Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Definitive Edition is out now, and of course modders are already pushing it to its limits. But the way they’re doing it is a lot of fun — and is perhaps the closest we’ll get to seeing a Waaagh! visualized on-screen.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is Relic Entertainment’s much-loved real-time strategy game set in Games Workshop’s grim dark sci-fi universe. It launched in 2004 and proved to be an entry point into the Warhammer 40,000 universe for a generation of PC gamers, while also pleasing existing fans with its authentic representation of the setting.
Now, over 20 years later, Dawn of War returns in Definitive Edition form, and some of the modders who have spent years tinkering with the original are excitedly moving over to this new version to see what it’s capable of.
Much of this early testing is being done by people involved with Dawn of War’s wonderful Unification Mod, which lets users seamlessly combine almost all community-created races. Within hours of Definitive Edition’s release this week, modders started seeing how many Ork Boyz they could spawn in-game before it crashes, because, well… what else would Ork Boyz do?
One member of the Unification Discord, Gunnisson, led the charge by summoning Ork Boyz as soon as they got their hands on the Definitive Edition:
Then, a progress update at nearly 1,000 Boyz spawned:
Over 3,000, and according to Gunnisson: “They’re pathing through each other exceptionally well.”
The Ork count kept on increasing, to the point where, after more than 10,000 Orks, Dawn of War hit single-digit frames per second and became unplayable. But it still ran! “I mean, 10,000+ models on screen, I call that a win for performance and stability,” Gunnisson said.
Gunnisson was eventually able to make 47,504 Ork Boyz “before the game died.” It took over seven hours, they said, while publishing the screenshot below: “At the end it was still chugging along at 10 seconds-per-frame.”
“Performance is fantastic,” Gunnisson added. “It took a lot of corpses to start impacting.” Then: “I’m hyped to try some big matches.”
This is a herculean effort, and for Warhammer 40,000 fans is about as close as we’ll get to a good old Waaagh! For the uninitiated, this is the name given to the wonderful moment when enough Orks gain enough collective momentum to launch devastating system-wide invasions. The Orks don’t really understand what’s going on or why it’s going on — they’re just happy they’re in a massive scrap — but for anyone on the receiving end, it’s bad news indeed.
In a post on Steam to mark the release of the Definitive Edition, Relic thanked modders for helping to test the game ahead of launch.
“We want to say a huge thank you to our community modders who we have been working with for many months,” Relic said. “They’ve put in a lot of work both in helping us to support legacy mods, and in readying their own mods for the Definitive Edition.”
It’s exciting to imagine what modders will be able to do with the Definitive Edition in the coming years as they get to grips with the game. As Gunnisson suggested, massive battles involving tens of thousands of units may now be possible, if the game can stand up to it. Perhaps then we’ll get truly lore accurate body counts.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
