The negative user reviews are infuriating

Mp crowd remains unchanged as it did in coh2.

Except Coh2 numbers have not dropped off that much. So many have not come over. Could be they got Coh2 free and dont want to pay $60+.

The game started at a peak of around 30k players. Now it is down to around 14k on the weekend. 12k during the week. By this coming Wednesday we could be seeing below 10k players.

I hoped for a much better start. And at a minimum have the numbers keep going up, not down.

As Aerafield said, maybe the single player people played it and left. Maybe the numbers will gradually increase as players become used to the game and venture into MP. Or maybe when the price drops, people will try it out and stay. Hopefully Relic has the bugs worked out by then.

All I know is, if I was a manager at Relic and saw this I would not be happy. Crap reviews even by people who love the series and never have anything bad to say, player base starting small and dying fast... I would be sending out resumes fast because my dismissal is right around the corner.

I am starting to see longtime Coh2 MP players saying they uninstalled Coh3 already.

Streamers are sticking to Coh3 still. So that is a positive sign. It is the future of the game for sure, so that makes sense they would.

I did expect more as well although we need to remember that games become very expensive lately. 60 dollars for many people is too much to pay at start for a game. Imagine you can wait like a year and get way more polished game for maybe -20% less. I know many people who will buy coh3 but just not now.

I understand people who give negative reviews because game lacks very basic stuff at release which at first looks quite obvious to be target. I don't like the design idea behind the main menu. Why there isn't a list of missions in DAK single player campaign, why there isn't a list on maps i do play in multi, why there isn't a single veto or no indicators of players in teamgames or option to look at the map after ending. First impression is the most important and it's not the best. Relic will fix this but sadly it will take time.

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I agree to all of this.

I did expect more as well although we need to remember that games become very expensive lately. 60 dollars for many people is too much to pay at start for a game.

Also let's not forget this shitty global economic situation we're in currently, and the ludicrous price of CoH3 or Games in general in some countries in the world

Also let's not forget this shitty global economic situation we're in currently, and the ludicrous price of CoH3 or Games in general in some countries in the world

Not many people have talked about this. CoH 3 was the most expensive video game ever released in Turkey, just for one example. Cost nearly a month's pay for the average citizen.

Agreed with everything you said. Relic is so lazy that they can't spend a day at most making new icons or fixing tooltips. That lack of effort is exactly why I gave COH 3 a negative review, especially since the game was delayed to allegedly fix these issues.


They recycled the game engine, recycled textures, recycled icons, sound is significantly worse, what exactly did Relic do? Serious Question what exactly has Relic done with COH3?

Spend a year figuring out how to add hotkeys to the game? (a basic feature in almost every game since the 90's)

COH 3 is straight trash especially when they are charging $70 for this fecal matter.


If they were honest and charged say $20 for this recycled mess of a game I probably would have given it a positive review.

I keep saying this. From the main menu, the icons, the UI to the sound and animations - the game feels so cheaply done it's frustrating to say the least. As someone pointed out, the icons of the factions are something you can create in MS paint in 5 minutes. Is this really all Relic could do? Why did COH2 have nice looking faction icons even though it was made when THQ went bankrupt?

People said things like the ugly grenade timer are placeholders during the multiplayer test and as I already knew ... they weren't.

Maybe Relic devs are just lazy? No love for WW2 and RTS? Not sure what it is ...

I am just glad I didn't give Relic my money for this "product".

Steam has grown a lot, I am looking a the headlines "Steam Tops 7 million users online" in 2013, and today it is 33m online.

The 10-20k concurrent playerbase game was a smashing success in the 2013, and now it might not even be the top 100.

Yes, this is definitely a good point. But you also cannot expect linear growth. Both Steam and the gaming market have changed drastically since then. In 2013 Steam had roughly 2500 games on the store. Last year alone they released almost 11000 (mostly trash games I guess) spreading the overall players over more games, and strategy games have generally fallen behind in public favor. It's hard to conclude that a game has failed in some way because it only surpassed its predecessor by X%.

CoH3 surely does not have the impact on the gaming market that the first two games had. It also does not have to to be financially viable.
If we take AoE4 as a rough benchmark (highly advertised, and despite not much novelty it got favourable reviews both by critics as well as on steam and metacritic), CoH3 seems to be roughly half of that. Probably not great, but not bad either for competing with what is probably the largest strategy franchise. CoH2's numbers are surpassed a lot. If Relic managed to financially survive on CoH2, they might manage to survive on CoH3 as well unless they heavily increased their spending (which I do not have any insight about).

The game started at a peak of around 30k players. Now it is down to around 14k on the weekend. 12k during the week. By this coming Wednesday we could be seeing below 10k players.

I hoped for a much better start. And at a minimum have the numbers keep going up, not down.

As Aerafield said, maybe the single player people played it and left. Maybe the numbers will gradually increase as players become used to the game and venture into MP. Or maybe when the price drops, people will try it out and stay. Hopefully Relic has the bugs worked out by then.

All I know is, if I was a manager at Relic and saw this I would not be happy. Crap reviews even by people who love the series and never have anything bad to say, player base starting small and dying fast... I would be sending out resumes fast because my dismissal is right around the corner.

I am starting to see longtime Coh2 MP players saying they uninstalled Coh3 already.

Streamers are sticking to Coh3 still. So that is a positive sign. It is the future of the game for sure, so that makes sense they would.

What you fail to show is that this is an all in all pretty normal chart. Almost every game has most players at release and retains only a quarter or a third within 1-2 months.
Steamdb is down for me and steamcharts does not have the resolution at the respective releases. But from what I remember, CoH2 was down to about a third of the players at release after a good month or so, AoE4 as well iirc. Look at all the Total war games, that are much more focused on replayability and SP campaigns. They all drop the same.

If you compare the peaks of CoH3 from a day to day basis, there's not a huge efflux anymore. Numbers still go down, but not that I'd expect the game to be dead soon. We'll see what happens after this weekend, usually people play a lot on the weekend and then drop a game because they start finding it boring or move on, so let's see what happens for the next two or three days.

I also don't see anymore that CoH2 will die. Player numbers here have taken only a minor dent.

Yeah I'm sure the player numbers will stay at a solid 4-digit number. But if I check out the first couple of pages of all CoH2 ladders on all factions & modes, I see a lot of "Last match 3+ weeks ago". Which looks pretty decapitated to me in terms of trying to find competitive matches now.

For 90% of the remaining coh2 playerbase barely anything will change though of course, and CoH2 will technically still be alive

Yeah I'm sure the player numbers will stay at a solid 4-digit number.

We topped out at 11271 today (Monday). Like I said, we could be below 10k this week already

Honestly is Company of Heroes actually worth saving at this point? All it is right now is pretty much a hollow brand - Ancestors Legacy was mentioned earlier and, whatever you may think of the game, it proved that other, smaller studios can pretty successfully emulate or even innovate on the formula and produce a fun, functional game. Relic right now is in the end stage of a Ship of Theseus situation, clearly a vast majority of the people making actual decisions at the company have no idea what makes Company of Heroes good or fun, and I suspect a large portion of them don't even play it.

The silence from the company and the fact that they can't even do a proper hotfix when it's desperately needed points to a critical failure at some end of the decision-making process internally. Right now everything looks like it's adding up to a Dawn of War 3-level scenario, and I think people should brace for the possibility that the studio straight-up won't finish the game. Refund it while you still can, if you can.

Honestly is Company of Heroes actually worth saving at this point? All it is right now is pretty much a hollow brand - Ancestors Legacy was mentioned earlier and, whatever you may think of the game, it proved that other, smaller studios can pretty successfully emulate or even innovate on the formula and produce a fun, functional game. Relic right now is in the end stage of a Ship of Theseus situation, clearly a vast majority of the people making actual decisions at the company have no idea what makes Company of Heroes good or fun, and I suspect a large portion of them don't even play it.

The silence from the company and the fact that they can't even do a proper hotfix when it's desperately needed points to a critical failure at some end of the decision-making process internally. Right now everything looks like it's adding up to a Dawn of War 3-level scenario, and I think people should brace for the possibility that the studio straight-up won't finish the game. Refund it while you still can, if you can.

There's definitely a lot that needs fixing and balancing, but this is a little bit hysterical. Dawn of War 3 was an absolute dumpster fire. Whatever you think of it's issues, the game at least got more than decent reviews and it isn't a watered down MOBA.

Yeah I'm sure the player numbers will stay at a solid 4-digit number. But if I check out the first couple of pages of all CoH2 ladders on all factions & modes, I see a lot of "Last match 3+ weeks ago". Which looks pretty decapitated to me in terms of trying to find competitive matches now.

For 90% of the remaining coh2 playerbase barely anything will change though of course, and CoH2 will technically still be alive

The only thing I can say is that I did not have any issues finding games in CoH2. The "filthy casual" tier of players seems to be doing fine. The player numbers are now on the lower end of what CoH2 had over the last years, which means its fully playable.
Relic also seems to have solved their issues regarding crashes and drops in CoH2 that occurred directly after the launch of CoH3. They probably allocated too many servers to CoH3 to not enrage even more players with bad server stability if the game already has many other issues, but relocated more server capacity back to CoH2 afterwards.

We topped out at 11271 today (Monday). Like I said, we could be below 10k this week already

Aera was talking about CoH2, not CoH3.
We'll see what happens long term for Coh3. AoE4 also had low player numbers mid-term but started doing okay after about a year. Is an "okay" game enough to make Relic financially viable long term? I can't tell, but probably enough to support the game for a while. It might lead to more aggressive monetization via MTX and expansions.

There's definitely a lot that needs fixing and balancing, but this is a little bit hysterical. Dawn of War 3 was an absolute dumpster fire. Whatever you think of it's issues, the game at least got more than decent reviews and it isn't a watered down MOBA.

Dawn of War 3 was honestly Relic's best game at launch, other than the huge misfire that was the main multiplayer mode (for the record, I liked it, but I can see how people would have issues being forced into it). The art direction was generally terrible but the game ran great, there was next to no major bugs or technical issues, and the game launched with three of the most well-designed and distinct factions in Relic's development history. There were a few outstanding balance issues coming out of the beta test but for the most part, every unit in the game had a role and a job that it could perform, build diversity was even better than Company of Heroes 2 in its heyday and the game just felt great to play - every unit operated differently, the elites were extremely fun to use (albeit not fun to have used against you in some specific balance scenarios) and it had that ineffable quality that just made me want to keep playing.

Fast forward to Company of Heroes 3 and it's clear that the PR disaster that was Dawn of War 3 must have gutted the company of its former talent - playing the most recent multiplayer alpha (i.e., the launch build) was a thoroughly uninteresting and unentertaining experience. It feels like the Diet version of Company of Heroes - I understand why people say that it feels like a mobile game, because tons of tiny things about how the game operates, from the way tanks move to how infantry operate and react and just the blandness of it all add up to something that lacks that quality that makes me want to keep playing. I don't think I played more than three games of that test for no other reason than that desire wasn't there. It's like AI-generated text - you can train an AI to mimic a particular author or writing style and all the hallmarks of it will be there, but the thing itself, taken as a whole, will be flawed.

Hence I think the best possible outcome at this point is Relic collapses. The argument tends to be, without Relic there won't be Company of Heroes, but at this point what I'm seeing is that with Relic, there won't be another good Company of Heroes. And I'm not going to settle for a boring, broken, buggy mess and shell out $70 CAD on the promise that maybe, down the line, it might end up being a good game. I have standards.

Dawn of War 3 was honestly Relic's best game at launch

Ok, I'll admit its been quite a long time since COH 1 came out and I have some serious rose-tinted nostalgia goggles when it comes to that game, so feel free to correct me on this. But I'm pretty sure it beat the fuck out of Dawn of War 3 when it comes to a 'successful' launch.

While the various factions felt OK in terms of units and options, the input lag in DoW 3 was absolutely horrendous and the the hero units were very boring and uninspired. It's cool if you liked it of course, but to me it felt like it had very little in common with any of the previous entries at all. I might be misremembering but didn't they completely water down/remove the cover system? Not to mention all of the shallow MOBA nonsense they tried to add. I get that they really wanted to innovate but it just didn't know what it wanted to be.

That said though, you and other people have voiced a lot of completely valid criticisms of 3. That list from Dirty Finisher for example, it brought up so many obvious 'why is this STILL an issue' issues that should never have made it past the testing phase. It definitely smacks of very rushed and unfinished game that just isn't really acceptable, given all the love and hard work from the people who made the original and then (eventually) coh 2, into a really great multiplayer RTS.

Ok, I'll admit its been quite a long time since COH 1 came out and I have some serious rose-tinted nostalgia goggles when it comes to that game, so feel free to correct me on this. But I'm pretty sure it beat the fuck out of Dawn of War 3 when it comes to a 'successful' launch.

While the various factions felt OK in terms of units and options, the input lag in DoW 3 was absolutely horrendous and the the hero units were very boring and uninspired. It's cool if you liked it of course, but to me it felt like it had very little in common with any of the previous entries at all. I might be misremembering but didn't they completely water down/remove the cover system? Not to mention all of the shallow MOBA nonsense they tried to add. I get that they really wanted to innovate but it just didn't know what it wanted to be.

That said though, you and other people have voiced a lot of completely valid criticisms of 3. That list from Dirty Finisher for example, it brought up so many obvious 'why is this STILL an issue' issues that should never have made it past the testing phase. It definitely smacks of very rushed and unfinished game that just isn't really acceptable, given all the love and hard work from the people who made the original and then (eventually) coh 2, into a really great multiplayer RTS.

I don't really consider Company of Heroes 1 to be the benchmark anymore because that game launched at a point in time where the industry standard was to rigorously QA-test a game before it came out in the absence of Steam and its patch infrastructure. That moment in history is long past us and so the more relevant launches are Company of Heroes 2 and Dawn of War 3, both of which launched in a more contemporaneous moment.

That being said, Company of Heroes 1 launched as an extremely functional game in terms of playability and smoothness, but it left much to be desired in the balance department. There are several systems that are included, even in the base factions, that time and experience would repudiate in Company of Heroes 2. Manpower discounts, purchased veterancy, unit replacement abilities, stealthed elite infantry, global upgrades... these were things that were included from the beginning, before Company of Heroes had defined itself as a subgenre within the greater scope of RTS games, and many of them were mistakenly drawn from other, completely mechanically-different strategy games. Many of them downplay or even outright negate the moment-to-moment tactical gameplay that makes Company of Heroes great - hence, they were largely excised save for a few abortive attempts in the second game. Not coincidentally, many of these things have been brought back in some form or another in Company of Heroes 3 which is one of the reasons why I expressed serious concern during the pre-alpha tests.

It's funny that you bring up the cover issue in Dawn of War 3 because this was something that was an issue in Dawn of War 2 - at that game's launch common wisdom said that the cover system was cloned from Company of Heroes (not entirely inaccurate) and that it had no place in Dawn of War. If anything, Dawn of War 3's cover system, such as it was, had a bit more in common with the first game than it did the second. Was this for better or worse? I can't say. The input lag was indeed an issue but one that was fixed quickly. I will also note that it had absolutely none of the ridiculous interface problems Company of Heroes 3 currently has - Dawn of War 3 looks professional and appealing in its menus and UI. Company of Heroes 3's current interface is barely at the level of the first game, and it's honestly shameful. It's also been that way for almost a month now. As for the elites being uninspired, sure, there were a few that were pretty basic. Most of them, though, had a unique mechanic or an interesting role or synergy with other elite units or with your base roster that made them worth using. I had a lot of fun very successfully using elites some considered to be very far from meta (Warp Spiders). That was one of the things I loved most about Dawn of War 3 - the tactical diversity. You could make just about any unit on the roster work for you if you used them right.

The point is, Relic has fallen far indeed. I wonder how much of Age of Empires 4 was actually Relic and not one of Microsoft's supervising studios, or how much Relic's internal decision-making process was involved in the game's design. The difference between even that and Company of Heroes 3 is vast, and it's depressing to see people debasing themselves to try and garner enthusiasm for a game which was clearly made with very little. I, personally, don't have time to waste on a game which doesn't have any respect for me as a consumer. Company of Heroes 2 is still out there if I ever want to play a Relic game again.

Yeah, completely fair point about the standards on patching/fixes now vs back then. It's a totally different era now isn't it. It's pretty depressing that apart from a few notable exceptions, broken and buggy games on release are basically considered the norm now. I also can't really argue with you about the interface issues. Balance is one thing, but the interface stuff is pretty damn inexcusable.

The state of the game is unnacceptable as it stands. We definitely agree on that. Reading your earlier post, its very similar to how i felt about the state of Coh 2 when it first came out. I thought the series would just die and that would be that. I was pretty shocked at how much better it had become when i gave it another try, though this was a couple of years later at the very earliest.

That's probably why i'm an optimist about this one really. It improved so much, but we shouldn't need to lower out standards to this degree, not for a game this expensive and that has already been delayed and subjected to so much player feedback. I completely get it if you've had enough of Relic and believe you shouldn't have to wait for so long after its release for it to become decent.

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As an aside, I thought Dawn of War 2 really nailed it in terms of the feel, cover system and the little squads you had. Though i know it wasn't universally popular, many people really hated it. Honestly, you are kind of making me curious to dive back into DoW 3 to see just how much it improved over time, that is, if it's even still listed on Steam anymore?! Haha.

Appreciate the very detailed and thoughtful reply.

Steam and its patch infrastructure

I am old school. I always quote Quakes "Its done when its done."

But having early access to a game has its draws. We get to play it sooner rather than later. We have more opportunity to guide the devs to making the final game we really want. The community can feel closer to the devs since we have a voice.

And it is too good to pass up for the devs. They dont waste another year making a game no one buys.

I get it. I can live with some bugs while they get things smoothed out.

- But this game has not improved much since last year, which means our "VOICES" have been ignored.
- The design choices for UI, feedback, information are completely unacceptable.
- The game mechanics that were proven to be bad in Coh2 are back.

From what I remember about DOW3, people said the community told them what they wanted and Relic did not listen.

I would gladly give this game a good review (because I feel it will be great someday), if not for the three things I listed above.

These all say "Relic is not listening to anyone and are clueless to what people want". They deserve to crash and burn. Even though we all want them to excel and continue to make great games in the future.

Sadly I have been saying this for the last 2 years, watching Relic is like watching a young mentally handicapped kid trying to do some complicated task. And you are rooting for them, knowing full well they will fail miserably.

Dawn of War 3 went into the direction people didn't want, yet it is even hard to describe what direction the average person wanted DOW to go. Random ass mechanics from previous DOW or COH (and more, like stealth bushes). Any direction could have worked, but it was just half-assed with no clear goal or future plans, just here... some base building, some cover tactics, some large armies, some heroes, some titans.

But it didn't kill DoW3, Relic did. Their management and PR are incompatible with a successful game.

DoW3 launch state was probably better than CoH3 as far as polish and balance goes. I remember I didn't like the game, but it was subjectively from the person who had low interest in IP/DOW, and writing was there on the wall from week 2: Game will receive token support and get abandoned to prioritize AOE4/COH3.

Sadly I have been saying this for the last 2 years, watching Relic is like watching a young mentally handicapped kid trying to do some complicated task. And you are rooting for them, knowing full well they will fail miserably.

Another thought on this topic, What is worse:
A) Giving a bad review so people do not buy the game.
B) Letting people buy the game then smash them with my premade team.

Option B means people paid $60+ for a game they stopped playing the next day because it looks like trash and they got stomped. Which to untrained eyes could mean it is not balanced as well.

A) Is 100% Relics fault.
B) Was partially Relics fault in Coh2 (dont know about Coh3) and partially the community.

So should we be pushing the "dont be a bitch and search solo" narrative more than blaming reviewers?