Dawn of War 4 Could Eventually Come to Consoles, Creative Director Says

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Could Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 reach consoles? Its creative director says RTS games on console are “always a big challenge,” yet “I believe we could carry it out on a technical level.”

Jan Theysen, creative director on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4, includes hinted that the new real-time strategy game may one day arrive on consoles as King Art plans ahead for its future.

In a chat with TechRadar Gaming, Theysen also confirmed that the team drew inspiration from Dawn of War 2 and 3, including hero systems and interface ideas. He said that while there is nothing announced right now, a console version of Dawn of War 4 does not seem impossible.

“I mean, I believe we could manage it on a technical level,” Theysen said. “We are also looking, of course, into what else might come in the future.”

The King Art co-founder noted that RTS games usually rely on many keyboard and mouse commands, which makes adapting them cleanly to a gamepad difficult. Even so, the studio has handled that kind of shift before with games such as Iron Harvest and Battle Worlds: Kronos.

• RTS controls are hard to adapt to a controller
• Keyboard layouts often use dozens of inputs
• King Art has prior console-friendly RTS experience

“RTS games on consoles are always a major control challenge, aren’t they? he said. So if we ever took it on, I think our aim wouldn’t be to force the exact same controls to be mapped on a gamepad because that’s not really working. I think we actually have around 40 different keys on the keyboard for various things.”

He added that King Art would likely need to rethink parts of the gameplay and make changes so it “actually works well on controller.”

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 is scheduled to release on PC on December 3. During the same conversation, Theysen also spoke about how the game captures the classic RTS feel of the 2004 original, and how the advanced animation system, Combat Director, once seemed like a nearly impossible task.