Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is a Real-Time Strategy game by Relic Entertainment, the same people who would eventually be behind Company of Heroes and who previously brought us Homeworld and Impossible Creatures. Obviously a licensed game of the tabletop game, the series is unquestionably the single most successful interpretation of the Warhammer 40,000 universe in video game form in the history of the franchise.
The original Dawn of War takes place on the planet Tartarus, which is under attack by a horde of Orks that are tearing through the planet's population and Imperial Guard garrison. The player is in charge of the reinforcements, Space Marines of the Blood Ravens chapter, but after a few missions slaughtering greenskins it becomes apparent that things on Tartarus are more complicated than they seem: the Eldar of Craftworld Biel-Tan and the Chaos Space Marines of the Alpha Legion are working behind the scenes, and a Warp Storm is incoming and expected very soon.
The first expansion pack, Winter Assault, takes place on the icy planet of Lorn V, and expands the Imperial Guard into a full-fledged playable fighting force of its own. In this story, two factions on either "side" (as in Order vs Disorder) team up temporarily to defeat the other two and secure the power of a massive wrecked Imperator-class Titan that is lost somewhere on the planet.
The next expansion, Dark Crusade, departs from the mission-based campaigns of the original Dawn of War and Winter Assault and introduces the Tau and the Necrons as playable races. Its campaign is set on the planet Kronus, where the seven playable factions engage in a free-for-all smackdown across a "Risk"-Style Map. The planet nominally belongs to the Tau, but of course the Imperium of Man claims it's theirs by right, so each dispatches armed forces from the Fire Caste and the Imperial Guard to consolidate their authority; the Blood Ravens are back, sent by the Chief Librarian to carry out a purge of the world seemingly to protect the chapter's dirty secrets; an Ork Waaagh! led by Warboss Gorgutz Headhunter, who was also the Ork leader in Winter Assault, arrives on the planet to satisfy their bloodlust; the Chaos Space Marines arrive to claim the world for their dark gods; the Necrons buried in vast catacombs beneath the planet's surface stir from their tombs and rise to stake their own claim to the planet; the Eldar of Craftworld Ulthwé arrive to stop them under the leadership of Farseer Taldeer, another returning chararcter from Winter Assault. Although the Imperial Guard and Space Marines factions are usually on the same side, they fight each other anyway, since following their orders is mutually exclusive with leaving the planet to the other side peacefully.
A third expansion pack, Soulstorm, upped the ante by featuring a nine-way free-for-all campaign over the four worlds of the Kaurava system, in which even the three Imperial factions were at each others' throats (all located right next to each other), and introduced the Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar as playable armies.
The sequel, Dawn of War II, is a reboot of sorts. The player is a newly-promoted Force Commander, leading a few squads of Space Marines against an Ork invasion threatening the Blood Ravens' recruitment worlds, and therefore the future of the chapter itself. Once again, the Eldar are working behind the scenes to instigate the conflict, hoping to buy time against the incoming Tyranid hive fleet to save a Craftworld. While still a Real-Time Strategy game, the game eliminates base-building altogether and greatly simplifies resource-gathering, while focusing more on squad-based tactics rather than huge pitched battles, and also incorporating RPG elements in the form of unit experience, wargear, and skill selection. The game is built on the same engine used in Relic's World War II RTS, Company of Heroes, with plenty of graphical enhancements and gameplay tweaks, mirroring the history Dawn of War shares with the Impossible Creatures engine.
An expansion titled Chaos Rising adds Chaos Space Marines to the multiplayer and as antagonists in the campaign, along with powerful wargear that can be used by your Space Marines, though they may lead to corruption. A second expansion named Retribution expands on the single player campaign system by reintroducing campaigns for all the playable factions, and brings back the Imperial Guard as a playable faction.
Besides these official games, the Dawn of War series has spawned numerous mods, from simple tweaks to damage and health values, to ambitious projects that add new units and factions (complete with voice acting and unit models), or even attempts to make the game more closely mirror the rules of the Tabletop Game it is based on.
The franchise's future was in doubt in 2012 due to the bankruptcy of its publisher THQ, sending its subsidiary studios either to auction or out of business. Relic was purchased
by Sega on January 22, 2013, and it was confirmed later that month that with it came an exclusive license to produce games based on Games Workshop IPs. Relic released a trailer on May 3rd, 2016 confirming Dawn of War III was in development and three races — Space Marines, Eldar and Orks — will be playable in it. The game came out on April 27, 2017 and featured a return to the first game's model of large-scale battles, but ultimately turned out to be a Franchise Killer due to disappointing sales resulting in Relic ending support and indefinitely shelving all plans for future content barely a year after release.
See Warhammer 40,000 for the tropes used in the universe itself, although Dawn of War naturally has its own spin on many of those.
Tropes are power. Guard them well, battle brothers!
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Absolutely blatant. Players can play as Hive Tyrants, Chaos Sorcerers, Ork Mekboys alongside Space Marines, Imperial Guard Generals, and Eldar Farseers. Outside of your faction announcer commenting when one of your comrades goes down, none of the characters so much as acknowledge they're working with their mortal enemies.
- Glass Cannon: Several of the playable heroes have builds that emphasize extreme mobility or damage output at the cost of survivability.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: Wave 16 of the Bloodied Colosseum is a Mirror Match against the players' own heroes; the clones have the same weapons and abilities and significantly boosted HP over the originals; they can even revive one another if not taken down quickly. Depending on matchups, this can make it nearly unbeatable, as the AI use your own superpowered abilities to take out your best heroes before you can get a shot off, or else keep picking each other back up faster than you can kill them. Woe betide you if you have a Lord General armed with a sniper rifle. This goes double for Tyrants equipped with Toxin Sacks; since the damage of Searing scales off your HP, your clone will do much more damage than you will.
- Mirror Match: The infamous Wave 16 of Bloodied Colosseum. 3 AI-controlled copies of your team that are even stronger than the originals. The only way to beat them is to use trickery, massive burst damage timed for the instant they spawn, or A.I. Breaker moves (such as the Farseer's Confuse ability, which screws with the AI but has no effect on human players). The clones are revived for a rematch on Wave 20.
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Nintendo Hard: There are two arenas, each with fixed waves of enemies. These enemies start easy, but scale up VERY quickly; new players, with limited Wargear options, likely won't survive long without help from better equipped, more skilled players; however, even for veterans the higher waves can be punishingly-difficult. - Stone Wall: The Hive Tyrant and especially Space Marine can be built this way; tons of health, armor, and (in the Marine's case) health regen, at the complete sacrifice of speed or mobility. The recently added Necron Lord blows them both out of the water though. With the option to build insane armor, or health regen, and the ability to self revive a short while after being killed.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Multiple variants, but a speciality of the Ork Mekboy. One possible build combines a knife that can teleport the player or enemies when it hits, an armor that can teleport the player or enemies when the player is hit, and an accesory that causes anything teleport to explode. Combine with an accessory to make the Mekboy immune to knockdown and the end result is multiple random teleportations followed by explosions; none of which will harm the Mekboy.
COWARDS DIE IN SHAME
