- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 creative director Jan Theysen has explained how the original Dawn of War influenced the new game's RTS systems
- Theysen says King Art Games "wanted the battles to take a while" in Dawn of War 4
- He says that the game's on-field reinforcement feature was almost cut because it was "weird," but now the team loves it because it "brings the macro [management] and the economy side into the battles"
King Art Games co-founder and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 creative director Jan Theysen has described how the game manifests the classic real-time strategy (RTS) experience of the original Dawn of War.
In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Theysen explained that the first question the team asked itself was which game it wanted to draw inspiration from for the foundations of Dawn of War 4; it ultimately chose the first game, which was released in 2004, as it was the more "classic RTS" and the game the team refers to as its "north star."
"We basically said, 'Okay, we want to do a new Dawn of War,' but then the question was: 'What are we talking about? Dawn of War 1 or 2?' Which are both great but very different," Theysen said. "Maybe even Dawn of War 3. And we said, 'Okay, let's really go back to Dawn of War 1, which for us was more this classic RTS with base building, with big battles."
King Art looked at how big the battles were and how long they took in the original game, and decided on a larger and longer "time-to-kill" gameplay system for the newest iteration.
"We wanted the battles to take a while, so that you can actually throw more units into the battle, right?" he said. "And maybe you win the battle and lose the war because you put all your resources into this one battle, for example; it was something that we looked into a lot, because you know it's something that different RTS [games] handle very differently.
On-field reinforcements is one of the "weirder" things Dawn of War 4 will feature, which Theysen revealed King Art didn't have initially because it's an old system that not many modern RTS games have. Turns out, when the team tested it, [and they] really liked it.
"We felt like it was a little bit weird, right?" he said. "Lore-wise, it doesn't make any sense, and even gameplay-wise, it's not something that a ton of RTS games have. Maybe it's a weird thing that they had like 20 years ago, and maybe it's not that important, but then we actually tried it out, and now we love it."
The creative director added that "we think it's great" because on-field reinforcement also "brings the macro[management] and the economy side into the battles," as well as the real-time unit control with micromanagement.
"By just auto-healing everything or auto-reinforcing everything, the battles become easier, but actually the economy part suffers, right? Or it becomes harder," Theysen explained. "But if you are more about the macro and more about the big picture, it might be totally fine to just put all your units on auto in battle, and they'll do their stuff.
"While if you're really into micro, you probably say, 'no, I can optimize the battle', and then you spend less time in the macro but more in the micro, and that's also fine, and that is maybe an example you know that we directly took from Dawn of War 1."
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 is slated to launch on PC on December 3.