"Please just continue taking your blue pill and move along, Sir."
I take no pleasure in saying these things. They are just the truth as I see it. If I were doing prep work to invest in a company, this is what my report would look like. This company is a headless chicken. It appears to have no direction.
As I have said since 2017, Relic cant get out of their own way. There is someone/something there in power holding that company back tremendously.
FURTHER COH3 OBSERVATIONS:
With COH3, Relic took steps to increase the player base. Which we can all applaud. Adding the Total Warhammer thing, increasing TTK, changing cover, retreat paths, tactical pause, etc all helps newer players. This shows that a team somewhere knew what they were trying to accomplish and set goals. How much came from community members is uncertain.
The issue came when someone decided to launch the game over a year before it was ready.
This destroys the community. Most older players, streamers, etc are looking for something new and more challenging than Coh2. Instead they get an unfinished watered down version of Coh1. 1v1 is in pretty decent shape so many 1v1 players stay. The majority of everyone else leaves.
This mass exodus combines with review bombs to paint Coh3 as an unfinished failure.
WHAT TO DO NEXT
As a manager what do you do now. Do you pivot or double down and try to finish your goal game?
WHAT I WOULD DO
I would have put every resource on finishing QoL. Within the first month I would have had a roadmap with release dates for Spectate, Replay, etc. I would have focused on more maps in any form. This would at least slow/stop the review bomb bleeding since the game would appear finished.
Discuss with top players that are leaving,
"What is not fun about playing Coh3. Are you just bored of Coh in general? Are there mechanics we can fix/change to increase excitement." Since Relic has community members talking to them, maybe they have had these talks. I do not see evidence that they have changed anything at all. So either the community members dont have the answers or Relic is not listening to the answers. Members could say but they wont (NDA?).
WHAT RELIC DID
Dicked around for over a year pretending to care. Pushing out false hope with tiny patches and almost zero QoL updates. Steam reviews are still trash. Community members are still leaving.
In Relics defense we have the arguments of:
- 1/3 workforce laid off.
- Fixing bugs in game.
- Owed a DLC before the end of the year.
All of these are valid to some extent. But these could have been relayed to the community a year ago. These lies of omission further reduce faith in Relic. They knew a year ago they were not going to fix this game but sit in streams every other months saying how excited they are to get it fixed.
So now all of a sudden we are to believe they are going to fix the game after the DLC?