AE's State of Coh3

STATE OF COH3
Great video by AE about the state of Coh3. Did a good job of comparing the state of Coh2 at the start and Coh3's rocky beginnings.

Sadly for me, the video reinforces what I have been saying since I had first dealings with Relic. The community cares 1000x more about the game than Relic does.

AE's point of community working with Relic is what made Coh2 great. We all hoped Relic learned that and did not repeat DOW3.

People here are learning editors, making videos, running tournaments, creating web pages for stats and leaderboards, etc for a game that is practically still born. Then you watch a Relic stream and the employees streaming dont know the basics of the game they are playing. Relic only has a few games. They cant be bothered to learn about the games they are making or representing? Red Flag?

Even the video we are talking about goes way beyond anything Relic has done so far.

Community putting in minimal time making missing art files, Janne creating content Relic should have done, etc all points to Relic does not care.

I guess I got my hopes up too much when I heard all of the community members that Relic hired. These people will surely bring the passion most Coh players have. So I expected too much. My bad. A few good people cant carry the dead weight of a whole company. I should know this from playing 4v4.

THE BAD
The bad has been beaten to death by everyone and for good reason.

THE GOOD
As AE points out, Coh3 can become a great game. I am pretty sure everyone believes this also. It has great bones. The question is how long will it take.

I do not play 1v1, but it appears the 1v1 mode is in the best state. That gives hope to the other game modes. They will get there eventually.

Most streamers are playing 1v1. The higher mode streamers have slowly disappeared or never started streaming at all.

The last few updates have ranged from anemic to practically a death blow to the game. With the Console release upcoming, my personal view is the game is dead for at least 6-12 months. Knowing Relic cant execute the simplest tasks in less than 6 months, I fear it will take more like 2-3 years.

Like AE, I would suggest everyone not playing 1v1, go back to Coh2 until the game is done baking. At least then the player base for Coh2 can rebound to a point of getting better games.

THE JOKES
AE stated he really felt relic should have included community maps early to boost content. I agree 100%. However, most mappers that have worked with Relic over the years have publicly slammed them for their incompetence time and time again. Not naming names.

My "hope" for CoH3 is that once Relic manages to push out the console version, that they can finally focus on more content. If that is the case, CoH3 might improve quickly in the next ~3 months.
However, this would assume that the console version is not full of bugs and glitches.

Quick question:
Could Relic legally just grab community maps and put them in the game (without asking)? I guess this would be a hard thing to do. Even if they put it into their terms and conditions, I doubt they would hold up to national law. The mappers should be paid for that.

Thanks for the write up Ros. We will see if Relic starts pointing at their own nose on their "balance stream" or if it will be a big nothing burger, filled with PR buzzwords.

I start having hope again when relic acknowledges their mess and humble themselves towards the community, which to this day is passionate enough to beat a dead horse about the state of this game.

Could Relic legally just grab community maps and put them in the game (without asking)?

Good question but I dont think it would ever happen. WhiteFlash has a mappers Discord and everyone can be contacted on there. Relic could have several maps picked and ready in days. Every mapper dreams of having a map in game, so I am 100% sure everyone would say yes immediately.

Currently most maps are small modes however, not the 4v4 maps that are really needed.

Could be a great situation for everyone.
- Build support for the community. Everyone would be excited about it. Would show good will.
- Get fresh content quick.
- If the maps are not great, it does not show badly on Relic since they did not make them.

In the past Relic has taken 4-8 weeks to put maps into a package and get it out. Again... it is Relic we are talking about... so.....

Good question but I dont think it would ever happen. WhiteFlash has a mappers Discord and everyone can be contacted on there. Relic could have several maps picked and ready in days. Every mapper dreams of having a map in game, so I am 100% sure everyone would say yes immediately.

Currently most maps are small modes however, not the 4v4 maps that are really needed.

Could be a great situation for everyone.
- Build support for the community. Everyone would be excited about it. Would show good will.
- Get fresh content quick.
- If the maps are not great, it does not show badly on Relic since they did not make them.

In the past Relic has taken 4-8 weeks to put maps into a package and get it out. Again... it is Relic we are talking about... so.....

Add a shit load of community maps. Add some vetoes. of course there will be some duds but even they would provide some much needed variety.

We do desperately need some 4v4 maps (and all the other modes ofc).

Some points are valid, but video is full of Relic di... copium to say the least. No offence.

We still dont know what is happening with Relic, but since they didn't gave any official explanation, we are free to assume that they are, to put it lightly, morons, again no offence.

They are not an indie game studio, they have at very least around 30+ people working on the game, not a team on 10.

They false advertised the game, saying "we listen to the community", yet, ignored all the feedback, besides the one which probably was "in the scope" of their changes.

Relic did everything to piss people off, with their hands and management. So its not "game dev being bad in 2023", its studios who cant get their shit together.

And SEGA has nothing to do with it. Considering how painfully slow everything regarding CoH3 right now, no wonder they weren't able to finish it before shipping.

Best case scenario, Relic has like schedule list, and they just dont care about whats happening with they game, unless its somthing like man power exploits (which are still taking weeks to "hot fix")

I think half of the backlash could have been avoided or at least alleviated by proper communication. It's really mind boggling how either their PR managers don't understand PR or that they are ham strung by their bosses. They always produce quite high quality videos reading from their teleprompters, but consistently miss the point of what the community wants and actually cares about.

I'm following Warno at the moment. Eugen systems has (according to Google) one tenth (!) of the employees that Relic has (roughly 40 vs 400). Let's split Relic's number to 250 due to AoE4. I guess there is administration staff in those numbers as well, so not all of them are devs. The game has been released one year ago as a real early access: Fairly low content, only 2 divisions (roughly a faction on CoH's terms), but working engine. Today it has a number of divisions and way more features but is still in early access due to the lack of SP content. The overall MP state looks better to me than CoH3 by far. A quick look at the Steam news site: Weekly dev blogs, regular updates (some smaller, some bigger), every month or so a larger update with new features. They address balance issues, specify what they're working on now and how they want it to look like, roughly when to expect the feature release or why their feature/update has been delayed. They're even so honest to say that they don't release an update on Fridays because it won't be fixed over the weekend if stuff breaks. You know what? Fair enough. Good decision. They even have a post starting with "mea culpa".

Why can't Relic have any of this? We don't know what they are currently working on for the most part. Parts of their "briefings" are being "redacted" by themselves when they announce it to hide hideous stuff. It's quite exceptional that at the moment we actually know that they are working on the console release and some balance update (due to the balance stream soon). But for the most part after release, there was nothing like this.
It's been two months now, and the only update that Relic labeled as "large" actually wasn't. Not a single feature has been added, and few bugs squished since then.
Why is a 40 men dev team seriously outperforming a company so much larger?

Yeah, the A_E video was terrible. I normally don't go for the 40-minute "video essay" shit but I felt it necessary to at least get a handle on what one of the self-described "god-tier" community members thought. And predictably, it's awful. Just a load of complete mealy-mouthed bullshit if I'm being honest, a repeat of the same tired tropes that have been trotted out for the past month-plus coupled with some wink-and-nudge intimations that Relic is probably not all that bad but hey, NDA, wink-wink.

I personally don't think it's a personal attack to say that developers at Relic don't know what they're doing - this much has been obvious to me in the gap between the two "pre-alpha" tests. Being given quality, concrete feedback and doing absolutely nothing with it is one thing, but actively choosing the worst decision possible at almost every step of the way is something else entirely. A lot has been made of the comparison between this release and Company of Heroes 2's (and A_E helpfully parrots Relic's selling point of more maps! more factions! wheee!), but what really drove me away here that I was willing to overlook in Company of Heroes 2 (which I alpha-tested and played pretty consistently during and after launch) was that this game is a straight downgrade in a lot of ways.

Company of Heroes 2, even from the start, was evident as a game made by people who were committed to improving on Company of Heroes 1. So many important features were there right away - cap circles, fuel for vehicle call-ins, no purchased veterancy, no global upgrades, and the basis of an excellent and tactically-diverse combat system. Were there major issues? Yes, but it was clear in those days that they were going to be fixed. I was complaining along with everyone else when they added Soviet Industry, and the Tiger Ace, and everything else, but I was still playing the game, because it was fun, and it was clearly being made by some people with a modicum of passion.

Company of Heroes 3 is devoid of all of that. It was abundantly clear from the pre-alphas to release that almost no feedback was taken into account in regards to the glaring issues in moment-to-moment gameplay and greater-scheme metastructure. It's been obvious that whoever is calling the shots at Relic was concerned purely with 1. getting the game out the door, and 2. making sure any issues with what a certain breed of management would term "optics" were corrected. I even attempted a little experiment with the latter - I raised a bit of a stink about unarmed medics being targetable entities, saying that the game promotes war crimes as a result (and honestly, it's pretty sick). I laughed my ass off when I learned that medics were invincible at release - instead of actually adjusting the way the mechanic worked, or removing it entirely, they chose the worst possible way to "fix" the problem at the complete expense of gameplay. So that shows you where Relic's priorities are.

So a 40-man developer team or even a single person's basement operation will always outperform Relic's bloated corpse of a 200-man team, because of that key ingredient - actual passion. Whether or not the developers (and I suspect this is a critical minority of the people actually employed at Relic right now) are talented or not is irrelevant when the people making decisions behind the veil are cowards cashing a cheque and nothing more. The fact that they're being outdone by Eugen, a mediocre B-tier developer by any metric, is enough of an indication to me that this game is going nowhere. I can't trust the process anymore after Dawn of War III, which, incidentally, was the last game from Relic that looked like it had any amount of effort put into it.

Too "soft" on Relic as usual ... Bringing up COH2 launch is totally pointless. It`s not an excuse. Not sure why AE feels the need to bring this up 124945334 times on Reddit and now on Youtube. I get it, he wants COH3 to become a success and wants people to stay optimistic but this is ridiculous.

The problem with COH3 is, I said it before, a lack of talent, effort and passion. They are simply incompetent. The only thing that can save COH3 is Relic (re-)hiring competent devs and most of all an "artistic update". The icons, main menu and UI look like they were outsourced to a 5USD/hour Indian "designer" on Fiverr. The fucking faction icons are especially bad and make me want to puke. This crap can be made in 5 minutes on MS Paint. How the fuck does it find its way into a full-priced game?

I made a threat about how coh3 is going to flop during the multiplayer beta and everything I brought up has proven to be true. If you are not high on hopium and actually see things for how they are you will realize 5 minutes after starting up COH3 that this game is not a worthy successor. It`s just not engaging and feels plastic compared to COH1/2.

Too "soft" on Relic as usual ... Bringing up COH2 launch is totally pointless. It`s not an excuse. Not sure why AE feels the need to bring this up 124945334 times on Reddit and now on Youtube. I get it, he wants COH3 to become a success and wants people to stay optimistic but this is ridiculous.

The problem with COH3 is, I said it before, a lack of talent, effort and passion. They are simply incompetent. The only thing that can save COH3 is Relic (re-)hiring competent devs and most of all an "artistic update". The icons, main menu and UI look like they were outsourced to a 5USD/hour Indian "designer" on Fiverr. The fucking faction icons are especially bad and make me want to puke. This crap can be made in 5 minutes on MS Paint. How the fuck does it find its way into a full-priced game?

I made a threat about how coh3 is going to flop during the multiplayer beta and everything I brought up has proven to be true. If you are not high on hopium and actually see things for how they are you will realize 5 minutes after starting up COH3 that this game is not a worthy successor. It`s just not engaging and feels plastic compared to COH1/2.

Exactly, stop legitimising this behaviour by giving companies like relic (and there are so much more) a pass. Stuff like "but CoH2..." or "but BF2142..." is just not useful when discussing CoH3. Objectively, relic has fucked up hard, and that is not only in terms of incompetency and inactivity, but also by actively lying to the player base over and over again. This is not a case of "poor relic, they are trying", this is blatant anti-consumerism to make an extra buck here and there.

I get it, we love the game and want it to succeed, but that doesn't mean giving in to blood-sucking monetary practices by shady companies gaslighting us. If AE and so many others emphasise that the game could become great over time, you should ask yourself: Do we have so much time? The player base is massively receding, just checked steamcharts today and it went back by 40% over the last 30 days. Even if the game would be actually good in the next months, this wouldn't necessarily mean that we would see a great return of players or an influx of new players. That's the reality of this subscription-like model, where we pay for unfinished products and have to hope that they become over time. Because if they don't or are too slow to get better, they die fast (see Anthem, Fallout 76, or BFV).

There has been a lot of copium spread about how Coh2 launch was bad. I did not interpret AE's video as more of that. I took it as "here are the facts" and "for those of us left, it should get better but not for a while". He even says "dont play Coh3 for a while". I took these Coh2 missteps as a guide on the timeline AE expects for Coh3 to get better.

One thing AE has been saying publicly for over a year is that he wants to step away from Coh casting. He wants to stop being the "biggest" coh tournament streamer.

When he first said that, I interpreted that as "Coh3 will be coming soon, so I want to slow down casting Coh2 since it will be dead soon".

After seeing what a complete trash release Coh3 is, as far as a streamer is concerned. I now interpret AE's stepping away as "I have been working with Relic on Coh3 for years and realized it was going to be a disaster."

Imagine being a streamer and wasting your weekends away from your family and spouse/girlfriend trying to build a loyal fan base. Then seeing the future when Relic hands you the burning turd that Coh3 is. Knowing that the only thing Coh3 is going to accomplish is destroying the fan base you helped cultivate. Would you feel disappointed? Would you be mad? How would you respond?

AE in all actuality is just another victim having their time completely wasted by Relic and their insane level of incompetence.

I have no skin in the game. I dont ever want to make a map for coh3. I stopped mapping back in coh2. I dont necessarily even want to play Coh3. And I am personally furious at how poorly Coh3 was executed. Because of how it is destroying the coh community on every level.

The only thing that could save Coh3 for me is if Relic/Sega starts firing some management. If any other company in the world did what they did, the company would immediately let some people go just to save a bit of the companies reputation and stock price.

For some reason, anything computer based is allowed to be a complete and utter disaster and its fine. Imagine if your car worked like Microsoft Windows. "Oh your car just accelerates and turns into a wall for no reason. Just turn it off and back on again. Sorry your kids are dead, you can make more." Another example of people just being cows and going with the flow.

Personally I think everyone should stop playing Coh3 to send a message. The reality of the situation is "its just a game and it will get better". And that is the same feeling I got from AE's video.

Yeah here's me making a video that addresses Relic's failures, calls them out on bad decision making, goes in hard on some of them, tries to be balanced on others, and the overall recommendation is to literally not play the game until it's fixed....

Is that enough for the hate mob? Absolutely fucking not, the only thing that would be enough for these fools is to say "it's all terrible, relic are terrible, it's completely fucked beyond repair", which in my opinion is not the case, it's not all terrible, relic aren't all terrible, and it's not fucked beyond repair.

Apparently trying to take a balanced view on it, is "dick riding", pathetic.

There has been a lot of copium spread about how Coh2 launch was bad...

Personally I think everyone should stop playing Coh3 to send a message. The reality of the situation is "its just a game and it will get better". And that is the same feeling I got from AE's video.

Conversely, there has also been a lot of hysterical 'relic literally hates us and game' posts from people who can't handle the fact that they simply won't be getting a game as good as COH 2 is, ten years after launch. They know who they are.

Yeah here's me making a video that addresses Relic's failures, calls them out on bad decision making, goes in hard on some of them, tries to be balanced on others, and the overall recommendation is to literally not play the game until it's fixed....

Is that enough for the hate mob? Absolutely fucking not, the only thing that would be enough for these fools is to say "it's all terrible, relic are terrible, it's completely fucked beyond repair", which in my opinion is not the case, it's not all terrible, relic aren't all terrible, and it's not fucked beyond repair.

Apparently trying to take a balanced view on it, is "dick riding", pathetic.

You're still telling people to buy the game and support the series based on principle. You're making the giant assumption that Relic will actually put the work in to fix the game and won't be shuttered after the console port crashes and burns and SEGA squeezes the last few dimes it'll get out of this trainwreck. That, too, is an assumption, but at least it's one with very recent historical precedent and in keeping with overall industry trends.

If this is the Company of Heroes we're getting from Relic, then maybe it's just time to say goodbye to the series. I have, and I'm definitely not paying any amount of money for the game at any moment in time. Let it die. You come off as desperate and more than a little stupid making a 40+-minute video essay about a game made with far less concern and care. I honestly feel stupid too writing this much about it.

... relic aren't all terrible, ...

I have a hard time to believe that, based on current relic's PR strategy and community managment. You definetly have alot more insight, compared to someone like me who just gets the relic interaction which is public.

From the content and responses I witness as an average joe is: John says what he is told, besides that he seems like a nice dude in a tough job position. All other relicans which we were able to witness are just some alleged devs and management people which say their lines in their videos leading up to coh3 release.

Ever since release we barely ,if at all, get actual developers working on the game to communicate with us. As of now its all via the mouth or Relic (aka John).

This makes it really hard to picture human beings who actually want to work on coh3 and make it a good title. I have the feeling, with how the games industry is, most devs will ,if not already, jump ship to work on a new game. Coh3 is just a bulletpoint on their CV. At least thats how it feels like.

Although I really want to believe that the upper managment of relic and their SEGA overlords are the real reason for this absolut blunder of a release.

You're still telling people to buy the game and support the series based on principle. You're making the giant assumption that Relic will actually put the work in to fix the game and won't be shuttered after the console port crashes and burns and SEGA squeezes the last few dimes it'll get out of this trainwreck. That, too, is an assumption, but at least it's one with very recent historical precedent and in keeping with overall industry trends.

If this is the Company of Heroes we're getting from Relic, then maybe it's just time to say goodbye to the series. I have, and I'm definitely not paying any amount of money for the game at any moment in time. Let it die. You come off as desperate and more than a little stupid making a 40+-minute video essay about a game made with far less concern and care. I honestly feel stupid too writing this much about it.

Vermillion, if you've made up your mind (and it really sounds like you have), why are you still here? You are free to walk away and stop talking about it at any time. Is AE not allowed to feel differently? This is a weird thing to post.

I have a hard time to believe that, based on current relic's PR strategy and community managment. You definetly have alot more insight, compared to someone like me who just gets the relic interaction which is public.

From the content and responses I witness as an average joe is: John says what he is told, besides that he seems like a nice dude in a tough job position. All other relicans which we were able to witness are just some alleged devs and management people which say their lines in their videos leading up to coh3 release.

Ever since release we barely ,if at all, get actual developers working on the game to communicate with us. As of now its all via the mouth or Relic (aka John).

This makes it really hard to picture human beings who actually want to work on coh3 and make it a good title. I have the feeling, with how the games industry is, most devs will ,if not already, jump ship to work on a new game. Coh3 is just a bulletpoint on their CV. At least thats how it feels like.

Although I really want to believe that the upper managment of relic and their SEGA overlords are the real reason for this absolut blunder of a release.

Why is there this community desire to have the developers pause working on fixing the game to talk to us? The community managers have the actual job of collecting information on what the developers are working on and presenting it to the community. If a developer does get community face time, I guarantee you they will tell you the same thing the community managers are. It also means the updates we will all want ASAP are going to be pushed back, because they have to stop working to setup and record videos.

Vermillion, if you've made up your mind (and it really sounds like you have), why are you still here? You are free to walk away and stop talking about it at any time. Is AE not allowed to feel differently? This is a weird thing to post.

Yeah at this point, there is just a group of players that have uninstalled the game or given up on it and are just hanging around to shit on it and declare it will never be fixed and is abandoned. If you have given up on the game, then move on and play another game. Stop wasting your life just shitting on a game you think is dead and unfixable.

Stop wasting your life just shitting on a game you think is dead and unfixable.

Telling someone like AE they come off as desperate and stupid after all the work he's done is crossing a line imo. Everyone knows you disagree, that's fine. Just walk away.

Why is there this community desire to have the developers pause working on fixing the game to talk to us? The community managers have the actual job of collecting information on what the developers are working on and presenting it to the community. If a developer does get community face time, I guarantee you they will tell you the same thing the community managers are. It also means the updates we will all want ASAP are going to be pushed back, because they have to stop working to setup and record videos.

I was talking literally anything. How about a weekly blog post of John, detailing what actually goes on. We know jack shit except "balanse talk stream" and that the console version is being worked on. There is no consistent communication since launch. A weekly sign of life from relic would make people go less balistic, So that they atleast know that things are happening or if it gets dropped like DoW3.

All these "lets pretend" roadmaps with the [Redacted] gimmicks are obnoxious and we all know that those usually mean terrible things by now e.g. in-game store.