@Vermillion_Hawk:
capture points have returned to a Company of Heroes 1 standard
This is flat-out wrong and degrades your argument.
- There were no capture circles in COH1. You either hit or missed the flagpost.
- If you were e.g. 75& up in your capture of a point, you would automatically go down to zero if your enemy touched the flagpost and you were not holding it. e.g. Ketten push
Purchased veterancy for Wehrmacht in COH1 was part of the asymmetric design.
Relic's love for the Nazis is defamatory. There are no Nazi symbols in the game - German standards alone demand that.
rip parts from Company of Heroes 1 visibly for nostalgia factor at the expense of a coherent vision for how the game should play
Here we can agree. It confounds me that Relic seem not to take account of age. The 18-year-old in 2006 is now aged 35; the 18-year-old in 2012 is now aged 29. i.e. they are most probably moving into building families in RL and have little time to devote to PC games. There is no Lost Legion of COH1 players stuck in Scotland among the Picts, waiting to troop South to fight again under the execrable loading screen of COH3. They have vanished. And the same applies to a lesser extent for COH2.
Unlike you, I believe that COH3 will be cleaned down and improved, especially for teamgames. But I am sure we would both like an answer as to how it came to this, especially when there were a team of testers/posters, mostly from this site, who went along with it all.
You're right in that we still have the (infinitely superior) Company of Heroes 2-style capture circles, I should have been a bit more specific and said I was mostly talking about the capture points as representations of the match economy. Manpower being a standardized income affected SOLELY by unit upkeep was probably one of the best features of Company of Heroes 2 from a competitive standpoint - one of the main issues in Company of Heroes 1 was the outcomes of early engagements practically deciding the match and allowing for manpower snowballing. Relic, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit to return to a non-functional standard here, not the first time that was decided in this game's development.
As for their love for the Nazis, that's hardly defamatory since it's been on display since the first game, and I'd wager it's one of the reasons why some people like this game to begin with. It's not necessarily having an open endorsement of National Socialism or having swastikas and iconography everywhere, it's the way the German factions have been deliberately portrayed. Relic dredged up every pseudohistorical myth creating the German factions as "elite" forces with superior technology and weaponry, with a strong late-game presence. Someone who has no idea about the actual history of the war would think the Allies were some kind of scrappy underdogs if this game was their only experience of it. I remember John in particular was really sensitive to these criticisms in the run-up to release and it gave me a little hope that they were shifting things around - nope, same old, same old, "elite" Nazis versus cobbled-together Americans and British. The Africa Campaign's existence leads me to believe someone was making a Rommel-forward campaign showing him as a noble commander (as in many post-war memoirs and HIAG-approved histories) and not a meth addict so far up Hitler's ass he didn't get a tan in Tunisia, and then at some point someone else realized how it would look, which led to the post-mission campaign briefs of the civilian storyline. So Relic's definitely earned their reputation, and I'll be more than willing to speak on it.
I don't think the game will get better, because the studio is clearly run by people who have no idea what this game is and what decisions will be best for it. It stinks of bean-counter logic the whole way through, from the pre-alpha until now. I'd like to say it was a big disappointment but I really had no expectations for it at all after the public tests, and now the continuing trainwreck of its post-release support is more entertaining to me than the actual game. Relic deserves every bit of what's happening, and I only wish the burden of that actually fell on the people in charge of the studio and not the programmers struggling to extract a decent game from a mountain of shit.