During the PC Gaming Show – Tokyo Direct, KING Art and Deep Silver debuted a gorgeous in-engine trailer for the upcoming real-time strategy game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV and shared some details about the game’s inspiration. Originally announced at Gamescom 2025 and slated for a 2026 launch on PC (via Steam), the game will, according to Creative Director Jan Theysen, follow in the footsteps of the first game in the franchise.
The first big decision, of course, was what we were aiming for. Do we try to do a Dawn of War 1 or 2 or a mix of both? We like both of them. But in the end, we said no, let’s really go with Dawn of War 1; that’s our guiding star. We talked to a lot of people: ‘What do you remember from Dawn of War 1? What made it Dawn of War 1 for you?’ And everybody was excited about sync kills. That was just something that everybody remembered, and so we said, okay, we definitely want sync kills in the game, but could we maybe even make it more spectacular or something that 20 years later is super cool? And so we came up with a new system.
I think when you do a new version or reinterpretation of a classic game, the challenge is always that you’re not trying to recreate the old game, but you try to recreate the feeling that people had when they played the old game, right? What you basically want to do is you look at the old game, you ask yourself, okay, how did this work and how did this make us feel and how can we do this 20 years later?
Jan Theysen then discussed the developers’ choices when it comes to the factions that will be featured in Dawn of War IV:
There are so many cool factions and so many cool stories you could choose from. We ended up picking the factions we picked because we felt if we do like a new version or an evolution of Dawn of War, you need the Blood Ravens and you need the Orks. That is just a given.
We thought about adding the Nekrons to Dawn of War IV because we felt that, you know, Nekrons were kind of promised for Dawn of War 3 and never came. So, it felt like a nice touch to finally give them to the players. There may be a faction that never had a big role in the Dawn of War games and there are not that many. The Adeptus Mechanicus is definitely a big and important faction in the 40K universe and they were never part of the Dawn of War franchise, so we felt that’s a good opportunity to have something new for everyone.
As a reminder, the first three games were made by Relic Entertainment, which went independent from SEGA in March 2024 and is now working on a self-published turn-based strategy game called Earth vs Mars, as announced in February 2025.