Dawn of War 4 may be the most generous RTS I've played

The defining philosophy of the game is a single option: the ability to hit a 'skip mission' button. If a player makes a mistake at the end of a mission or simply wants to progress the story faster, the game allows them to move on. Game director Jan Theysen explains that the goal isn't to force a specific playstyle, but to provide a sandbox where players can have fun on their own terms.

Massive Scale and Narrative Branches

The campaign in Dawn of War 4 is described as massive, featuring four sub-campaigns for each faction. These stories intertwine on the planet Kronus—the setting of the fan-favorite Dark Crusade expansion. Each individual campaign is reportedly longer than the entire original Dawn of War campaign. Furthermore, players will encounter narrative forks, where choices lead to different mission paths, effectively doubling the content within each faction's story.

Early previews covered the Orks and Adeptus Mechanicus campaigns. The Ork storyline offers a choice between supporting a local upstart, Guzkutta, or the returning warboss Gorgutz. The Admech campaign leans heavily into the unique atmosphere of the 40k universe, featuring bureaucratic absurdity and mysterious voices, with writing contributions from John French, a noted Black Library author.

Customization and Automation

The game offers extensive customization in skirmish mode. Players can tweak numerous settings, including economy rates, reinforcement costs, and unit stats. Beyond the classic Annihilation and Domination modes, new modes like Maelstrom and Defence are being introduced. Players can also expect the return of the revamped Last Stand mode and the highly anticipated Conquest mode from Dark Crusade.

To manage the chaos of large-scale battles, Dawn of War 4 introduces automation features. This includes the ability to set active abilities to trigger automatically on cooldown and a right-click-and-drag function for selecting enemy groups to prioritize attacks. These tools are designed to help average players manage massive battles without requiring the extreme clicks-per-second of professional esports players, while still allowing high-level players to manually optimize their micro-management.

Factions and Roadmap

At launch, the game will feature four factions. While standard for the genre, this means some iconic 40k factions like Chaos, Astra Militarum, and Eldar are missing from the initial roster. However, Astra Militarum units appear as NPCs in the prologue, and King Art Games has promised more factions to be added through 2027.

Visually, the game introduces the 'Combat Director' feature, which provides bespoke melee animations for individual units without impacting the underlying RTS simulation performance. The game aims to blend the spectacle of Dawn of War 3 with the deep base-building and economy of the original titles.

Dawn of War 4 is scheduled for release on PC via Steam on December 3, with early access starting on November 30.