Developer King Art Games believes that the single-player campaign in its upcoming strategy game – Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 – might dwarf just about every other game in the genre. In an interview with IGN, creative director Jan Theysen spoke about the campaign in Dawn of War 4, revealing that each one of its four campaigns is bigger than the entirety of the campaign in the original Dawn of War, which came out in 2004.
Theysen spoke about the studio’s history of working on strategy games that primarily focused on their single-player campaigns with titles like Iron Harvest. While he acknowledged that referring to Dawn of War 4’s campaign as the biggest one out of any strategy game might be “a little bit tricky”, he is confident that this is the case.
“I would say you are up for a treat because this is really what was our focus, right? We come from single-player games, and we like stories and campaigns. It’s always a little bit tricky with these claims because someone will find some RTS from 1994 that was bigger. But I think we probably have more single-player content in the game than any other RTS at launch. We have four campaigns and each of the campaigns is bigger than the campaign from Dawn of War 1.”
He went on to discuss how each campaign having a branching storyline will also bring in plenty of replayability, since players won’t have access to all of the missions in a single run through the entire game. Bringing up the example of the Ork campaign in Dawn of War 4, Theysen said that players will only be able to experience 15 or 14 out of its 18 missions in a single playthrough.
“The Ork campaign — I can’t remember 100% — but I think it’s like 18 missions or something like that if you play everything,” he explained. “And in any playthrough, it’s still like 15 or 14 missions you can play. It’s a lot of missions compared to Dawn of War 1. If you’re a single-player fan, I think this is really a game for you.”
Discussing the structure of the campaigns, Theysen also confirmed that Dawn of War 4 will feature two tutorial missions that kick off the campaign. Following these, the campaign will slowly start escalating, giving players access to more of each faction’s tech trees and units in the process, while also giving players plenty of time to adjust to each faction’s unique quirks.
“The campaigns become more interesting because people get new stuff all the time,” Theysen said. “And also, we are not front-loading everything. Your head would explode if we tried to explain everything in the first couple of missions, right?”
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 is being developed for PC, and is slated for release on December 3rd. At launch, the strategy game will feature four playable factions – Space Marines, Orks, Necrons, and the Adeptus Mechanicus. The main story of the campaign has been co-written by Black Library author John French, who has extensive experience in writing for the Warhammer 40,000 setting.
For more on Dawn of War 4, check out the recent showcase of the Maelstrom mode with hard AI.
