Dawn of War III - Cunning and Wiles

Dawn of War III is a AAA real-time strategy game set in the Warhammer 40k universe, focusing on intense, large-scale battles, and hero characters. Control hundreds of units ranging from belligerent squads of Ork Boyz, to towering walkers like the Eldar Wraithknight. The campaign consists of 17 linear missions jumping between 3 armies while telling one cohesive story.

On this project I was a Mission Designer, overseeing 3 missions from paper plan to ship.

My tasks included:

• Creating paper plans and level layouts

• Greyboxing levels

• Scripting encounters in Lua

• Scripting objectives and dialogue

• Creating in-game cinematics and non-interactive sequences

• Collaborating with environment artists, sound designers, and gameplay designers on custom assets

• Conducting regular playtests to gather feedback and iterate on the mission

Cunning and Wiles

From the start, my intent for this mission was for it to embody the Ork faction experience. Thus, the gameplay focuses on the Ork’s two loves: Fightin’ and scrappin’.

The gameplay is simple. Destroy the Eldar bases in an all-out brawl (fightin’), then loot the base for scrap to upgrade and build more units (scrappin’). Each encounter increases in scale that reaches its climax during the final fight where the player is introduced to the Ork super ability ‘Rokks’ which drags a massively large rock down from orbit slamming it to the ground in a devastating area of effect.

Full mission playthrough - No commentary

Highlights

Encounters focus around the Eldar bases where players fight large scale battles.

Each encounter leads to building a bigger army. All building and vehicle scrap can be turned into upgrades or constructed into entirely new units.

The Rokk super ability is taught to players through a staged encounter culminating with a giant rock slamming to the ground.

Challenges

The core experience of this mission was strong from the start and was only further solidified through iteration. However, a challenge this mission did face was finding its place in the campaign narrative. When I received this mission, the narrative directive was to start the mission getting backstabbed by Ronahn, fight through the Eldar faction, then arrive at “The Vault” to close it out. The body of the mission risked feeling like filler.

To solve this, I worked with the writers to add a Wraithlord mini-boss that is fought in stages throughout the mission. This new character was given a character portrait and was foreshadowed in missions leading up to this one. This added a few layers:

• The narrative thread continued throughout the mission, rather than bookending it.

• It highlighted the Wraithlord, a unit the player experiences for the first time here in the campaign.

• The mission had greater weight in the campaign beyond simply fun gameplay.

Result

This mission was an instant hit amongst the team and remained one of the favourites throughout development for its simple Orky gameplay. Later in development the mission was used for a hands-on press demo with IGN.