Why Dow 4 won't look as "good" as the older DoW games
TLDR: Better technology and engines will deliver better graphics, but they don't necessarily translate into a more immersive game.
The old Relic team (not the people that produced DoW3) always painstakingly put an extraordinary amount of effort into animations and small little details into their games which makes their games incredibly atmospheric compared to other RTS games on the market.
Yes King Art games has copied over sync kills, but sync kills are only one aspect of Relic's attention to details. This meticulous attention is detail is the secret sauce DoW 4 (and many other modern RTS games) is lacking.
Below is an interview excerpt during development of company of heroes 1, a game that came out in 20 years ago.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/company-of-heroes-impressions-exclusive-first-look/1100-6124417/
>Among other things, the game models small-scale tactical encounters on the ground between individual soldiers, jeeps, and tanks, as well as aerial runs from bombers overhead. And everything is rendered with remarkable detail. We took a close-up look at an individual American soldier, whose shiny helmet and rumpled uniform got convincingly muddied with use. All infantry units in the game will move using a skeletal animation that is context-sensitive; that is, depending on where your soldiers are, they’ll automatically move differently.
>You can expect to see everything in the game rendered with unbelievable detail.
>We watched the soldier adopt several different stances, including a standard forward march, a dashing forced march, a cautious advance in which he continuously looked from side to side, and, finally, a dive to a prone position, from which the soldier sidled forward on his belly. As supervising graphics programmer Ian Thomson demonstrated, the level of detail shown on each soldier isn’t just limited to facial expressions (and even lip synching, a rare feature indeed for real-time strategy games) and mud on uniforms. The game’s advanced lighting engine will also allow for “localized lighting,” which is environmental light and shadow mapping (such as the shadows of trees and buildings that pass across soldiers as they walk under them, for example). Thomson then showed off the same soldier under, of all things, a disco ball. While this demonstration might have seemed amusing, this actually showed the soldier with more than 40 distinct colored and animated lights shifting along his body. You’ll see this in the game as multiple animated lights from incidental sources on soldiers, such as muzzle flashes from a soldier’s gun (and from his nearby buddies’ guns and from nearby explosions) during night missions.
>Embark Upon the Great Crusade
>And units look just as good in motion as they do standing still. The game will actually stream animations to its units using what Thomson describes as an “animation brain,” which is an in-game library of about 700 different animations (compared to Dawn of War’s 150). This isn’t just for show, either; it plays into the game’s “battlefield awareness system,” which causes soldiers to automatically adopt appropriate behaviors in the right situation. We watched an in-game demo that showed soldiers in the field advancing up a country road alongside a convoy. As soon as they crossed enemy lines, the soldiers adopted a cautious stance. And as soon as enemies began to open fire with a spectacular rain of bullets and earthshaking dive-bombing runs, each soldier immediately and intelligently leaped for cover–behind the convoy, behind an environmental object (like a nearby fence), or into a prone position–automatically, and without any instruction.
>We could probably spend all day just discussing the game’s graphical panache and how the powerful Essence engine models both huge set pieces and really distinctive details. But we’ll focus on the most impressive features, such as the engine’s use of subtle lighting, like soft shadows of swaying trees that show up on soldiers that pass below and nuances of both direct and indirect lighting. For instance, at high noon, when the sun beats down on a town square, you’ll definitely see the shimmering specular mapping you may have come to expect in recent PC games. But you’ll also see ambient occlusion that realistically shows shadows on everything in an environment, from the side of a tank facing away from the sun to the smallest wrinkle on a footman’s uniform. The game will also have a powerful particle effect system that will be capable of rendering multiple thunderous explosions at once, while also providing realistic smoke that will actually act as concealment cover for infantry.