Why listening to the community isn't always good.

Nah, don't twist this back on the community.

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Someone only read the title of the thread and then decided to comment

because from what I remember CoH2 had new stuff released a month after it's release

This is actually true, however that "new stuff" was the first wave of OP DLC commanders, then very soon after that we got the original assault grenadiers/StugE and soviet urban defense doc with mega busted FHQs and booby traps. Which was even more OP.
Only to be followed by the top 5 most OP pay2win DLCs in gaming history (Tiger Ace, Soviet industry, For Mother Russia and B4 Howitzers). This turned so many people away from the game back then

Currently we're being fed table-spoon sized updates for modding when so much more could be done if we at least had the same capabilities as CoH2 if not the original game.

I keep seeing this constantly but you gotta realize that Relic has to make profit in the end. Imagine if CoH3 modding tools were as powerful as the CoH1 tools, and now someone is recreating a fully fleshed out version of the CoH1 Eastern Front Mod while Relic is secretly working on an Eastern Front Armies multiplayer DLC, and now that mod has 500,000 subs when the DLC launches.

Would be a complete disaster. Mods are "horrible" if they directly compete with Relic's content, and it's the reason why powerful modding tools are very rare in the first year of pretty much any game.

Agree though it would be beyond awesome if the modding tools would become very powerful down the line, I have my doubts about that though given what the trend was with CoH2's modding tools since 2013...

This is actually true, however that "new stuff" was the first wave of OP DLC commanders, then very soon after that we got the original assault grenadiers/StugE and soviet urban defense doc with mega busted FHQs and booby traps. Which was even more OP.
Only to be followed by the top 5 most OP pay2win DLCs in gaming history (Tiger Ace, Soviet industry, For Mother Russia and B4 Howitzers). This turned so many people away from the game back then



I keep seeing this constantly but you gotta realize that Relic has to make profit in the end. Imagine if CoH3 modding tools were as powerful as the CoH1 tools, and now someone is recreating a fully fleshed out version of the CoH1 Eastern Front Mod while Relic is secretly working on an Eastern Front Armies multiplayer DLC, and now that mod has 500,000 subs when the DLC launches.

Would be a complete disaster. Mods are "horrible" if they directly compete with Relic's content, and it's the reason why powerful modding tools are very rare in the first year of pretty much any game.

Agree though it would be beyond awesome if the modding tools would become very powerful down the line, I have my doubts about that though given what the trend was with CoH2's modding tools since 2013...

Say it's Paradox. Their games have tons and tons of mods. HoI4 alone has so many different mods, and this is what keeps the game afloat in many ways. Because without mods, vanilla HoI4 looks very unfinished and with minimal content. But at the same time, it has an average online of 30,000 players per day and 50 000 peak.

I am a moron and I made a simple Coh style RTS in 2 months. Imagine what smart people would do with good modding tools. Relic would be out of business. They should never put out good modding tools.

This is actually true, however that "new stuff" was the first wave of OP DLC commanders, then very soon after that we got the original assault grenadiers/StugE and soviet urban defense doc with mega busted FHQs and booby traps. Which was even more OP.
Only to be followed by the top 5 most OP pay2win DLCs in gaming history (Tiger Ace, Soviet industry, For Mother Russia and B4 Howitzers). This turned so many people away from the game back then



I keep seeing this constantly but you gotta realize that Relic has to make profit in the end. Imagine if CoH3 modding tools were as powerful as the CoH1 tools, and now someone is recreating a fully fleshed out version of the CoH1 Eastern Front Mod while Relic is secretly working on an Eastern Front Armies multiplayer DLC, and now that mod has 500,000 subs when the DLC launches.

Would be a complete disaster. Mods are "horrible" if they directly compete with Relic's content, and it's the reason why powerful modding tools are very rare in the first year of pretty much any game.

Agree though it would be beyond awesome if the modding tools would become very powerful down the line, I have my doubts about that though given what the trend was with CoH2's modding tools since 2013...

Still, at least it was some type of new content rather than just rehashed old commanders. Even if it was a sort of cash-grab.

And well that's the thing, an almost limitless modding scene is profit because people will buy the game to play the mods, especially if they're overhauls that transform it into a favorite theme of theirs like Star Wars or Warhammer for example, and it also allows the game developers to look at community ideas and talent like is the case right now with CoH3 as well with it's mappers and large amount of people that were fans of CoH2.

A personal example I can show is how our mod MACE for Gates of Hell (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2905667604) started off as a simple idea of just adding some additional units to Germany and the Soviets such as the Hummel and Wespe that we felt were missing but ballooned into a community expansion of sorts which did that and also introduced the US as an almost vanilla-like faction because we aimed at making it feel and look like a natural part of the game. The only real parts we were missing were some maps and perhaps a campaign but that's about it really.

The point is however, there were people like DevilDogGamer that showed it off on Twitch and it received a lot of positive feedback with many people (mostly from the US because obviously they want to play as their own nation) stating that they bought the game because of the mod, which is in turn profit for the game's developers which wouldn't be possible if we weren't allowed the level of freedom to even make our own factions. It's also the same case with the original CoH and DoW with many people buying them to play the mods.

Instead, Relic made a lot of poor decisions,

Some of the "poor decisions" were made because Relic listened some few "top 1v1 Community players" in the past. And this happened since the early days of CoH2.


The things got much worse after the lastest CoH2 DLC (brits), they started listen 4v4 Axis players (yes thats right, faction players lol). CoH3 and this mess is the result.

Quality post right there.

Divided on the topic though. I think having 4 factions currently keeps the game alive, because even with only 2-3 maps, you can have at least some variety in gameplay. With only one faction per side and two main strats per faction, variety is very limited even in 3v3/4v4 games. The second factions spices up things a lot.
From what I have read, the balancing isn't an awful lot off. Yes, some broken stuff, but most of what I have read is that all factions are interesting to play and generally well designed. Regarding game design, having four faction from the start will help the overall faction design. Balancing two factions against each other will lead to "overfitting". "Faction A is strong in this phase, therefore B needs this counter earlier and peak afterwards, therefore unit X from faction A needs that buff...". The units will be tuned to fight their counterpart and the special strategy of the opposing faction. This can lead to very cool and interesting gameplay as in CoH1 and CoH2, but both games fucked up the introduction of additional factions. Balance was screwed and suddenly hard to tune because the first factions were meant to fight each other and none of the new factions. CoH3 balances each faction against two others from the start. This should hopefully reduce overfitting and allow easier introduction of new units and factions.

This surely came at the cost of other parts not being finished. I don't think that CoH3 would have been a solid game if it released with two factions and shifted resources elsewhere. There was too much wrong with the game at release, having four factions can't be the cause of these issues.
The post-release drought is a symptom of incompetent Relic leadership. They used their best PR speak to brush over concerns and glaring issues and padded themselves on the back with their store update, non-communication with the community and really embarrassing content like the videos of Steve (forgot the last name) stating how proud he is of the game and its current state. This was a leadership not wanting to accept their failure and trying to hide it.
SEGA or someone even higher at Relic realized and tried to sweep those people out during the layoffs. Which will obviously come with bigger trouble for the organisation and therefore even more breaks. That and the probably still poor planning are reasons why CoH3 hasn't had large content updates up to now. Updates seem to be much more focused though since then. I think the situation overall has improved.

Releasing two additional factions shortly after launch would have helped there to be "some" content for sure. But I don't think it would have been good content. There are to options:
1. They delay the release of two factions to generate some artificially "new" content later on. Release would have had even less content and poorer reviews than it already had.
2. They delay and shift resources elsewhere: Not that easily possible if you plan on a release shortly after launch. Relic cannot hire another audio engineer, because they still need the game designers. This only works if you release the factions a long time down the road as they did with WFA in CoH2. Then you can afford to focus on e.g. audio issues before the game's launch, fire the audio guy/move him to another project and get a gameplay designer for the new content (overly simplified process obviously). But you cannot shift your budget that quickly for 2 months to audio and then shift it back to gameplay design.

Relic bit off more than they could chew, at least with poor leadership and planning. Four factions at release is part of that, but not the main reason why the launch failed so horribly and why the post-launch phase was very underwhelming.

Divided on the topic though. I think having 4 factions currently keeps the game alive...

Good post, Hannibal.

Quality post right there.

Same to you!

Divided on the topic though. I think having 4 factions currently keeps the game alive, because even with only 2-3 maps, you can have at least some variety in gameplay....the balancing isn't an awful lot off..."overfitting"..CoH3 balances each faction against two others from the start...

All very good points

This surely came at the cost of other parts not being finished. I don't think that CoH3 would have been a solid game if it released with two factions and shifted resources elsewhere. There was too much wrong with the game at release, having four factions can't be the cause of these issues.
The post-release drought is a symptom of incompetent Relic leadership...

+1

I think the situation overall has improved.

Certainly, a lot of stuff sucking the fun out of the game in 4v4 got patched early on, like OST emplacement spam and brit boys rifle deathballs.

...Relic bit off more than they could chew, at least with poor leadership and planning. Four factions at release is part of that, but not the main reason why the launch failed so horribly and why the post-launch phase was very underwhelming.

Thank you for the post. Good points all around. Maybe it was doomed from the start just from the Relic staff and leadership, maybe it was biting off more than they could chew, or maybe it was both ofc. Who knows. To be completely fair, it's probably not worth much to speculate about, seeing as there's nothing we can do to change the release (unless someone on here's invented a time machine I don't know about ), it was more of a hopeless rant on my part haha.

Thank you for the post. Good points all around. Maybe it was doomed from the start just from the Relic staff and leadership, maybe it was biting off more than they could chew, or maybe it was both ofc. Who knows. To be completely fair, it's probably not worth much to speculate about, seeing as there's nothing we can do to change the release (unless someone on here's invented a time machine I don't know about ), it was more of a hopeless rant on my part haha.

Always has to be both. With a large enough budget, even an incompetent leadership can succeed reaching a mediocre goal. A mediocre goal would have been to roughly redo CoH2 after 10 years. No one would have complained, but also no one would have been flashed by the "new" CoH. Relic was more ambitious though: Four factions that all have their own style, more flexible battlegroups, the Italian single player campaign, new engine, new animations, new sound and graphic assets etc...
Which is exactly what they need to set CoH3 apart. On that point, they did everything right. The CoH3 as outlined would have been amazing, even if some features would have been only "okay". But in the end, there were few really well done things (such as some graphics/textures, the battlegroups and the four factions) and too many bad to mediocre ones.

I don't know their budget, but seeing that Relic has multiple hundred people as staff and allegedly started development 5-6 years ago, it must have been mismanagement at the very least. The management did not make efficient use of that work force. Maybe the company was bloated by administration, inefficient processes, unclear directions and goals. Most of this falls back on management in the end. Surely Relic has their fair share of simply incompetent individuals, but which larger company doesn't? Some aspects of the game are done well, and some are lacking. It might be incompetence, it might be under-budgeting, I can't judge that from outside. Whatever the reason, it would have been duty of HR to get sufficiently qualified people and of management to give the necessary budget and adjust to problems in time. If only one or two aspects failed, then I'd assume it is personal incompetence in that section of the company and not blame the management. Management cannot catch every single issue as well, but if so much stuff is just straight up bad, they should have noticed and re-adjusted. They didn't. Instead, we got a video what a great launch this has been.

CoH3 wasn't bound to fail, but with the decision making higher up, there probably was not much chance left. As a CoH2 fan, I can only hope that Relic will devote a small dev group for the next 2 years to keep improving the game, while player numbers slowly creep up again. Relic has blown its best chance at release though, from now on, everything will be twice as difficult.

Thing is, CoH3 would've been much better received if it had at least some super basic quality standards behind it.

I'm not even talking about industry standards or bullshittery like surrender button.

For instance why you would launch game with re-used assets and icons from CoH2. People will notice that and mock the game for it. No-one will argue that they are hard to do, even amateur can made them relatively fast.

Why you launch the game with-out balance patch and keep beta state of balance, with objectively abusive cancer strats\abilities\mechanics, which you will nerf anyway the next patch. But you will already ruin first impression for a lot of people.

Replays are kinda represent all the problems of CoH3 really. Functionally replays were ready since beta, meaning technical part of the replays was already in the game. UI and maybe in-game option to launch them was missing, yet it took almost a year to add them officially.

Basically, some-one decided that replays are not the priority, despite them being already mostly done.

And this is what kinda ruined CoH3, for some reason really easy to do things which could've dramatically increase quality and reception of the game, were put out of the priority.

Maps are different topic, because we dont even know how many people are working on them. But if Relic really was scrapping the barrel, they could've at least re-used campaign maps to some extend to at least make map pool ever so slightly bigger. I know in one of the devs blogs, it was said that SP maps arent really made for MP.

But excuse me, you already did it. Winter Line (4v4 map) is almost a direct copy of the last mission of the Italian campaign, just slightly extended and few props are changed here and there.

If that is the excuse, it is hokum.

There are only 3 issues that I stretch myself to imagine

1) Copyright in the map. If this were an issue, I would have thought it highly likely Relic have a template assigning copyright from COH2, which they can easily adapt and ask the mapmaker to sign. This may include being allowed to change the map. Since all mapmakers I came across wanted their maps published and preferably in automatch, this is unlikely to be an issue,

2) Capacity to contract. If Relic are worried the mapmaker may lack capacity bcs they are too young, all Relic have to request is sight of a birth certificate.

3) NDA. If for some bizarre reason Relic want the mapmaker to sign an NDA, this sadly should not be difficult, since community members seem to happily sign their lives away on these things.

More likely, it is that the Relic mapmaking side feels under pressure and does not want to spend hours on examining community maps if they have their own tasks to attend to.

All known former staff members who are part of Relic now, are shown on our staff tree under the Developers section

This mapmaking "legality" excuse to prevent the community from fleshing out the map pool seems to be bs unless I'm missing something.

COH2 we didnt have this much friction putting maps into the game, even in the early days.

COH1 we didnt have this much friction once custom maps actually got into the game, though it was harder to do, never any legal issues.

Never signed a legal peice of paperwork with relic relating to getting maps into any coh game for any reason.

Shrug

... Balance was screwed and suddenly hard to tune because the first factions were meant to fight each other and none of the new factions. CoH3 balances each faction against two others from the start. This should hopefully reduce overfitting and allow easier introduction of new units and factions.
...

Balance was screwed because Relic did a basic mistake. Instead of tuning the new faction to the old one they started tuning the old faction to new and that creates issues for a number of reasons.

Firstly neither USF nor OKW where balanced when released and that trying to fix thing by making changes to Ostheer/Soviet was a fools errand.

In addition "fixing" Soviet to fight okw and OStheer to fight USF meant destroying the balance between the two which Relic had spend so much to achieve.

The end result was to completely redesign 3 factions and waster more time in trying balance things while not fixing simple things.

Trying to release 4 faction at launch does take a lot of resources and might be a contributing reason why other things that should be easy fixes where not done upon release.

The community will never truly find out what the “community council” had input on. But I would love to know. 1. The list of people that were on it. 2. The amount of influence and their suggestions. Especially since people that have no idea about gameplay or unit match ups were on it - AE was on it.

Will never understand the need to “get back to COH1”

Lower TTK
Removing TD roles essentially
Huge variations in model health
Cover rework against grenades
MG suppression mechanic completely changed
Snares completely changed
Crush being removed
Factions missing essential elements again
USF with no non doc indirect besides a mortar
Brits without a TD
The buff to retreating

All of these things just make gameplay not fun. They aren’t even balance concerns. Just the gameplay itself is boring, anticlimactic. Most of my complaints probably dont matter to new people or people who barely played COH2 or COH1.

But I do not understand people who actively played COH1,COH2 and think COH3 is anything close to its predecessors.

Look at the “community” its gone lol. The known streamers are gone. The playerbase is still declining.

I can not express to anyone in words. How sad this is. That this franchise is where it is now. I gave COH3 a chance. I played a decent amount of games for all factions. None of those games came close to some of the average, not even good games of COH2 I have had.

Being realistic. COH3 will probably not recover. There are way too many good games releasing this winter. For a massive influx of people to comeback. On top of the update cadence that has been shown by Relic. Like people said. After 10 months. There will only be 2 new 4v4 maps. Not even talking about missing elements just maps.

I think its okay to say. I wish COH3 never released. At least then the franchise would be remembered for being good while it lasted. Not an utter clusterfuck. That it is now.

The community will never truly find out what the “community council” had input on. But I would love to know. 1. The list of people that were on it. 2. The amount of influence and their suggestions. Especially since people that have no idea about gameplay or unit match ups were on it

https://www.mobygames.com/game/199646/company-of-heroes-3/credits/windows/?autoplatform=true

I wouldn't go after the people in the closed group.

The games faults ultimately lie with Relic alone, my impression is that the closed group was used for marketing reasons (look how good we are, we got community members to test and sign off on the game).

I dislike these community groups because they create a buffer for the studio who made the decisions that resulted in the game being not up to snuff.

Ultimately relics fault yes. Does that make the people on the council blame free? No. We dont know how much influence or how many suggestions were taken from them. For gameplay/balance…etc.

On top of any of that if asked they would probably downplay their role based off the current state/launch of the game. I just know from reading that list. That I have heard less than half those names before. On top of names that dont even play this Franchise lol. Or haven’t in a long time. Or consistently in the pass.

On top of people like AE being involved who is a glorified anchorman that couldnt win a game against someone who RE spams him in COH2 ( he lacks understanding of gameplay).

On top of people like AE being involved who is a glorified anchorman that couldnt win a game against someone who RE spams him in COH2 ( he lacks understanding of gameplay).

To be completely fair to A_E, he is a popular content creator, so if nothing else he would be a good ask on what a lot of people like to see most in a game/what brings in the most attention. I would imagine that they were asking him about what players liked watching the most about previous games. Or maybe how he would improve the replay/caster system.

To be completely fair to A_E, he is a popular content creator, so if nothing else he would be a good ask on what a lot of people like to see most in a game/what brings in the most attention. I would imagine that they were asking him about what players liked watching the most about previous games. Or maybe how he would improve the replay/caster system.

Most people don’t play 1’s or care about tournaments. In regards to multiplayer. Replays and observer mode sure.

Most people don’t play 1’s or care about tournaments. In regards to multiplayer. Replays and observer mode sure.

I'd say its a bit more complicated.

Most people might not be playing 1v1s, but its always good to see best ones play against one another, tournaments of COH2 were popular for views, even if most viewers prefer team games themselves.

And yes, replays is not only a qol feature, its also something very important for content creators to have and you would think it would be very important for relic as well, given how these casts can create free advertising for the game.

Scarcity of maps across game modes really does make it feel like there is less content in the game despite having twice as many factions at release with much better fleshed out mechanics and depth too, we didn't feel it as much in CoH2, because maps were shared between game modes, something not present here.