Female Eldar allow "different tone" and variety in Dawn of War 3

But rest assured there are still some "angry dudes" in the game according to game director Philippe Boulle.

We had a chat with Dawn of War 3 game director Philippe Boulle to learn more about the work that's gone into the third main chapter of the series, and when we might hear more of the Orks and a potential beta.

On the subject of why they chose these three races; Space Marines, Eldar, and Orks, Boulle had this to say:

"We chose these races for two reasons. One and most importantly because they created that gameplay triangle. It's not a hard rock-paper-scissor relationship, but you really get three different styles of gameplay, three really different approaches that play off eachother in really interesting combinations. When we get into the multiplayer there's definitely going to be a team component there, so how these races interact on a team is also important to us. So that's the most important reason, it's the gameplay. It creates this foundation that we can then expand after the main release, with other races and other heroes and so on."

"The other thing that it allowed us to do is tell the story that we wanted to tell. Have a real variety in voices and points of views. The Eldar are one of the rare races in 40K that have a significant number of women in leadership roles. So that allowed us to create a different tone than we would have if we would just have various variations of angry dudes."

We noted that we do love "some angry dudes" in our RTS games, Boulle assured us there will be here as well.

"There are plenty of angry dudes in Dawn of War 3, don't get me wrong. And I love me some angry dudes. But it's nice to have that variety there."

As far as multiplayer and a beta, Boulle said they weren't quite ready to talk about that yet, but that "there will be opportunities to play the game ahead of launch", but the details are not public and perhaps not even finalised.