At a glance:
Release date: December 3, 2026
Platforms: PC
Developer / Publisher: King Art Games, in partnership with Relic Entertainment's original IP
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV is set to release December 3, 2026, continuing a strategy series whose last true mainline entry, Dark Crusade, is nearly two decades old.
What we know so far
Dawn of War IV is being developed by King Art Games, the German studio behind Iron Harvest, rather than original creator Relic Entertainment. The story picks up two hundred years after the original Dawn of War and its Dark Crusade expansion, continuing the story of Cyrus and Jonah as they return to the planet Kronus to try to rebuild their Space Marine chapter.
Early hands-on previews from Gamescom 2025 were unusually enthusiastic for a genre that's had a quiet few years — one preview from Game Informer was titled, only half-jokingly, "Makes Me Want To Become An RTS Sicko." The game leans on the large-scale, drawn-out battles that defined the original Dawn of War, rather than the smaller skirmish format some later entries in the series experimented with.
Why it matters
Real-time strategy has had far fewer big-budget releases in recent years than shooters or open-world games, which makes a genuine, large-scale return to one of the genre's most beloved settings a bigger deal than its release date alone might suggest.
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