A thousand umms.
Right, let's get one important thing out of the way first: I've played a fair bit more of Dawn of War 4's main campaign, after my initial impressions of a single mission last year, and I think it is very good. The action is as screen-filling as ever, the Orks are a delight, and the combat director, which sees individual combatants lock onto each other with bespoke animations when groups fight in melee, remains a genuine feat of RTS engineering. I'll have much more to say on that front soon, though I'd like a little more time with it first.
And so, in the meantime, I bring huge* news.
(*This is not likely to be huge news to very many people at all.)
That news is, amongst other things, confirmation of how and why developer King Art decided on the colour of the Blood Ravens' chestplate "imperialis". For the un-neckbearded out there, this is a big deal amongst a very specific part of the 40K community. Warhammer is, ultimately, a tabletop game and hobby built around painting miniatures, and given the nature of it - and of its audience, really, myself included - that painting process has developed all kinds of rules, which are in turn governed by the series' ludicrously vast repository of lore.
The good news is the Warhammer community is also surprisingly good at enforcing the "rule of cool" when it comes to painting minis - as in, if you think it looks cool, then you go for it and don't let anybody stop you. But there are also plenty who want to know exactly what the lore says about the exact piece of armour you're about to paint. And to those people who happen to also be Blood Ravens fans, that's led to the question of the imperialis - the winged skull marking on Space Marine chestplates - and what colour it's truly meant to be.
This is because, in the original Dawn of War games, that imperialis was gold. But then in Dawn of War 2 and 3, it changed to black. In the meantime, Games Workshop, the company behind the 40K universe, has offered very little in terms of wider lore for the Blood Ravens chapter of the Space Marines. Unlike others such as the poster-boy Ultramarines, they have no origin story or confirmed "gene seed" - essentially their genetic origins, a huge part of 40K lore - and likewise varying depictions in official imagery. Even Games Workshop itself has varied over the years, with an old White Dwarf magazine's depiction being one of the main sources until a recent official in-house recipe was confirmed by one persistent fan. (In that version, it was plain old black - boo!)
Amongst all this, and particularly with the original games in mind, I was curious as to what the conversations between King Art's Dawn of War team and Games Workshop looked like when it came to settling on the armour scheme for Dawn of War 4, which has opted for black again here. It turns out, as game director Jan Theyson told me in a recent interview, that there was barely any conversation he can recollect at all.
"It's interesting," he said, when I enthusiastically asked about the chestplate imperialis, presumably while hammering the secret 'PR please get me away from this crazed nerd' button under his desk. "Actually I can't remember that we had the discussion, because I think we just took the latest iteration of them, and there it's black, right?"
"Dawn of War 1 is of course like our 'guiding star'," he continued, "but it's also like, 20 years old, right? And so a lot of stuff changed and happened, and so sometimes you have situations where you basically say, 'Okay, is this still a thing? Can we do this?' But in this case I think we just took the latest one." That latest one, as per the more recent White Dwarf edition, the somewhat niche Onslaught tabletop game, and the most recent video game in Dawn of War 3, was black.
There are other pressing questions, naturally. Some especially precise Space Marine fans have picked up on a specific phrase in the latest trailer, for instance. There, Blood Ravens Captain Cyrus refers to the Dark Angel who saved him as "brother". Technically - and this is getting a little niche even for me now - I gather that's a term Space Marines typically reserve for fellow chapter members, while members of other, allied ones get called something like "cousin". Does this mean the Dark Angels and Blood Ravens are related in some way, perhaps with a shared origin? Or is it just friendly chatter everybody's reading far too much into?
"In that case I can confirm it's just Space Marines who are 'brothers-in-arms'," Theysen smiled.
I dug a little more into the topic of the Blood Ravens' origins, just in case. In terms of their background, Theysen said "it's not going to be a huge part [of the game], because they're very far from home and on the wrong side of the Great Rift and so on. So for them, it's more about survival basically. And so it's not exploring their history, and they're not going back to their old world or anything like that."
That's three-for-three on my lore fishing attempts, so one more for luck. One popular, albeit slightly far-fetched fan theory as to the Blood Ravens' origins has been to speculate that they might share a gene seed with the Thousand Sons, a corrupted Chaos Legion with a similar colour scheme, similar mottos, and similarly unusual number of psykers in their armies.
There's no confirmed mention of Chaos being a faction in Dawn of War 4 so far, playable or otherwise. But do the Thousand Sons get a mention at all?
"No comment," Theysen said.
Read into that what you will. My interpretation: maybe lore needs a rule of cool, too.
In the meantime, look out for a slightly less ridiculous conversation between myself and Theysen, as well as more detailed thoughts on my latest time with the game, here on Eurogamer soon.