• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 creative director Jan Theysen says the RTS game draws inspiration from Dawn of War 2 and 3's mechanics
  • Theysen says, "There are definitely elements" in there from the first game, such as hero mechanics and UI features
  • While core inspiration comes from the first Dawn of War, King Art felt it needed to find the right balance between old and more recent mechanics

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 creative director Jan Theysen has confirmed that while the upcoming game took core inspiration from the first Dawn of War, King Art also borrowed elements from Dawn of War 2 and 3.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Theysen described how the game manifests the classic real-time strategy (RTS) experience of the 2004 game and that, when the studio was looking for a starting point, Dawn of War "was more this classic RTS with base building, with big battles" and its "north star" for inspiration.

The King Art co-founder also revealed that while Dawn of War was the basis for Dawn of War 4, the studio also took features from the second and third games and "there are definitely elements" in there such as hero mechanics and UI features.

"A lot of the hero stuff comes from Dawn of War 2, of course," Theysen said. "I mean, the heroes are not as powerful or not as important as they were in Dawn of War 2 or 3, but a lot of the upgrade mechanics and the different paths you can send your heroes down; you can optimize them in different ways and so on, like meteor range or stuff like that.

"There is definitely a lot of Dawn of War 2. I also think the look and feel is kind of maybe more Dawn of War 2 than it's Dawn of War 1. Dawn of War 3, we liked aspects of the UI, for example. So there are some elements like the unit cards at the bottom of the screen and so on. That is something that we, even for Iron Harvest or previous RTS [games], already took from Dawn of War 3."

Theysen's reasoning for borrowing from the sequels comes down to Dawn of War being over 20 years old, and King Art felt it needed to find the right balance between old and new.

"Dawn of War 1 is a great game, and I love it, but it's also over 20 years old," he added. "So stuff happened in between [game releases] and wherever it's possible, we want to get the best version. But what we also said was, when in doubt, if there's not a really strong argument to do something differently, then let's just do it."

Similar to what Relic Entertainment did with its Dawn of War sequels, Theysen said, "Just because there's no reason to change stuff, don't fix it when it's not broken."

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 launches on PC on December 3.