Take a closer look at Dawn of War IV’s brutally satisfying Combat Director

Hello everyone!

Today we want to talk to you about the animation systems we’re building for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV. Specifically, how we’ve fine-tuned our Combat Director system to deliver what we believe is the most visually spectacular and detailed animation system in RTS history.

When we started development using the first Dawn of War as our guiding light for Dawn of War IV, we asked ourselves what people remembered most about that experience. What are the feelings and emotions we want to evoke in our players, and how can we best achieve that?

When you ask these kinds of questions, sync kills come up time and time again. These special animations occur whenever units stop scrapping using generic animations, and instead square up in a visceral one-on-one fight to the death. They’re meaty, they look very, very cool and they make combat feel amazingly immersive.

So, it’s fair to say that sync kills were a shoo-in for Dawn of War IV. We didn’t just want to bring the old system back with a fresh coat of paint though. Instead, we wanted to bring it back bigger and badder than ever before, taking full advantage of modern technology.

Our animators were the first to take up this challenge and asked themselves a question: “Why only sync the last few attacks? Why not sync everything?”Now that’s an incredibly tough task, even 20 years on from the first Dawn of War! When it comes to working out who can fight who - and how - in a game like this, there are many thousands of permutations in the animation system. 

There were no guarantees we could pull this off, but the potential was so awesome we were determined to try. A core group of our in-house animators, tech artists and coders huddled together and emerged with a prototype so good, we just knew we had to bring it into the final game.

The result of all this hard work is what we call our Combat Director system, and we hope you’ll agree its impact on Dawn of War IV is pretty spectacular!

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes to make all this work. If you’re a heavy infantry unit like a Space Marine fighting someone lighter or heavier than you, for example, how should that work? What are the animation rules for engaging vehicles versus infantry units?

In every combat scenario, our Combat Director continually assesses the situation. Who is around you right now? Who is the enemy? Who is supposed to damage who and in what manner? 

Whatever you can imagine, the Combat Director figures it all out and stitches together animation snippets to perfectly match the battle at hand.

The end result is not just tens of thousands - or even hundreds of thousands - but millions and millions of potential animation combos playing out across different combat scenarios. Units may jump on each other, then get thrown around dynamically. Heads become severed from necks. All that good stuff.

We don’t think anyone’s ever done anything like this in the RTS genre, and it lends Dawn of War IV an incredibly engaging, unbelievably cool melee combat feel. Every time you watch it unfold, there’s a good chance you’ll see something that you’ve never seen before - in our game or any other!

A lot of this technology simply wasn’t possible on PCs 20 (or even 10) years ago. In fact, we can do things with our engine now that even our previous RTS Iron Harvest couldn’t have handled back in 2020!

We’re incredibly proud of what the team’s achieved with our Combat Director, and we can’t wait to get it in your hands when Dawn of War IV releases next year. Until then, we’ll have more development updates for you very soon.

Everyone @ KING Art Games