the negative user reviews are deserved

How is everyone else feeling at this point?

I'm kind of torn. On the one hand, the game has a lot of issues, many of which are pretty inexcusable when the devs made such a song and dance about listening to community during its development.

On the other, given the developer's track-record and the realities of game dev in general in 2023, its probably quite naive to immediately expect anything close to the level of polish that we've come to enjoy from COH 2 after ten years of balance, additions and patches.

As far as you feeling foolish for pre-ordering the game, I agree. It's not something I've ever done, I think it actively contributes to money hungry publishers getting away with releasing poorly optimised and unfinished games.

Admitting to mistakes is not a sign of weakness but a sign of integrity & humbling yourself.

This.

If Relic/Sega wanted this to succeed they should have called it Early Access. Everyone here would flock to it so they could play it sooner. All issues would be forgiven. If they were really smart they would have just released the MP portion. Buying more time to finish the SP on the full release.

Personally, I would give them a pass if they had working Team Colors, Stats screen, easier to see kill counts, and upped the Specular lighting or textures. The rest is fine for me.

The fact none of those were working tells me they have no idea who plays the game and why. This is day 1 stuff.

1) They fixed team colors a little. But never explained why the colors are what they are. They probably had a reasonable answer. Would have taken less beating if they explained it better.

2) Stats screen is tied to the Host of the match. This is hard dumb. But it may have origins in trying to keep MP teams in sync when searching for games. But, why is it broken when playing alone? Again, silence from Relic.

3) Hiding the kill counts is unforgivable. You cant find space anywhere in that bloated trash GUI to print 3 small numbers??? GTFOH.

4) How did Relic let this game go out the door looking like everything is made of chalk? The texture quality is amazing. The new objects look amazing. Maps are very pretty. Why ruin all of that work with no shiny lighting?

Every person has their list. Mine is simple stuff that should have been done in the first month of development.

Balance will never be completed.
Dont care about in-game stores.
Camera seems fine to me.
etc etc etc

So it all points to management as usual. They dont know the game. They didnt adjust to the fact the game was not coming together fast enough. They are not communicating well to calm the masses that are mad.

And stop being lying pieces of shit. Stop saying "we are listening to the community". No you are not. And it looks very bad when you keep saying it.

As I always say, I am very dumb. If I can see the problems, why cant the smart people at Relic. Clearly there are NO SMART people in charge at Relic/Sega.

Midas touched post

Very nice post, I wish I could be state my troubles with the game in such a structured & concise manner.

Boggles my mind everytime how soulless companies try to act all indie-dev and relatable by just repeating phrases such as "community feedback" and "we are listining", while doing the exact opposite.

PS: John looks in every video like at gunpoint and made out of clay. Not sure what the production crew is doing over there. It certainly doesnt help me feeling being heard or confident in their abilities as a functioning team.

PS: John looks in every video like at gunpoint and made out of clay.

I know right! I feel so sorry for John. He walked in first day and was handed and a dead hooker and told to get rid of the body. Andy got out while the getting was good. He must have seen what was coming.

COH3 just makes me feel like the majority of Relic devs are lazy and don`t love the COH-franchise

Well this is seen in COH2 with how Relic couldn't be bothered to fix something as basic as Tooltips which took like 15 minutes at most to do. They just couldn't be bothered.

Also in COH2 just off the top of my head, UKF when choosing Anvil there is an ability called Advanced Warning which is passive and increases the sight of territory that you own. It has never worked since day 1 and it is still in the game to this day lying to you. Relic made a typo and a quick 2s fix would fix the ability but they couldn't be bothered once to fix it.

They did however have plenty of time to push out numerous paid DLC commanders.


Many of you people are thinking this is new for Relic. It isn't. It is the same lazy ass Relic. It took 20+ years for Relic to finally give people the ability to change keybindings. These guys are the laziest pieces of garbage I have ever seen. Zero pride or effort put into the work that they do.

1) They fixed team colors a little. But never explained why the colors are what they are. They probably had a reasonable answer. Would have taken less beating if they explained it better.

Agree with most of the post but this part is something I keep talking about in other threads on here.

The idea was good with poor execution. Truly unique player colors is a new concept to RTS games I guess, so I guess other people didn't like it, but I do like it, so I'll defend it anyways.

Every other CoH game with "unique colors" doesn't actually have unique colors. It would be more appropriately called "distinguishing colors", because there's nothing unique about the colors assigned to players. Although everyone else is assigned a "unique" color to distinguish them from each other on your own screen, each player is actually blue on their own screen, which really takes away the "unique" part of it.

If you've ever played a game like CSGO, and used voice chat there, you would see why this kind of color system can cause a bit of confusion. In CoH 2, if I'm looking at the map, and I see someone's tank get red flares dropped on it, I immediately see the color of their unit icon. I know it's green, for example. But maybe in the heat of things, I forget momentarily who exactly green is.

Now, I want to tell them to move their tank, but I have to first click their unit to figure out their name, which wastes a small amount of time and micro. That or I have to spam ping it and say "watch your tank in middle" etc. and annoy everyone else in the game.

In CoH 3, all I have to do is say "green, they just dropped red flares on your tank!!" and the player I'm talking to will immediately know they're being referred to, because they are actually green on their own screen, and not blue.

-------------

Obviously, this is not to everyone's taste. I think that they should have added a CoH 2 style "unique (distinguishing) colors" option. In addition to having some common sense when implementing the new system in the first place and not causing teammates to be pink and red and silly things like that, which probably would have made players more open to the idea to begin with. In the end, I think it will become a preferred feature for everyone who isn't insane, like grid hotkeys did in CoH 2. (No offense to classic hotkeys players, but I prefer not to play Twister with my hand on my keyboard when I have to reverse my tanks or retreat my units ("U" to reverse--are you serious?!)).

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that somewhere down the line, voice chat and cross-platform play is planned for CoH 3. It would explain the weird friends list bugs that plagued the multiplayer test, as maybe it had some half-baked code for integrating steam and consoles that was buggy, and also might explain why you don't get to see player usernames, but instead get unique colors, which could make it easier for console players to communicate. Although that might just be because Relic wants to hide usernames just in case they are offensive. They are trying to farm blackrock bux after all.

There aren't very many games that I can think of which have an in-game friends system which DON'T have crossplay. Blizzard and EA games come to mind with their in-game friends lists which integrate platforms. In fact, the only game I can think of which has an in-game friends list which doesn't have crossplay would be CoH 1, but that feature was there because coh wasn't integrated with steam at the time afaik, and it was dropped in CoH 2 for presumably that reason.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that somewhere down the line, voice chat and cross-platform play is planned for CoH 3. It would explain the weird friends list bugs that plagued the multiplayer test, as maybe it had some half-baked code for integrating steam and consoles that was buggy, and also might explain why you don't get to see player usernames, but instead get unique colors, which could make it easier for console players to communicate. Although that might just be because Relic wants to hide usernames just in case they are offensive. They are trying to farm blackrock bux after all.

There aren't very many games that I can think of which have an in-game friends system which DON'T have crossplay. Blizzard and EA games come to mind with their in-game friends lists which integrate platforms. In fact, the only game I can think of which has an in-game friends list which doesn't have crossplay would be CoH 1, but that feature was there because coh wasn't integrated with steam at the time afaik, and it was dropped in CoH 2 for presumably that reason.

The main menu has some of the laziest UI design you can think of. From the splash-screen artwork that looks like someone gave up halfway painting it from the sketch to illustration.

To the small details like the radar is being replaced by the spinning dots, or the loading bar no longer ammo-belt being loaded but just a flat rectangle. Call these cosmetic bits tacky, but whoever made them put some effort in.

There is no grand-mastermind plan for the UI, just Relic doing the bare minimum poorly.

Also in COH2 just off the top of my head, UKF when choosing Anvil there is an ability called Advanced Warning which is passive and increases the sight of territory that you own. It has never worked since day 1 and it is still in the game to this day lying to you. Relic made a typo and a quick 2s fix would fix the ability but they couldn't be bothered once to fix it.

I can confirm that it is indeed a scam.

Quite a lot of items in CoH2 are either poorly made (aka doesn't work or sometimes doesn't work), or their effect is so poor that you just shouldn't use them. It is a painful trial and error process to determine what is broken, and what is practically useless, in the game that is 10 years old.

Colors post

I learned about the colors from your post. Not from Relic. To be fair to them, I did not investigate. I just watch streams and was at a complete loss to the weird color choices.

The whole GREEN option was bad. Having your team warm colors while your territory is cool was bad.

But after reading your post, it started to make more sense.

They need to explain their choices better. But at this point, there are so many bugs/issues they would be talking all day every day trying to explain their stances. But it may go a long way to creating a less hostile environment.

John should be streaming 30 minutes everyday from now on. Answering questions and cultivating hope.

The main menu has some of the laziest UI design you can think of. From the splash-screen artwork that looks like someone gave up halfway painting it from the sketch to illustration.

To the small details like the radar is being replaced by the spinning dots, or the loading bar no longer ammo-belt being loaded but just a flat rectangle. Call these cosmetic bits tacky, but whoever made them put some effort in.

There is no grand-mastermind plan for the UI, just Relic doing the bare minimum poorly.

I agree with you about the UI being shit, but I'm not talking about the aesthetics of it, I'm talking about the implications of it and the back end.

After cutting so much from the game, why would they choose randomly to add the in-game friends list back from CoH 1 when nobody asked for it? It's not useful to steam users, they already have a perfectly fine friends list to use provided by steam itself.

It just doesn't make sense to add it back, considering all the other things that were removed. Maybe they are just incompetent and have weird priorities, but to me it makes the most sense that these are the foundations for crossplay.

If not, then Relic really doesn't know what they're doing.

The main menu has some of the laziest UI design you can think of.

That is actually true. The main menu, the looks, the buttons, the feel etc... it's like a time travel back to 2005

I am pretty sure it will get a major pass down the line. CoH2 main menu also looked completely different in 2013 for those who were around then

Even if splicing unique IDs/friend list is a requirement for crossplay, it is not good enough. There have been examples of proper crossplay UIs, being capable to scan your native platform's friendlist, and merging both in-game and Steam/Playstation...

Management said crossplay is a requirement, and Relic just took the most straightforward and clunky approach to making the playlist. Shortcuts and shortcoming everywhere.

I am very skeptical of any console people converting into the pvp multiplayer. This has gone belly up so many times... You always make compromises that doom your game, or you just ignore the console people. Microsoft can afford to build RTS games for their own platform as a marketing exercise.

I doubt voice-chat is coming to this game, ever. This is not a competitive game to warrant it. Even most competitive games have opt-in voicechat, optional feature.

This is not a competitive game to warrant it. Even most competitive games have opt-in voicechat, optional feature.

There is no video game that forces you to use voice chat that I know of outside of some gimmick horror games and kinect standalones anyways, so "optional feature" is a given. You'd be hard pressed to find competitive games *without* voice chat outside of the RTS genre.

Plenty of casual games have voice chat. It's not something exclusive to "competitive games".

The number of players in CoH2+3 (summed up) has not changed much since last week and remains at roughly 11-12k total in the peaks, which is slightly above CoH2 before the launch of CoH3. CoH2 has gained over CoH3 in the last week.
I guess this is a sign of both games mostly trade players between each other.

If that is the case, then:
1. CoH fans are currently still willing to change to CoH3 when it reaches a quality that is good enough
2. Relic failed draw in a lot of new players
3. Both games split the playerbase roughly 50/50, which is probably the worst state for matchmaking for both games. While the hardcore fans will likely play any of the CoHs anyway, 'intermediate fans' might switch to another game due to bad matchmaking. Relic should patch quickly and decisively.

Am I the only one who really doesn't see it as all that deep?

It is very likely the studio is under pressures to monetise CoH3 by those above. Shareholders and quarterly profit reports will only see getting the most money out of a game in the fastest time.

But, given time I am sure that Coh3 will develop into an excellent RTS. The barebones are there but it will take time. Time that will likely not be afforded to it if there remains this bizarrely self-pleasuring attitude towards hating the game. Like the calls for review bombing on steam. It reminds me of a child holding their breath until they turn blue to punish their parents XD

Yes. It needs work. But I think amidst all these appeals to human decency and the legacy of Coh1/2 we forget that the future of one of the last big RTS franchises rests upon the decision of a bean pusher who doesn't care for any of this. If the numbers don't add up they will simply reallocate the funds to a new Sonichu game and scrap Coh.

It's shit but it is the nature of the beast. So all can really do is shrug and hope the game survives this initial period.

While the hardcore fans will likely play any of the CoHs anyway, 'intermediate fans' might switch to another game due to bad matchmaking. Relic should patch quickly and decisively.

Matchmaking and balance is not a huge issue for me. I expect it to be rough on release and for months after.

What I hate, and why I probably won't ever play coh3 is the messy visuals.

The game is cluttered with visual pollution of unnecessary information.
Seriously why do units need all these icons on display. Surely this can be cleaned up or moved to the UI. Alternatively allow it to be turned off in settings.

I would often watch people streaming the game more than I would actually play but Coh3 is just horrible
to watch. Since Coh3 came out I have watched less than 5 hours of streams and playtime is about 6.5 hrs.
Some streams often look blurry making the stream unwatchable.

The resource icons are ridiculously oversized and the fluro colour is entirely out of place for WW2.

The resource capture timer is out of position and interferes with units in the circle. Also WTF is with the flag next to the timer, just more useless visual pollution.

Fluro green smoke for off maps - whose fucking idea was that.

Reshade makes the readability of units better but sometimes its a bit off. Surely relic sees people add this to fix their shitty graphics.

The elevation is also off-putting on some maps. Having the camera bounce around during competitive play
is just irritating.

I seriously doubt I will just adapt over time. Relic need to have a hard look at the push back the game is
getting and make some changes otherwise the game is on borrowed time.

snip

My post was not particularly about why CoH3 has issues, but why Relic has to patch sooner rather than later with a view on the whole franchise.

Previously, CoH2 had 9-10k players at peak (depending on the "phase" of the game and which time frame, but this was roughly the state in 2022). Now, CoH2 and CoH3 combined have 11-12k players. That's roughly a 2k gain in total player numbers, but now split roughly evenly between both games with CoH2 getting influx and CoH3 getting eflux. CoH3 gets further patches and players will continuously check in how much the game has improved after each patch. The hardcore fans will play either CoH2 or CoH3, whichever one they deem the better product at any time.
The problem is: If Relic keeps on with smaller patches only fixing a couple of features (not talking about short term meta or balance, but stuff that will actually make the game feel good to play) per patch, the player base will stay split. The lower player numbers however decrease the quality of matchmaking (which I can personally anecdotally confirm for CoH2). This could cause what I termed "intermediate fans" to leave the franchise entirely, because now both CoH2 and CoH3 are not as fun to play anymore and another game is better.

I doubt Relic will abandon CoH3 that quickly, the game is not in a great state but not horribly failing either, and player numbers still go down but apparently stabilize for the time being and not indicating a complete failure as well. The most likely way forward is that Relic keeps supporting and patching at least for the next months.

Those need to be big patches. After failing to gain a new audience, Relic needs to move most players to CoH3. The other option is that CoH3 completely fails and the community goes back to CoH2. But keeping both games only half-alive will hurt both in the long run.

It's really funny and sad reading this, and seeing all the threads and talks, all the problems people have had for 20 years, still be the same problems every release. It's almost like somebody called this happening years ago, if only I could remember who it was.

I really feel bad for the people they hired from the community, that are now on the receiving end of this, it so incredibly disappointing. I mean, game dev for the last 10 years has been a mess, and no real games have released finished, but basic stuff is just not done. The same complaints, over and over. Relic has not listened to anyone that hasn't groveled at their feet ever, they are immune to any criticism, no matter how it is framed, because at the end of the day things are just not implemented, and if they are... its bugged, it breaks something else, it takes several years, ect;

Just really disappointed. Feels like DoW3 again.

Yoo here is some popcorn