basically run into the archive and then send the references. And of course in the end they look over everything, they look over all the assets and so on, and make sure that they actually look on form and meet their expectations.
IGN: In the press release, it says Dawn of War 4 is set many years after the events of Dark Crusade. Are the narratives of Dawn of War 2 and 3 being acknowledged, or are you doing a soft reboot?
Theysen: I think our approach was more that we wanted these campaigns to be kind of nonlinear, so that you sometimes can pick between different missions and so on. And for that we needed a planet. So we said, ‘Okay, we want a world map where you can basically select different missions and so on, and also where there can be world map dialogues from Dawn of War 2.’ And so we basically thought about what we could do. And that was actually something that Games Workshop suggested: ‘Why not go back to [the Dark Crusade setting of] Kronus? Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing?’ Well, yeah, that would be cool, because Kronus is basically on the wrong side of the Great Rift. That also feels great for our story because the Blood Ravens are now scattered in the Nhilus Sector, and it’s basically they go back to this planet that is kind of connected to them in the hope of maybe finding recruits, or finding brothers that made their way back to the planet as well. But then it’s 40k, and of course everything goes totally wrong, but we felt it’s a nice idea to go back there.
And in terms of connections to the previous games, we assume that the Space Marines won the Dark Crusade, so that is now our canon. And the other stuff [from Dawn of War 2 and 3] happened, but it’s not really a big part of the story we tell, because now we tell four different stories from four different perspectives. They all have this overarching narrative, but it’s not all about the Blood Ravens. And so it’s more about what happens now on this planet, and why is everybody on the planet, and all that stuff.
IGN: I think everybody’s going to be asking where the hell is Gabriel Angelos? Where is he?
Theysen: That was actually one of the decisions we made relatively early. We don’t want Gabriel Angelos in the game. Because for us, he felt a little bit overpowered, and it’s a little bit weird to have either this slightly overpowered character from the beginning of the game, which is a little bit off, or you have to do, ‘Oh, well, he lost his memory and he lost all his power,’ which is also a weird trope. And so we basically said we want more “normal” heroes. So we have Cyrus and we have Jonah coming back, but they’re all more like, power level-wise, more similar to normal units.
IGN: The other thing people may be surprised about is that there’s no Chaos.
Theysen: That was actually one of the things of course we discussed, but there are basically… ‘story reasons,’ let’s say… why maybe Chaos would be a better fit later in this whole thing.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
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