As much as I adore the hand-painted Warhammer 40K guys I have sitting just off to the right side of my desk right now, there's always been one thing they can't do that an RTS like Dawn of War can: moving and fighting and kicking the crap out of each other realistically. I mean, sure, I can smash them together and make cool sound effects. But that can ruin the paint job, and it wouldn't really cut it for a new Dawn of War game. It is, after all, a series known for its brutal kill animations and intense battlefield atmosphere. We got a chance to chat with Thomas Derksen, animation director on Dawn of War 4, about how King Art Games is taking the animations for the characters in this universe that we love to the next level.
Like myself, Derksen recalls the original Dawn of War being a gateway into the larger 40K universe. Watch the video below or read on for what Derksen had to say.
"So the first memory that I have from the game was … So I didn't know anything about this," Derksen recalled. "I have no idea what Dawn of War is, who Games Workshop was, anything. I just got my hands on the Dawn of War 1 game. The first thing that I saw and that they did different than most other RTS was, I had a squad of guys there. And I could equip them with a range of weapons. I could upgrade them. I could add a sergeant and everything, right? It just felt like I cared so much more about these guys on the battlefield. They're fighting it out. I didn't want to have them killed or get them killed. And I think this is what really taught me on the whole idea.
"And the other thing that I remember from the game was seeing the dreadnought getting hold of one of the ork and then crushing him in his hand, and this is just nothing I ever saw in any game before. And I think it was spectacular to see all of this, the stuff that you … Back then that you only ever imagined in your head, really play out in real time during a game in a spectacular way. This was just awesome."
Synced kill animations have been around since the beginning of the series. But with Dawn of War 4, King Art wanted to take things even a step further. Any time two units engage in melee, animations can be created procedurally based on their relative heights, weights, and strengths. So it's not just the fatal finishers, but every tense exchange of blows.
"So I think this is one of the main things that kept us busy around here was what we call the combat director," Derksen explained. "The combat director does something very unique. Most people know the sync kill system from all the way back from Dawn of War 1, but what we did is we tried to expand on that and instead have synced combat really. So every action that you see in the game really has a counterpart. So you always see guys fighting it out between themselves. I don't think really any RTS has done anything like this in the past."
And that's no simple feat when 40K features everything from tiny, goblin-like gretchens up to towering astartes dreadnoughts. But King Art is aiming for a system that can even generate synced brawls between some very mismatched opponents.
"Regarding the size differences, we call it power levels really. There is a lot of overlap between certain power levels, but not all of them. So a gretchen will never be able to fight the dreadnought for example, the same way that another dreadnought does. So you have to find actions that fit both sizes. I think we have four power levels in total. So really there's a lot of overlap between certain units, but not all of them. So there's a range of actions that only dreadnoughts versus other dreadnoughts or in some cases versus terminators. So there's a range of actions that only a terminator can use against other terminators, for example.
"But some of them will be able to combine with say a dreadnought or a deff dread or something, right? But gretchens then have their own unique action sets where they would then match up against all the smaller ones like Imperial Guardsmen or sometimes the occasional ork, but most of the time they stick to themselves and are more or less only thrown around by the big guys."
Dreadnoughts and tanks are one thing. But with the storied Dark Angels chapter arriving to reinforce the beleaguered Blood Ravens, we'll be seeing another RTS first in Dawn of War 4 with the appearance of an actual space marine primarch on the battlefield. Lion El'Jonson, recently awakened from an epic power nap, will make an appearance in the campaign mode. And animating such a living legend is a task King Art is taking seriously.
"Already Space Marines are hard to get right from the perspective of an RTS," Derksen admitted. "If you don't think about it, they don't look much bigger than humans, so you have to convey a whole lot more than you would for normal humans. And now the primarch is on a whole different level again, and also he has his own certain characteristics. He has a very wild fighting style in addition to everything that we have seen so far on the space marine. So I think getting that right, this was just a whole lot of challenges all at the same time really."
And it's not just the scale of the units that are creating new challenges this time around. The battles in Dawn of War 4 can get bigger than anything we've seen in the series previously. And for the battlefield to stay readable, the animation system needs to adapt.
"We are a bit more zoomed out in our game," Derksen elaborated. "We want to show more units on the battlefield at the same time. So what we had to do that was a little bit different to what Dawn of War 1 did is we had to introduce a bit more movement throughout all these actions. These combatants, they were dragging one another along and to fight it out on the ground sometimes. As a player, you require a better read on the silhouette to really understand what's going on from the corner of your eye kind of."
Despite what you may have heard, though, in the grim darkness of the far future, there is a bit more than just war. I mean, you also need to build stuff that enables you to do more war. And even in constructing an outpost, Dawn of War 4 includes a lot of faction-specific personality. The orks, for example, actually drop most of their buildings from space in the form of a big pile of junk that somehow organizes itself into something functional.
"What we really did, we knew that we wanted to have this look like a bunch of junk really, like junk being dropped from orbit," Derksen described. "And I think we just went ahead with the physicality behind, okay, how would it look if we dropped a rock from orbit? Like what's the speed? What's the weight that we want to convey? And then we just let it go and see where we ended up, tweaked it a little bit here and there. And I was like, yeah, I think this looks scrappy enough now, so let's use it.
"I think starting with orks set us up to explore certain areas that we didn't fully or couldn't fully commit to with the orks. So for example, for the orks, it needed to feel scrappier. And so weight was kind of a different concern than for space marines, for example. So the ork stuff, it just dropped from the sky. But the space marine stuff, it was dropped there with intention and like with bad intentions. And so we could expand a bit on that idea, right? And for other factions, it was more for the AdMech, for example, wanted to click everything into place a little bit more neatly, for example. The exact opposite from what orks do. So I think orks pretty much provided us with a good enough baseline to expand into certain other areas that interested us."
Needless to say, bringing the 40K universe to life in an RTS is always going to be a monumental task. But for these devs, seeing intricate and interesting moments emerge through this new animation system has given them something to get excited about.
"So we had an immense task ahead of us back then," Derksen recalled. "I don't think anyone really realized in the team how much effort all of this would take. We were all knowing that we were biting off more than we could chew back then, but it was on a whole different level. What I find spectacular and it only hit me recently was I was just watching a scene of Bladeguards fighting it out with a bunch of orks. And you saw the Bladeguard apparently noticing someone approaching from behind and killing them. Other orks are taken from the sides, killing them too. These guys on the battlefield, they start to be aware of their surroundings and you start to see intelligence play out. I hope that players can find these little moments and appreciate them as much as we do here."
