The negative user reviews are infuriating

After having some CoH 3 burnout, I got my friends to play Ancestor's Legacy with me. A fun 2018 RTS game that's a mixture of CoH and Age of Empires and currently free to play. It's dead as a doornail. Sad that the RTS genre is littered with the corpses of well-designed and fun games.

I hope CoH3 survives long enough to become one of them before its playerbase fully jumps ship, but I'm hopeful that it will.

It's 35th on the Steam top sellers list 2 weeks after launch with 62% positive reviews at $80cdn. It was in the top 20 views on Twitch at launch.

I think this got the exposure it wanted, whether that's good or bad. The marketing department it seems got to polish their part.

Given this fact I figure the sales here would have warranted the risk to allow Sega to give Relic a couple of more months of development time. While that would have allowed more polish, it would not have resulted in a revolutionary change in the game.

These numbers are certainly not enough to warrant a "Naughty Dog" treatment. Compare these stats with TLUO Part 1 PC launch in a couple of weeks and you will see what I mean.

After having some CoH 3 burnout, I got my friends to play Ancestor's Legacy with me. A fun 2018 RTS game that's a mixture of CoH and Age of Empires and currently free to play. It's dead as a doornail. Sad that the RTS genre is littered with the corpses of well-designed and fun games.

I hope CoH3 survives long enough to become one of them before its playerbase fully jumps ship, but I'm hopeful that it will.

Lelic are lucky that CoH has no real competition in its particular style of RTS. Iron Harvest is the only one I can really think of, and that game is terrible thanks to some baffling design decisions.

The Men of War series is the closest, but is a vastly different game, primarily sharing just the setting.

CoH3 can easily be a great game, they've just really dropped the ball with regards to polish (And balance, though that's more forgivable)

Of course people compare it to CoH2, because that's what they currently have and can play...

I didn't rate CoH3 on Steam, but I can understand why people are pissed. Relic is selling a late alpha / early beta at full price, labeled as a release version. That's the problem. Relic is hurting the player base with this stupid decision. If people are pissed during the first two hours, they can just refund and might never come back.

They should have made it an early access release, ideally with a roadmap with what's coming and roughly when. People expecting a polished release ready game could have waited, and the hard core fans (including myself) could have bought it knowing what to expect.

Just because other games are released in an unacceptable state doesn't mean we have to be fine with it, not even if the release of the predecessor was at least as bad.

After having some CoH 3 burnout, I got my friends to play Ancestor's Legacy with me. A fun 2018 RTS game that's a mixture of CoH and Age of Empires and currently free to play. It's dead as a doornail. Sad that the RTS genre is littered with the corpses of well-designed and fun games.

I hope CoH3 survives long enough to become one of them before its playerbase fully jumps ship, but I'm hopeful that it will.

It was one of the "we want to be competitive, but we are not going to implement any form of matchmaking" crowd, which puts it lower then Iron Harvest on my list despite how well it was made.

I honestly don’t know how long it’s going to take for the gravity of the situation to set in for people that played COH2 and then played COH3.

I think it's more about making the best out of an unoptimal situation right now. It's not like there's any other options other than abandoning our favourite game franchise. CoH2 is gonna be super dead no matter how we twist it or what happens to CoH3.

And personally I think there's real hope, CoH3 has many problems right now but it's nothing compared to the absolute trainwreck that the CoH2 launch was, yet the game survived for almost 10 years.

I'm a CoH fanatic and hence can kinda overlook all the flaws and have a shit-ton of fun with CoH3, that's also why I left a positive review on Steam. But I'm definitely not running around and encouraging people to buy the game for the full price or anything like that.


Btw these "dropping playerbase" datas need to be taken with a grain of salt with a game that isn't pure MP. Surely some people got turned away from the multiplayer because they don't like the game in its current state, but many of these dropping numbers are simply people who finished the camapign(s) and then quit the game because they never intended to play MP in the first place.


What people also need to understand is that with a game like CoH, hardcore multiplayer gamers like us who put thousands of hours into the game, are a super tiny minority when it comes to overall playerbase.

What people also need to understand is that with a game like CoH, hardcore multiplayer gamers like us who put thousands of hours into the game, are a super tiny minority when it comes to overall playerbase.

Theres no point in arguing. So, I will just say time will tell. Either way the “problems” COH3 has are going to take an enormous amount of time to fix. Or they are never going to be fixed. Either way playing COH3 is the definition of COPIUM.

I don't get the talk about player numbers at the moment.
CoH3 is doing fine in that regard. Player numbers at release almost doubled compared to CoH2, and the community is rather one that sticks around and revisits the game, especially since there is not much competition in the CoH niche.
Losing most of the players in the first month is normal. CoH3's player loss is nothing exceptional. CoH2 went down to a third within a month and that level kept lingering for the next 10 years.
It is quite interesting that CoH3 does not seem to have taken many players from CoH2. Relic seems to have achieved their goal of opening up to a larger audience rather than only catering to the current one. One thing that is interesting, but will be impossible to find out is how the players distribute between SP and MP. CoH3's SP is vastly improved, so a higher proportion will play SP only. I guess we therefore can't fully compare CoH2's current player count with CoH3's current player count and make a solid conclusion of the healthiness of the MP.

I also don't see anymore that CoH2 will die. Player numbers here have taken only a minor dent. Yes, players will transition if CoH3 improves over the next months, but I don't see CoH2 being a dead game anytime soon. It will keep its own base, probably even a larger one than CoH1.

I think it's more about making the best out of an unoptimal situation right now. It's not like there's any other options other than abandoning our favourite game franchise. CoH2 is gonna be super dead no matter how we twist it or what happens to CoH3.

Looks at Dawn of Wars... Situation isn't as grim that Relic would just abandon the CoH3 like they did with DoW3. DoW3 nuked the franchise from something with potential to rally the playerbase into a "don't waste your time with it".

This is one path for CoH: have the unsustainable "early-access" model that needs Humble-Bundles/75% Off discount to keep the functional playerbase to justify the continued investment in battlegroups/factions/maps. Someone at Sega will look at the numbers: post launch revenue: X, continued support 2X, and will simply axe it into the maintenance.

It is all in Relic's court. Come out, talk to the players about all the content/balance/technical issues. List the roadmap to fix them, goals for the CoH3, tease the next Battlegroups. Inspire confidence please.

CoH3's SP is vastly improved, so a higher proportion will play SP only.

Is it really though? All I have heard is people saying the campaigns were boring. Which is a real surprise to me since AOE4 looked pretty cool. I assumed they put a lot of effort into the campaigns.

AI Skirmish is a joke right now. You cant tell how many kills anything has. The only way to see the end game stats is to play the whole match out. It is not new player friendly at all due to being so unfinished. And these are easy to fix things that should have been done since day 1. When I was writing my RTS I had kills printed as soon as I got infantry moving around and shooting at each other. How did they even test this game without kill counts?

As many people know I am an old guy. I grew up in the "games came on floppy disk" days. Actually way before that. You young guys are part of this generation that has an enormous amount of FOMO (Fear of missing out). You were all raised on instant gratification and have not grown out of it yet (will you ever?).

Relic knows they can push out an unfinished mess and you crackheads will gladly grab it up.

And I get it. Most hardcore fans are just happy to be playing a new version of our favorite series.

But Relic dropped the ball here. This is some next level screw up. People keep saying RTS genre is small. I wonder why? If I bought this game and was playing coh for the first time, I would play it a few times and delete it.

That is why the low numbers of players on Steam is alarming to me. We are going to be right back to sitting in queue for 10 minutes to get a trash matchup that is not even worth playing. Thanks relic, you are the greatest... at sucking.

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.

They recycled the game engine

This is biggest delusion I keep seeing about CoH3
The new version of the engine was written up from scratch and all features were re-written for CoH3 to allow for more flexibility and less hard-coding mechanics.

Saying they recycled engine is like saying UE5 is just recycled UE4.

Seriously? You want a positive review bomb? Players should not publish negative reviews because they are 'fans of the franchise' and because it does not help dragging in new players? This robs them of their right to phrasing their opinion how? What is the point of reviewing at all then if all you're supposed to do is to pad Relic on the back and congratulating them for the dump they've taken?

There's both unsubstantiated negative and positive reviews, you're only complaining about the negative ones though. You don't want players to give their honest opinion, at least not if they don't agree with you. If the review is positive, it's alright, if it's negative, it suddenly is low effort, review bombing, nonsensical. And because of that, it allegedly is the fault of the bad reviewers that CoH3 has too little players. You're shifting the blame, nothing else. Relic should fix their game before release, Relic is the only one at fault.
At first I really thought this is just a rant of a player that loves CoH3 and disagrees with most reviews, but since you're not only doubling down but even using more crude arguments, you're giving me a hard time of not viewing this as fanboyism. Which really surprises me because I remember your previous posts always as well founded, even if I did not agree with them.

I just can't stand the negativity in this community. So many people are constantly whining. I would never suggest stripping the moronic steam community of their god given right to shit on everything. I'm merely saying that hardcore CoH players should put the survival and growth of their hobby above principles. People who give shitty positive reviews aren't gonna harm the growth of CoH so I could not care less. The worst thing that could happen is that a few more people make the decision to buy one of the most underappreciated gaming series in history. Criticize relic as much as you want, but they are the only ones who can provide CoH. No other studio will create anything close to it.

This is biggest delusion I keep seeing about CoH3
The new version of the engine was written up from scratch and all features were re-written for CoH3 to allow for more flexibility and less hard-coding mechanics.

Saying they recycled engine is like saying UE5 is just recycled UE4.

Ye, and people are completely ignoring a fact that a lot of the "steps backwards" are due to this change, which came with the advantage of massively improved performance.

I just can't stand the negativity in this community .... Criticize relic as much as you want, but they are the only ones who can provide CoH. No other studio will create anything close to it.

I am borderline retarded. And I made a single player vs AI skirmish WW2 RTS very similar to Coh2 in under 2 months.

It was written in UNITY, which I had never used before ever. Had no idea what I was doing.

I Purchased 3D models for Trees, Units, and Tanks. Everything else I made by hand in Blender and Q3Radiant. This includes buildings, railroads, textures, the map itself, etc etc

ROSBONE MAKES AN RTS

Oh and I got kill counters and team colors correct on the first try.

So you are saying that a lone monkey like me could build an entire game in 2 months from scratch while a full studio like Relic couldn't do it in 5 years. Any gaming studio could crank out an RTS in a year tops if tasked to do it. This genre is ripe for the taking, if Relic does not get off their pedestals and get to it, I ALONE could take all their customers.

I only stopped coding because the next step was network coding so players could 1v1 each other, and I didnt feel it was worth all the effort. Otherwise I would have a complete ready to play game right now you could play for free. Relic and COH3 would be DOA.

People who give shitty positive reviews aren't gonna harm the growth of CoH.

This is so far away from the truth, I cannot be sure are you serious.
Leaving good reviews on game that does not deserve it, will only encourage video game publishers to keep releasing bad products.
Leaving bad reviews should encourage publisher to fix the game, because bad reviews will affect revenue of the game.
I still didn't leave any kind of review, but if I had to do it would be negative. Because it is missing a lot of polish, there is a lot of bugs and issues. It does not look or sound good as well. UI is horrendous, I still cannot change hotkeys on my keyboard, and I am not sure did they implement reconnect options, something that this franchise needs.

How thick and naive you have to be to think it is good idea that we pay for product and then lie about feedback to get more people in the game...
How about they release a good product? Did you ever though about that GiaA?

Is it really though? All I have heard is people saying the campaigns were boring. Which is a real surprise to me since AOE4 looked pretty cool. I assumed they put a lot of effort into the campaigns.

AI Skirmish is a joke right now. You cant tell how many kills anything has. The only way to see the end game stats is to play the whole match out. It is not new player friendly at all due to being so unfinished. And these are easy to fix things that should have been done since day 1. When I was writing my RTS I had kills printed as soon as I got infantry moving around and shooting at each other. How did they even test this game without kill counts?

What I meant to say is that the overall scope of SP has increased vastly. Of the current numbers, more players will hang around in SP than in MP compared to current CoH2 numbers. I also read reviews that said they find it boring, but also ones that found them decent enough (given the omnipresent bugs) to keep playing. I also have not found a proper argumentation why the DAK campaign should be worse than CoH2's Soviet campaign. They will stay a pull factor, especially in the beginning.

...
That is why the low numbers of players on Steam is alarming to me. We are going to be right back to sitting in queue for 10 minutes to get a trash matchup that is not even worth playing. Thanks relic, you are the greatest... at sucking.

Why would you say the player numbers were low? I don't know about Relic's financials, but they compare very well to CoH2's release and still decently to AoE4's release, which got much more advertisement from what I can tell. And as I've shown before, the player drop is nothing extraordinary, it does not hint at players leaving the game on mass due to completely broken stuff. I guess the next 2-3 weeks will tell if the shine of a "new" game wears off and the semi-casual players will leave or not, but from the current trend, the game is not losing that many players anymore. The majority who did not like it has already left, at least that's what it looks like.

Why would you say the player numbers were low? I don't know about Relic's financials, but they compare very well to CoH2's release and still decently to AoE4's release, which got much more advertisement from what I can tell.

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.

Why would you say the player numbers were low?

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.

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.

Casuals are finishing up their campaigns and not playing daily.
Mp crowd remains unchanged as it did in coh2.
Streamers will stick to CoH3, because once you've played it, there really is no return to CoH2 anymore unless you're exceptionally salty about something in 3.