Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II.  It was met with critical praise when it was released in February  and gamers have taken to its fresh answer to traditional real-time strategy gameplay: the game, developed by Vancouver’s own Relic Entertainment (also known for the acclaimed RTS Company of Heroes) has landed at the top of the global PC sales charts. Dawn of War II (or DoW2) has even pleased longtime fans of its source material, a dystopian tabletop wargame so popular it’s spun off a shelf’s worth of novels.

The setup almost doesn’t matter: a war-torn future (that would be the 40,000) and spacefaring races at war with each other, from your standard Space Marines – the focus of the single-player campaign – to Giger-esque Tyranids, elfin Eldar, and brutish Orks.

Scan DoW2‘s credits and you’ll see a lot of VFS alumni. From Animation & Visual Effects, Senior Artist Ian Cumming, Lead Animator Nathan Hocken, and Artists Claire Roberts, Allan Dilks, Jefferson Takahashi, and Christine Hubbard. From Sound Design for Visual Media, there’s Dialogue Editor Allan Levy. From Game Design, Designers Francois Chaput, Mike Wilson, and Brock Robin, and Assistant Producer Mbuso Radebe.

Game Design alum Francois, who graduated in early ’07, took time out of his busy schedule to talk about designing Dawn of War II, walking in the popular tabletop game’s considerable footsteps, and reinventing the RTS.

Hi, Francois! Thanks for taking the time to talk DoW2. First of all, how does it feel now that the game’s out?

Honestly, it feels pretty good. Reviews have been great, and sales have been strong, which obviously makes all the hard work feel worth it. But really none of that matters in comparison to when my brother in Manitoba calls me to tell me how much he loves the game, and that he’s skipped a few online Halo 3 matches he had planned just to play DoW2 instead.

Could you describe the broad strokes of what you were responsible for on DoW2? When readers play this game, what can they watch out for and say, “Hey, Francois did that”?

I was responsible for the creation of boss battles in DoW2, and their implementation.

This was a lot of fun, even though I felt as though I would have needed more time. It was a tough challenge, but one that forced me to improve as a designer as well, one that brought us a wealth of feedback – good and bad – from the community, reviewers and friends, and I look forward to putting what we’ve learned to use in the future.

I was also involved in many of the gameplay meetings as well, and contributed to things like the pacing of the game, how the game played out on the battlefield, and even what archetypes each of the squads would follow.

Warhammer 40K is pretty huge, with a rabid fanbase, novels – everything. Were you a player of the tabletop game? What was it like, as a designer, to translate a property like that into a video game experience?

Honestly, I had never played the tabletop game. Nor had I read any novels, or codices, or anything on this universe.

The only exposure I’d had prior to Dawn of War II was the original Dawn of War games and expansions,which I was playing before my interview at Relic to familiarize myself with their works other than Company of Heroes. In fact, the only exposure to tabletop Warhammer was when I bought some wood elf models to use in my D&D games.

So first thing I had to do was understand the tabletop fanbase, and what they tend to like. Then I had to do the same with the original Dawn of War‘s fanbase. I did a lot of reading, a lot of research, I read so many forums, reviews, fan work and so on.

Eventually the universe became kind of a mindset, and I began to see how things could work as a game. Really, the vision the team had created before I joined the team in December 2007 was very strong and very clear to me, and I was able to contribute to that vision and help it evolve into what Dawn of War II came out.

So all that to say that it was very tiring, but very inspirational and challenging. I feel now as though I have, in a sense, lived the universe and time that everything takes place in, and if I could change anything, I would only want to do it again the exact same way as I did it before, only to experience it all over again.

DoW2 has been getting a lot of praise for its single-player campaign – although it gets away from what one might consider the traditional RTS model of base-building and so on. Even the notion of bosses – it’s not unprecedented, but it’s still sort of unusual. As a designer, how do you handle that challenge of meeting gamers’ expectations while trying to do something new?

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