It is September 2026 and Dawn of War 4 is released. And the most interesting part: Relic is out.
If you are thinking, wait, isn't that their series? Yeah. It was. For twenty years.
2004, part one, a direct hit. A few add-ons, a sequel, all was good. No wonder people started dealing burned CDs in the schoolyard... ahem, forget I said that.
Then 2017. Dawn of War 3. Where somebody at Relic sat down and thought: what if Warhammer 40k... was a little more MOBA? I mean, what could possibly go wrong, you might ask?
Well, let's say Soulstorm, an add-on from 2008, ended up with more players than the sequel from 2017. And Relic, sadly, had to pull the plug. Expansions were cut without replacement, among them the teased Necron faction. Buried before they could rise. Which, for Necrons, is quite an achievement.
And it felt like they wanted Dawn of War 3 to just vanish into the vault completely. Like, you know... we don't talk about this one.
Honestly, that one wasn't bad luck. That was a bad design decision.
A new studio takes over
Interesting news, however, for every fan of the series. Dawn of War 4 now comes from King Art, the people behind Iron Harvest. And even the publisher changes. THQ, then Sega, now Deep Silver.
The studio that botched the series does not get to fix it this time. Let's give someone else a shot.
Seriously, the expectations are high. And right up front: base building is back, and according to Deep Silver it leans heavily on the first game. So you can build again, research, upgrade, unlock units. You know, all the things we loved to do back then.
We are also heading back to Kronus. Roughly two hundred years after Dark Crusade.
We are getting four factions at launch: Space Marines, Orks, the Adeptus Mechanicus making their debut, and even the Necrons get to play from the start. No waiting on a DLC this time.
Better still: each of these factions gets its own campaign. Over seventy missions to play, spread across all four sides.
Well, if that doesn't sound like RTS heaven... I don't know. Plenty to keep you busy.
Where I start to worry
Multiplayer is included, and looking at the roadmap, they are getting ambitious too. Crusade Mode arrives later, a mission editor is planned, updates for Last Stand, a story prologue for the Blood Ravens, and even a fifth faction.
And this is the point where I would start voicing my concerns.
With things like roadmaps, season content, and "it's all coming later," I usually get seriously bad feelings and my wallet starts to hide somewhere. I immediately think of micro transactions, endless battle passes, and every other way of trying to pull money out of my pocket. Seriously, this is the last thing I want. RTS games with micro transactions.
Deep Silver, however, has confirmed they want to keep it classic. Meaning they are aiming for paid expansions instead of permanent monetization.
Honestly, my jaw hit the floor. With this approach I feel dragged back to the early 2000s, when games hadn't yet started squeezing every last euro out of me.
There is one point, though, that genuinely annoys me. I know, for you it's probably not that big a deal. Dawn of War 4 has English voice-over only. German, or any other language, gets subtitles, nothing more.
The bad joke about it? The studio sits in Bremen, not too far from me. The publisher is German. This franchise had German voice actors over twenty years ago. And today, apparently, it only stretches to subtitles. It's a thing I see more and more in the industry, and it's sad.
So if Deep Silver is listening, and by any chance watching this: maybe reconsider.
My other worry is the studio itself. King Art has never made a Warhammer game, and while Iron Harvest was good, it was a tad smaller in size. Dawn of War 4 is huge. It is full of lore, and full of a fanbase that will dissect every single irregularity in the story.
What they are promising, four campaigns, seventy missions, one new faction to come, this is honestly the biggest pitch this series has seen in a very long time.
I want this one to be great, and I am crossing my fingers for King Art to deliver. From the footage it already looks nice, and if the game gets anywhere near what they have shown, that is going to be a huge achievement for them.
So where does that leave us
Dawn of War 4 is an enormously ambitious project. Classic gameplay, classic marketing, classic roadmap. Not the usual felt-like-a-scam that modern games try to pull today.
The footage from the trailers simply looks great. The sound of war... feels like music in my ears.
Personally, I can hardly wait to get my hands on Dawn of War 4 at some point.
And since Gamescom is next month, with Deep Silver almost certainly there and the release only three weeks after, there is definitely more coming. When it does, we'll take a look together.
For the first time in a long while, a Dawn of War announcement doesn't feel like bracing for disappointment. It feels like hope. And I'll gladly take that.