On Thursday, Games Workshop revealed a new and updated version of the classic RTS, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War, during its Skulls videogame showcase. Superficially, this looks like little more than a lick of paint and a bundle of all the expansion content for the venerable game – but the fact that it’s moving to a 64 bit engine is incredible news for the game’s well-established modding community.
Fans had suspected that Relic Entertainment was at work on something in the Warhammer 40k universe. I had high hopes that Thursday’s Skulls Showcase might reveal Dawn of War 4 to the world – alas, it was not to be. But after a night to deal with my disappointment, I’m actually stoked for this new version of a true classic.
Despite being over 20 years old, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War is still one of the very best Warhammer 40k games on PC, and the best RTS game in the franchise (sorry, Dawn of War II fans, they couldn’t both come first). The game enjoyed a treasure trove of expansions throughout its lifetime – all of which will be gathered into the new Definitive edition – and an active modding community has spent two decades making it even more comprehensive.
Dawn of War mods cover everything from balance patches, to new units, to adding entire new Warhammer 40k factions into the game, to expanding the scale to accommodate utterly colossal Warhammer Titans, units so large that fitting them on screen also requires unlocking the camera zoom maximum.
The new definitive edition comes with a dedicated mod manager, and the Steam page purports that it’s compatible with “over twenty years of lovingly crafted mods”. Hopefully, the great majority of those fan creations will be usable right out of the gate. And there’s every reason to think they’ll work better than ever before.
Mods like Ultimate Apocalypse are famous (or infamous) for putting so many units, and such massive units, on screen at once that they threaten to shake apart the game’s poor, wheezing, 32-bit game engine. It doesn’t matter how much RAM you have in your rig, because Dawn of War is running on 32-bit architecture, there’s a hard lock on how many gigs it can access.
That’s never been enough to keep up with the ambitions of the modders. This video review of Ultimate Apocalypse by the ace MandaloreGaming is a great example: the mod has moved on since then in many ways, but the performance limitations he highlights are hard baked in.
By making the jump to 64-bit architecture, Dawn of War hasn’t just been future proofed for compatibility with modern operating systems. It’s now able to call on every drop of power in your gaming rig. And when the modders get their hands on it… well, I’m shivering.
If you can remember all the voice barks from the original Dawn of War, painted up a Blood Ravens Space Marine chapter, or if you’ve given your PC a nervous breakdown trying to run Ultimate Apocalypse in multiplayer with two Emperor Titans on the field, you’re our kind of nerd. Come and say hi in the official Wargamer Discord server!
Dawn of War: Definitive edition may be the sleeper hit of the Skulls reveals, but the big hit was really obvious – Owlcat’s upcoming CRPG based on Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy. And if you want to get up to date with last year’s biggest 40k game, we’ve got three Space Marine 2 Steam keys to give away!
Source: Wargamer
