One of the weird things about being a lover of RTS games—aside from the fact that it sometimes feels like the games industry has left us behind—is how often the people making these games, and certainly the ones financing them, seem to forget that the initial popularity of the genre was driven by high-quality singleplayer campaigns.
Folks look at StarCraft 2, the RTS that's dominated the genre for 15 years, and think it's all down to competitive multiplayer and esports. And that's how we got Stormgate: a game designed by veterans, built to tap into the love of Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2. And it launched with an unfinished, uninspired campaign, and has struggled ever since then.
While the competitive scene is certainly responsible for both games' enviable longevity, most players won't even touch multiplayer. What got most people through the door were the best-in-class campaigns. They led the pack in terms of storytelling and mission design, and that cemented them as two of the best strategy games ever designed.
King Art Games, the studio behind Dawn of War 4, hasn't forgotten this.
"That was one of the things that we, as King Art, brought to the table," Jan Theysen, creative director and game director, tells me. "We are known for making narrative-driven games, and the campaign for Iron Harvest was very well received. So for us, this was super clear: campaigns will be one of the big pillars for the game."
King Art surveyed Iron Harvest players and asked them what the most important modes were for them. "And overwhelmingly," says Theysen, "it's singleplayer content and the campaign." That informed the studio's continued focus. But it didn't just want to do one campaign.
"We had this idea, instead of just having a Space Marine campaign, or maybe one campaign where everybody has some little bits and pieces, let's actually have a big campaign for each of the four factions. And that is already, of course, a lot of work, but then we said, OK, can we maybe even make the individual campaigns dynamic? And can we have optional missions, and can we make sure that the decisions that players make matter? And now we have these four beefy campaigns plus the tutorial."
This isn't to say that multiplayer is being given the short shrift, though.
"That's definitely where we're putting most of our focus for this title," says senior game designer Elliott Verbiest. "But of course we are going to have multiplayer modes for people who want to play with their friends or against other players. But as we saw in both feedback from the community as well as what we remember, what we look most fondly back on when playing RTS games when we were all younger, or how that shaped our tastes in the genre, the singleplayer campaigns were one of the things that stuck the longest with us."
It's a relief, then, but not really surprising for Dawn of War, which has always placed greater importance on its singleplayer campaigns—though perhaps to a lesser extent in Dawn of War 3. But the amount of campaign we're getting this time around—more than 70 missions across four distinct campaigns—feels especially generous.
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