Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 creative director Jan Theysen has revealed that the game's advanced animation system, Combat Director, initially sounded like an impossible challenge until King Art found a solution.

Combat Director is Dawn of War 4's improved animation system that makes sync kills—special animations that occur when units stop fighting using generic animations and square up in a one-on-one fight to the death—more immersive across all melee combat.

This means that instead of syncing the last few attacks, King Art has chosen to sync everything in order to offer a more immersive experience. As the studio explained in a blog post, "In every combat scenario, our Combat Director continually assesses the situation. Who is around you right now? Who is the enemy? Who is supposed to damage whom, and in what manner?" This results in "millions and millions of potential animation combos playing out across different combat scenarios."

However, according to Theysen in an interview with TechRadar Gaming, the team didn't think it could pull it off at the beginning.

"Combat Director for us is the evolution of the singles. At some point, our head of animation said, 'I think we might be able to do this not only for kills, but basically for all melee combat,' which sounded pretty much impossible," Theysen said.

Despite the big undertaking, a core group of in-house animators found the solution; instead of creating whole animations, they just created like little animation snippets, then "what the system does is dynamically, depending on the situation in the game, it puts these snippets together to build animations out of it."

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