„They will never be a great genre again.” Dawn of War 4 developers candid about the future of RTSs
The developers of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV talked about their approach to creating a sequel to this legendary series and assessed the condition of the entire RTS genre.
One of the nicest surprises of the gamescom 2025 Opening Night Live show turned out to be the announcement of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV.
Jan Theysen, creative director from the game studio King Art Games, gave a brief interview to GamesRadar+, in which he expressed his opinion on the current state of the real-time strategy genre.
Although King Art is currently working on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV, and previously achieved considerable success with Iron Harvest, Theysen does not believe that RTS games will ever regain their former popularity. However, he does not think that this is something bad. As he explains:
I'm pretty sure that RTS will not be the big genre again. It's more of a niche genre, but it's a big niche, right? And also, we felt like, okay, there are a lot of RTS fans that are just looking for the next cool, great RTS, but there are also, of course, a lot of Warhammer fans and a lot of 40K fans and Dawn of War fans and so on.
Now, even more because of Space Marine or maybe the upcoming Henry Cavill series. So for us, it's like, if there is a sizable RTS fan community, if there is a sizable Warhammer community, maybe that's enough. Let's make a great game for both of these communities.
Jan Theysen admits that there is no chance for any RTS to dethrone FPS games, but that doesn't mean it's not worth making real-time strategies.
A bit about four campaigns
Such an approach translates into a vision of the game. The senior gameplay designer, Elliott Verbiest, also participated in the interview. He revealed that in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV, we will find four story campaigns and each of them will be bigger than the one from the first game in the series.
However, they will not be so expansive as to conflict with the contemporary niche nature of the RTS genre. King Art Games is a relatively small team and they know their limitations. So the developers will not be trying to make a movie-like blockbuster typical for AAA games.
Verbiest believes that King Art Games' size is perfect for this type of game. On one hand, the studio is large enough to deliver the expected quality and level of development, that would cause huge problems to a small dev team. On the other hand, King Art Games is not so big that a project of this scale would have too little financial potential to cover the production costs.
Elliott Verbiest also added that each campaign will consist of about 12-15 missions. Some of them will only appear as a result of specific player decisions, so during a single playthrough of the campaign, we will not see everything it has to offer.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV is heading exclusively to PC. It will be released next year.
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Author: Adrian Werner
A true veteran of the Gamepressure newsroom, writing continuously since 2009 and still not having enough. He caught the gaming bug thanks to playing on his friend's ZX Spectrum. Then he switched to his own Commodore 64, and after a short adventure with 16-bit consoles, he forever entrusted his heart to PC games. A fan of niche productions, especially adventure games, RPGs and games of the immersive sim genre, as well as a mod enthusiast. Apart from games, he devourers stories in every form - books, series, movies, and comics.
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