Words are cheap when your job is on the line. |
It's not even the Sistine Chapel, it's more like one of those modern art pieces where one person says they see a brooding meditation on the finite nature of existence and I see a canvas that a Dr. Seuss character sneezed on. |
That's like saying a lobotomy patient still has most of their brain left. We can go back and forth here about known unknowns and unknown unknowns but ultimately the future of this game is going to come down to pure financial expediency. This is an obvious sign that Company of Heroes 3 underperformed to a severe degree - the next step will be shutting down Relic for good, and I suspect this will likely be before the end of the year, since even with nearly 500 employees, the company was clearly unable to juggle the demands placed on it. Don't kid yourself and think the game doesn't need a massive amount of work and spit polish - if you have low standards that doesn't translate to the majority that will decide the game's future.
You can have false hope, but don't even try to defend that position. It's untenable by any metric. |
How can it not be empty words? Relic strung along Dawn of War III players with promises of an "update" for two months before it was revealed that the "update" was that the game was being euthanized. They've done this whole thing before, with the exception that this time their survival as a company is in jeopardy. |
You just know that those 121 people were probably the underpaid employees struggling to finish the game under the poor leadership that has been evident every step of the way, and not the management themselves. Satoru Iwata took a personal pay cut and encouraged all his executives to do the same when things didn't go well under their direction - you'll never see a Western studio do anything like that. |
This game doesn't deserve you. |
The problem is clearly management-based, and it has very little to do with "woke" bullshit, which is strictly surface-level virtue signaling anyways, and more to do with the company's leaders abiding by a playbook that works extremely well in non-entertainment/arts-derived industries. |
Company of Heroes 1 had some seriously shit mechanics that made the cut, though. Global upgrades are one thing, but economic upgrades can add to the snowball effect which was seriously reduced in Company of Heroes 2. Manpower income is another thing that was entirely unnecessary, as was purchased veterancy in any way, shape, or form. They even included zombie squads, which I successfully feedback-sabotaged during the pre-alpha. |
Basically, they're gauging how much work it's going to take to get the game into a state that would be considered to be "acceptable" for the largest number of respondents. This will most likely lead to some quick math at the level of upper management where any serious work being done on the game will be severely curtailed given its current state as a likely financial disappointment. Keep in mind - Dawn of War III had a full expansion in the works which community members were constantly kept on the hook about until it was revealed as a pipe dream that had been squashed by bean counters long ago.
I don't know for sure that Company of Heroes 3 is a financial disappointment - but there are a few metrics that I know high-level management look at to determine such things. One of them is straight-up sales, and rest assured, if Company of Heroes 3 broke any records there we would have heard about it. People I know with a casual interest in the series avoided it entirely due to a variety of factors, but bad word-of-mouth from Day 1 was the prime motivator. The second, increasingly-important metric is microtransaction revenue, and the ability for the game to keep generating revenue from the already-existing player base. The particular implementation of microtransactions here, with a lacklustre cosmetic shop and no ability to actually customize your profile at launch means that the game is probably "underperforming" at this level as well.
With this survey it honestly seems like they're fishing for an excuse to justify a pre-existing plan to take the game (and the rest of the studio, hopefully) behind the shed and shoot it. |
I take issue with people saying the Starcraft/Warcraft campaigns are good when really they're incredibly generic and the thing that most people praise about them is the story - this, I suppose, is a matter of taste but if I REALLY wanted a good story, I wouldn't be playing an RTS game, and I certainly wouldn't be playing one written by a bunch of morons smashing together every terrible trope in the generic-fiction playbook. "Story-driven RTS" is a recipe for disaster, because the strength of the medium, to me, is not in a linear narrative.
But again, you can chalk it up to taste. Some people have awful taste, as evidenced by the fact that Company of Heroes 3 still has people playing it. |