Coh 10 years old - The Making Of Company Of Heroes

“The internet and forums have changed the relationship to a degree,” says Duffy. “The early games we did, there wasn’t any of this. There wasn’t a community, and forums weren’t the types of sites… some of them can be incredibly harsh. The tenor of what happens on the internet has changed quite a bit in the last decade. And the role of community in the studio. We didn’t have community managers, community liaisons, the developers were the people in the forums ten years ago, but now there’s a whole role, and group within the studios that’s helping us relate to our community and communicating intent back and forth, and that’s been big.”

It wasn’t until preparing for this interview that I realised a third expansion had also been in the works, after Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor. It would have been set around Italy, shining a spotlight on a less explored side of the war. Unfortunately, it was never finished. It was pitted against Relic’s other project, Company of Heroes Online in a sort of Highlander-style duel, and it lost. Company of Heroes Online was eventually cancelled as well.

“It was in early development, and right about that time the free-to-play buzzword started to gain momentum,” Wilson says. “So we started up Company of Heroes Online internally as well. So we had these two parallel competing priorities within the franchise, and at one point we made a decision that for the sake of quality and sanity we needed to pick a lane and go for it, and we ended up shelving the Italy stuff and pushing ahead with Company of Heroes Online.”

That may have not been the end of an Italy expansion, however. At the very least, Duffy continues to see it as fertile ground.

“I think it’s often viewed as a bit of a sideshow. Churchill said it was the soft underbelly and proved to be nothing but an incredible slog of challenge. Personally it’s really interesting because the Canadian army played such a big role in Italy. You don’t hear as much about it. The Normandy campaign took the attention away. So there’s a whole area in there that’s little covered. There are lots of spots in the war where important things happened but don’t get attention.“