The launch of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV has been delayed until 3rd December 2026, as developer King Art Games and publisher Deep Silver want to take a few extra months to polish the game. Here’s Game Director Jan Theysen with more.
Dawn of War IV had been planned for release on 17th September, right in the mix with all the GTA 6 avoiders out there. Pushing it back to 3rd December – or 30th November for those buying the Commanders Edition – means it will now be coming out a fortnight after GTA 6. Is that a problem for Dawn of War? Maybe not. It’s a real time strategy game and PC-only, while GTA 6 is console only. There’s bound to be some overlap in the Venn Diagram, but maybe not too much.
The extra two and a half months will be spent working on performance, bug fixes, gameplay polish, and acting upon feedback from recent community playtests. A number of people have picked on details with the animation for attacks shown in the recent Battle Reports, for example, so it will be interesting to see how much King Art are able to tweak and adjust with a little extra time.
The post-launch roadmap has also been amended, with Year One bringing things like the Crusade Mode, more maps, modes, commanders, a mission editor, and two major story expansions. Naturally a lot of this has been pushed back by a couple months.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV has been entrusted to Iron Harvest developer King Art Games and publisher Deep Silver. It’s a new leaf for the franchise, which was created by Relic Entertainment way back in 2004 and defined a new style of real time strategy with less focus on resource gathering and base building, and more on controlling the map and battlefield. Dawn of War enjoyed a good few expansions before Dawn of War 2 explored a more tactical approach in 2009, and Dawn of War 3 sought to blend them all together.
Source: press release
