What happened to Relic?

First of all, the Relic that designed vCoH is far from the Relic that designed CoH2. Most of the core vCoH team is at Smoking Gun.

Secondly, if you think vCoH had better support than CoH2, you're delusional. vCoH's support was flipping awful. Bugs lasted months, and balance patches were rare. The only reason MGs act like they do in buildings right now is because someone at Relic fucked it up years ago and nobody knew how to fix it, so they turned it into a "feature". There are even posts on GameReplays of the community manager at the time promising additions to the UI to let you choose which side of a building an MG initially sets up in when you put it in there. That was 4 or 5 years ago, and it's never been added.

Relic's business model for CoH2 requires that they continuously support it. They've done a far better job with CoH2 than they ever did with vCoH in that regard.

Rofl, that is amazing. Man, I had a big suspension when the game came out that different people were responsible for the two games and this further proves this. Thanks for the feedback.

They have a balance team?? Will they start work soon?



I think the low player base means CoH2 is only *technically* not dead. On life support I'd say

Did you play this game when it came out? Balance was fuckin terrible.

Relic gives this game consistent large monthly patches that often deal with the largest issues as well as help minor balance issues. I have never seen another company patch their game as consistently or as often as COH2 and the only ones that come close are MMOs. Not to mention the huge gameplay overhuals during the march deployment and elbe day patches.

This game may have a few problems, but the balance team has been absolutely fantastic. Especially with the badly designed units and factions the design team often tends to try and implement into this game without regards to the big picture. I think anyone who says otherwise most likely has an over-inflated expectations that, to be honest, no developer can accomplish.

Relic gives this game consistent large monthly patches that often deal with the largest issues as well as help minor balance issues. I have never seen another company patch their game as consistently

? Dota 2, tf2 and all other valve games always keep getting fixes almost every 2-3 days

? Dota 2, tf2 and all other valve games always keep getting fixes almost every 2-3 days

Cuz dey ar so brokin!

And Valve crew had as much to do with dota development as putting its brand name and putting in on steam.

Valve doesn't do games anymore, they figured it out that selling others games is much more proficient, because you are getting money for other peoples work and they are right.

Cuz dey ar so brokin!

And Valve crew had as much to do with dota development as putting its brand name and putting in on steam.

Valve doesn't do games anymore, they figured it out that selling others games is much more proficient, because you are getting money for other peoples work and they are right.

And you wonder why nobody takes you seriously with comments like this.

It's honestly unfair to compare Valve to Relic, though. Valve is an private, independent developer, while Relic is owned by a publicly-traded company. Valve owns their distribution platform and can push updates out on a whim, while Relic is essentially working on a third-party platform. I agree that Valve's iterative approach to releases is superior to Relic's shotgun blast approach, but I'd imagine much of that is out of their immediate control.

And you wonder why nobody takes you seriously with comments like this.

It's honestly unfair to compare Valve to Relic, though. Valve is an private, independent developer, while Relic is owned by a publicly-traded company. Valve owns their distribution platform and can push updates out on a whim, while Relic is essentially working on a third-party platform. I agree that Valve's iterative approach to releases is superior to Relic's shotgun blast approach, but I'd imagine much of that is out of their immediate control.

It is, yes.

But if Relic communicate with his Beta tester pool, the company still have problem to communicate with the community in general. I'm glad to see they have a blog when all the last updates in it are crappy information.
Let's make things clear, the game is far more complex than Starcraft2 or other usual RTS games but the communication level his too high level and sometime too superficial. From time to time we have a detailed and technical answer to a question and everyone is happy but those moment are too rare.

The company image suffer a lot from that, because there is a clear lack of detailed closed answers to basic questions. Maybe they want to keep every doors open, but maybe it just confusing everyone.

My last personal comment: look at the official forum, WFA is release since 2 months now and still the forum isn't updated with proper sections dedicated to USF ans OKW.

Patching bugs does need to be given a higher priority than balancing, etc.

I think OP is referring to vCOH when it was 7 years post release vs COH 2 one and a half years post release.

If you were there when vCOH was the first released, it was the buggiest, most unbalanced piece of shit you'de ever play. From the PaK39-or-whatever-the-number-was which you could attack ground the entire game which would gain damage with every shot (Meaning it could eventually one-shot Pershings if you abused attack ground enough) or the fact that the StuG-III had an eranous HP line which gave it 5000 HP instead of 500 making it literally indestructible, the game had such game breakingly ridiculous bugs. Note-It took Relic a year to fix the PaK-39 attack ground bug. It took them a good few years before all the bugs and balance issues were truly ironed out of the original. And then came the expansions...

The brits were so f**king broken when they first came out. It took THQ/Relic nearly 6 months to patch Kangaroos (Essentially a mobile, indestructible bunker you can pile all your infantry into for the lolz). The PE were soooooooo weak for the first few years they were in the game. They were balanced eventually but picking them over the Wehrmacht anywhere before 2 years post-expansion-release was like committing ladder suicide.

Also, snipers never really got patched in vCOH and absolutely fucked everything at higher levels over. The reason you couldn't go double-PE in any game ever was because of the existence of snipers. Brits also looooooooooved getting raped by Snipers.

Common Guys, the game is way better and fun that it was at release.

Relic's devs do a good job at supporting and improving the game with the resources available to them. As inverse said, Coh1 had far less support that Coh2 as patchs took months to come out.

Now i play more Coh2 then before, team play is becoming better and balance is improving nicely.

This game is complex and hard to learn, people should try to practice and play it a bit more before criticizing the balance.

I trust relic'devs and we should all support them. But this must be done without giving them a blind approval.(yes there are still some balance and design issues to address...)

This is our favorite game so let's try to work together to make it meet our greatest aspirations.

See you all on the battlefield !

While CoH2(The Western Front Armies expansion to be specific) is actually fun to play, CoH1 is just simply better I think for a number of reasons.

First of all, CoH1 just feels better and the mechanics just seem to work better and dare I say flawlessly. CoH2 has improved on some of those mechanics and taken steps back as well, and CoH2 also has more bugs from my experience but not enough to severely drag down the games merits.

CoH1 also had the British Army so that automatically makes it better than CoH2 in my opinion. Relic can remedy this though by reintroducing the British Army in CoH2, by giving it an overhaul so it doesn't feel like they're copy-pasting the British faction from CoH1 into CoH2.

If we actually get off the "I hate CoH1 bandwagon" and look at CoH1 objectively, then it's pretty clear that it's a damned fine game and one of the greatest rts games ever created. Everything in CoH1 works flawlessly from doctrines, unit abilities and to map design. CoH1 also has less bugs than CoH2, but i'm inclined to believe it has more to do with the CoH2 engine than the devs themselves; CoH2 is horribly optimised due to the engine and not even Valve I think could work with the CoH2 engine and fix it.

Now, there's a number of reasons why CoH2 isn't as good as CoH1 and why Relic isn't the same anymore, but a large part of that is because the original team(Josh Mosqueira, Brian Wood and etc) isn't the same team that made CoH2. As much as I hate to say that one man really made CoH1, Josh Mosqueira was an extremely skilled developer and him moving to Blizzard(Who proceeded to lead the development on Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls mind you) really hurt Relic. The fact that Brian Wood(Another CoH1 veteran dev) died leaves not that many veteran people left that worked on CoH1. Quin Duffy comes to the top of my head as one of the few veteran developers that's still with Relic.

We also can't forget that the whole bankruptcy incident with THQ really affected the quality of CoH2 when it initially released, so there's another reason why Relic ins't what it used to be compared to their 2006-2010 version.

COH1 was great and had its share of issues. The gameplay led to a more competitive scene but it wasnt ready for it.

COH2 started as crap. Horrible DLC policies, pay 2 win everything, it was quite bad. Relic though has realized this and changed their tune and I really applaud them for it. Is it vCOH? No, and it will never be. Is it a good game? Yes, its just not as competitive and still slightly more for casual players than vCOH was/is.

Patch frequency wise Relic is doing fine... if they wouldn't introduce new problems and bugs with every patch. I swear every time i visit this site i see a new video or thread with a new bug popping up.

They surely have a lot to fix, if they don't want to look incompetent and get their game "e-sports ready".

Balance could be handled better, but it gets handled at least.

CoH1 also had the British Army so that automatically makes it better than CoH2 in my opinion. Relic can remedy this though by reintroducing the British Army in CoH2(...)

Oh god noooo! Heresy! I played the steam version of vCoH recently and i was surprised how much more i liked CoH2 not only but mostly for the lack of a British faction.

its just not as competitive and still slightly more for casual players than vCOH was/is.

It's a god damn shame. The mechanics of CoH have the potential to create a far more interesting competitive game than say SC2.

Problem is the game lacks polish and had a really shitty launch. Also, I guess the commanders gotta go, even if they are less p2w now. I have to grind an undetermined amount of time to get a proper tank for the US (EZ8, rifle commander)? No competitive player can take that seriously.

Hell, consider if you had to grind for weeks to get the AWP in CS:GO. Competitive players would have dropped it like a turd.

Oh god noooo! Heresy! I played the steam version of vCoH recently and i was surprised how much more i liked CoH2 not only but mostly for the lack of a British faction.

To each their own. Everyone likes to play as "their guys" so it makes sense to add the British. A lot of Americans went and bought the WFA because the US Army was added, so it would be wise for Relic to add the British Army, but rework them like they did to the US faction.

The fact that the British Empire(The UK, Canada, Australia, India and etc) singlehandedly won WW2 but don't have an Army in CoH2 is almost a crime.

I spent most of my CoH1 matches playing the British Army, so Relic not adding the British Army in the WFA forces me to conclude that CoH1 is better than CoH2.

While CoH2(The Western Front Armies expansion to be specific) is actually fun to play, CoH1 is just simply better I think for a number of reasons.

First of all, CoH1 just feels better and the mechanics just seem to work better and dare I say flawlessly. CoH2 has improved on some of those mechanics and taken steps back as well, and CoH2 also has more bugs from my experience but not enough to severely drag down the games merits.

CoH1 also had the British Army so that automatically makes it better than CoH2 in my opinion. Relic can remedy this though by reintroducing the British Army in CoH2, by giving it an overhaul so it doesn't feel like they're copy-pasting the British faction from CoH1 into CoH2.

If we actually get off the "I hate CoH1 bandwagon" and look at CoH1 objectively, then it's pretty clear that it's a damned fine game and one of the greatest rts games ever created. Everything in CoH1 works flawlessly from doctrines, unit abilities and to map design. CoH1 also has less bugs than CoH2, but i'm inclined to believe it has more to do with the CoH2 engine than the devs themselves; CoH2 is horribly optimised due to the engine and not even Valve I think could work with the CoH2 engine and fix it.

Now, there's a number of reasons why CoH2 isn't as good as CoH1 and why Relic isn't the same anymore, but a large part of that is because the original team(Josh Mosqueira, Brian Wood and etc) isn't the same team that made CoH2. As much as I hate to say that one man really made CoH1, Josh Mosqueira was an extremely skilled developer and him moving to Blizzard(Who proceeded to lead the development on Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls mind you) really hurt Relic. The fact that Brian Wood(Another CoH1 veteran dev) died leaves not that many veteran people left that worked on CoH1. Quin Duffy comes to the top of my head as one of the few veteran developers that's still with Relic.

We also can't forget that the whole bankruptcy incident with THQ really affected the quality of CoH2 when it initially released, so there's another reason why Relic ins't what it used to be compared to their 2006-2010 version.

That's right. vCoH is superior, dare I say perfect, because some people felt objectively better playing it. Also, the initial developers had names and have moved on to better games whereas the current developers are still working on CoH2. Oh and the British.

Guys, vCoH came out 9-06

IIRC, and I may not because I was a 7th grade noob, before 1.4, the game was fairly broken balance wise. 1.4 was passable.

1.4 was 11-06, 2 months after release
1.5 was better, 1-07
1.6 IIRC was fairly balanced, and came out during 5-07, 8 months after release
1.7 is considered the pinnacle of balance, and came out at the end of 5-07. Some say it was perfect (though I know it had its flaws) while others say it was merely fantastic (although I do remember of a few who hate the patch)

So let's put a 99% sticker on 1.7. 8 and a half months after release. Make what you want of that.

The only kicker is that OF came out in 9-07 and fucking TRASHED the balance. It wasn't until 2.301, in 4-08, that the situation was considered acceptable. So let's equate 2.301 with 1.5.

You can do math but since it's an approximation, it won't tell you anything useful. But right off the bat, we see Relic did get shittier with OF. The reason OFC is that the design of OF was, frankly, horrible, which made balancing a bloody mess. Speaking of, summer of 08, anyone remember that? The summer of 1.71. We got our cake and ate it too, for a mere 3 months. But it was delicious!

Anyways, after 2.301, we had to wait a fucking year for 2.4/2.5/ToV. Balance finally came back during 2.4 (or 2.5, I forget which, but it was the one right before ToV) before being broken once again by ToV (mainly the custom units).

I haven't followed CoH 2 too well until recently, but it seems that we just about had things worked out on the eve of the WFA release, until WFA fucked it all up.

So what happened to Relic? Well they actually have a good balance team. They just have some combination of a poor design team, overly ambitious management, and unskilled play testers. I'd guess that the balance team and design team don't communicate too effectively.

But I think the design team is too much of theorycrafters. They have ideal versions in their heads of how the factions work. Not real versions of how they actually work. They have playtesting "yes men" who cannot play on the level or even close to the community pros that don't keep the design team in check "No guys, sniper squads are a great idea and should totally go in cars! And I love the idea of the OKW, how they are forced to stick to a script!".

As for management, perhaps management is too weak to shut up the design team's bad ideas, or the design team is being forced to go to lengths it doesn't want to by an overly ambitious management.

Either way, there is a serious breakdown in the middle echelon of Relic. It's like they are a great team as individuals, and when they work together properly, it's fantastic, but they never do!

http://companyofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Changelog

Also, the initial developers had names and have moved on to better games whereas the current developers are still working on CoH2.

Yep, timeless masterpieces like Musical Feet, Doodle Jump and Freefall racers! Kinect and iOS games have never been so good!
http://www.smokingguninc.com/products/released/
(I shouldn't be cruel to Smoking Gun, it's just sad that the money is in mobile trash these days. Look at where Sega puts most of it's efforts in Japan for example)

God, why oh why can't coh2 be more like Doodle Jump!? Bring back the real devs!

Casual SP/some automatch 1v1 and 2v2 player here, not sure if my opinion counts for much, but here goes.

I've played every Relic RTS from Dawn of War 1 to CoH 2.

CoH 2 is not only a better game than CoH 1, but probably also the current pinnacle of Relic RTS games.

When Relic made Dawn of War, they experimented with capture points, cover, squads, long range units, armor being (somewhat) resistant to small arms and stuff. It was a cool game but it still played similar to a conventional RTS, mostly because cover wasn't enough of a factor yet, and morale and retreating, though present, weren't changing up the game play too much.

Then they made CoH. CoH is awesome. Finally, cover really matters, there's suppression and pinning, tactical flanking, armor is immune to small arms - and retreating! Awesome. I only played it after they finished patching (2011) so I can't speak for its balance, but I found it mostly balanced then at least.

These things aside, it had its share of flaws. Pgren blobs, airborne blobs, brit blobs. Tanks with papery armor that couldn't even take out an AT gun if you ambushed successfully - sure, the ATG should win from the front, but if you sneak behind it, you should be rewarded for that! The pacing was also too slow, and it was too hard to come back from a disadvantage. If you did badly enough in the first few minutes you might as well just quit. If an early mistake kills you off, that's awesome. If it kills you off but the game still has to drag on for another tedious 30 minutes, that sucks.

Dawn of War 2 introduced cool single player features, specifically, co-op campaign plus last stand mode. Both were great. In the few MP games I tried, I found the game lacking, though. The campaign was awesome but for some reason the skirmishes were, I would say, "like CoH, except scifi, and not as good." IMO they didn't really succeed in making a game with melee units work on the CoH system. Also, the scale was tiny and evocative of "whack-a-mole," plus the maps felt cramped and too divided into lanes.

CoH 2 I hated, before the lethality updates in March. After that update, though, it waaay surpassed CoH 1. Pacing is worlds better, blobs are sorta back from WFA but hey, at least they're not as bad as airborn blobs. Tanks are better implemented - they lose to ATG in an even fight, but if you sneak up on a PAK, hey, that gets rewarded now! Critically, matches are not decided as much in the early game. True sight makes the game far more interesting as well. Squads fighting while capturing, and the lower number of points across the map, focuses the game more on combat and less on boring "capture point grabass" (stole that from someone, can't remember who). All in all, a much better game.

IMO it suffers from having a poorly designed faction (soviets), but Wehr, OKW, and US are all pretty solid. So it gets a 3/4. CoH1 I'd give a 2/4 for factions, as PE and Brits were terrible.

This might make some bring out the pitchforks, but one mechanic I actually think DoW2 got better than CoH2 was removing base building. Base building absolutely brings nothing to the game strategically. They only brought it back for CoH2 because a loud minority cried about DoW2 lacking it.

IMO the US faction is the best designed faction because they don't have base building, and IMO all the factions should be like this. It would also be way easier to balance.

Other than that, CoH2 is way better than DoW2. DoW2 was too limited especially by the tiny scale.