Hurtle back through space and time with me, will you, to my living room sofa in 2005. Hunched over, Ork-like and sallow, I used to balance my laptop on one of those nesting coffee tables that was a tiny bit too small, a squeaky little bluetooth travel mouse on the even smaller one beside it. It got so uncomfortable at one point I had to give up on the luxury of my squishy wrist-pad mouse mat, and just wedge a whole cushion under my arm instead. All that for another few minutes running my army around the corners of the map, looking for the final building to demolish, any straggling xenos I’d yet to expunge.
The original Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War is one of the all-time greats of real-time strategy. It’s Relic Entertainment, an RTS powerhouse, approaching if not outright hitting its utmost peak, the three brilliant expansions it developed in-house (plus Iron Lore Entertainment’s Soulstorm later on), arriving at just the same time as its equally superlative first Company of Heroes. To look back on that time now – an early teenager, surfing the early-ish, pre-algorithmic internet, playing a favourite genre in a pomp we’ll probably never see again – is to summon that phrase which increasingly feels like the defining cliché of life as an older millennial. We didn’t know how good we had it.
Anyway, I’ve got that out of my system. Back to the grimdark violence of the far future! Dawn of War was and is brilliant because it is just frightfully silly. In writing that, I can hear a thousand mouths cry out in pain, as I think the Aspiring Champion put it. For many, Warhammer is serious business. But not me. Ye olde editor of mine Martin Robinson used to describe 40K as like Tonka Toys for grownups, as if the little models were something you’d imagine smashing together while making duf-duf-duf noises and giggling with glee. I’ve never been able to see it another way since – no faction captures it more than the flag-bearing Space Marines, being all domed shoulders and coned shins and big, cool trucks. Dawn of War was intricate and keenly balanced and vast, but it was also simple. What if you could play your goofy pre-teen imagination, and what if doing that was awesome?
Dawn of War – Definitive Edition, which has just released, was more than enough of an excuse to return. As a remaster it’s a pretty low-key one. For everyday users arguably the biggest fix is the one made to the previously clunky choose-your-resolution options on start-up. There were no good options, for anyone not playing on a monitor from 2005 (Dawn of War and the first expansion, Winter Assault, are 4:3 aspect ratio for instance, and Dark Crusade onwards just stretched-out versions of that), where now it scales nicely all the way up to 4K.
There’s a prettifying effort that’s been made to textures, lighting, shadows and the like – the type of thing that you notice the first time you play the new version and then immediately forget. That’s a compliment, if a back-handed one: the nature of these kinds of upgrades is that, while noticeable side-by-side, in practice the new one simply bumps your memory of the old clean out of your head. I must’ve played the original Dawn of War for hundreds, maybe thousands of hours; within about three with Dawn of War – Definitive Edition my subconscious has already decided that’s just how it always looked.
Naturally, of course, it isn’t. Go back to the original again and you’ll be blown away by just how claustrophobic the level of zoom is with the camera. Or how greedy the UI’s taskbar is, taking up the entire bottom edge and what must be close to about 20 percent of your entire screen. These are little snags you didn’t even know were snags, sanded off and 2025-ified for modern consumption. Plenty of old bugs have been tidied up too.
The headline for the true nerds is the move to a 64-bit version of the game from the previous 32-bit. I’m not going to even attempt to get all Digital Foundry about this but the top-line point here is that it’s a major boon for the modding scene, adding extra headroom where modders would previously come up against hard limits to RAM usage. Part of the justification developer Relic gave for this specific type of somewhat limited remaster, in fact, was that it “didn’t want to break anything” modders had made for the original, as design director Philippe Boulle told some guy called Wes at IGN.
The headline for me, meanwhile, is that I once again have a reason to play this game again – and a functional, borderline thriving online community to repeatedly lose to once more. (Anyone who ventured onto old DoW servers in recent years would’ve encountered one of about nine, five-star-rated experts who still lurked there, and who were often very nice, in that Warhammer shop assistant way, as they absolutely obliterated you in about 45 seconds flat.)
I started up my playthrough here at the very beginning, with the first Dawn of War’s main campaign. This lasted a few pleasantly xeno-purging missions until I had one of those who am I kidding moments, and turned straight to the conquest mode of Dark Crusade – one of the very greatest RTS campaigns of all time, and a mode I’ve personally replayed so many times, on so many chunky laptops after school, or friends’ parents’ PCs when attempting to jank together some rudimentary LAN party, that even the tutorial voiceover guy’s weirdly impeccable enunciation is burned into my ears. This mode is just magic. Put a conquest mode in everything, I say (and realise I’ve also said before).
In saying that, I realise I’m trying to sell you on it. And in realising that I’m landing on something else. The other big millennial realisation that is forever destined to haunt us, as it’s done to every generation before. A lot of people are about to experience this thing you’ve always loved for the first time today. I like that one much better. So much has been said and written about the demise of the RTS. And indeed of Relic, a sensational developer that’s gone through the ringer like so many others in recent years. Now’s your chance to remind yourself what they were all about; or to realise it for the first time. If you’ve never played Dawn of War – hell, if you’ve never played a real-time-strategy game – this is the time to do it.
Dawn of War is grim, jagged, frequently some shade of sludgy grey, green or brown. It’s also campy, emphatic in its spectacle and quite happy to be bizarre. It’s a game where teching (or turtling, as some call it) can be genuinely viable, letting you pile up defensive turrets and mines, pack choke points (all great strategy games must have choke points!) and outlast your enemy’s assault as you bide your time through unit upgrades. As can rushing to a specific unit or upgrade for some niche, edge-case means of assault, like teleporting a builder over a chasm and having them construct cloaked buildings right under the enemy’s nose. It’s a game you can take very seriously, with a real competitive edge, or likewise not even a little seriously at all, giggling at line deliveries and old quotes you’ll find yourself muttering to friends years later. And all of it’s just drenched, dripping, squelching away in peak, secondary school oddball fantasy. I refuse to play this game and be sad about the state of the RTS, to feel sorry for what we’ve lost or what could’ve been. Instead I’m simply glad to have it at all. I say get your big fancy power armour on and wade in, like the rest of the Emperor’s finest.
