Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 massively expands the original’s sync-kill system so “every action has a counterpart” as it makes you actually care about individual units

KingArt Games’ upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 aims to bring the iconic RTS series back to its roots with an “overwhelmingly single-player” package that aims to please fans of the original game.

Set to release later this year exclusively on PC, the upcoming RTS game won’t include the series’ iconic Gabriel Angelos, but it will be the biggest game the series has ever seen on launch. Including four armies on release—Orks, Necrons, Blood Ravens, and Adeptus Mechanicus—the game also revitalises the original game’s Sync-Kill system with unprecedented detail.

Speaking to IGN, animation director Thomas Derksen explained that Dawn of War 4 is powered by a dedicated “combat director” that works to make sure combat actually shows individual units interacting on the battlefield.

In the original game, this would result in larger enemies picking up smaller units and smashing them into the ground, or characters lobbing grenades at specific opponents. To this day, the Sync Kill system makes the original Dawn of War feel alive, and the upcoming fourth entry is cranking that up to 11.

“It just felt like I cared so much more about these guys on the battlefield there fighting it out.”

Dawn of War 4 animation director Thomas Derksen on the original’s Sync-Kill system.

“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,” Derksen said. “Every action that you see in the game really has a counterpart, so you see guys fighting it out between themselves. I don’t think really any RTS has done anything like this in the past.”

KingArt Games has created a wonderfully dense branching animation system that has unique situations for units coming up against specific units. “There’s a range of actions that only a Terminator can use against other Terminators,” the animation director said, explaining that “gretchins then have their own unique action sets where they would match up against all the smaller ones”.

Derksen explains that, when playing through the original Dawn of War, the Sync-Kill system stood out as being the most unique aspect of the game. There’s a reason why fans still point at the game as the pinnacle of early-2000s RTS and why YouTube compilations of death animations are still present to this day.

“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?” the animation director said. “It just felt like I cared so much more about these guys on the battlefield there fighting it out.”

Dawn of War 3, the series’ most maligned entry, annoyingly abandoned Sync-Kills, although it did create some hilariously over-the-top animations for major characters. While the original two titles—which are very different in their core gameplay—both generated dozens of unique kill animations, Dawn of War 4 is boasting over 1,000 permutations. It’s a Herculean effort, but it’s what the system deserves, and it’ll be fantastic to see it in action again when the game launches later this year.

For more Warhammer news, read about Games Workshop’s ban on Generative AI. Additionally, read about why it may be quite a few years until we get our hands on Space Marine 3. I know, it’s sad.