An article about Relic

Which short cash grab?

*Sorry if I missed the joke.*

Serious answer:
The decision to make commanders was clearly a design to milk the franchise quickly. It was so poorly handled they even gave up on abilities and just tossed in crap already on hand.

The ToW material was also completely designed as a simple ploy.

All the different editions of the game, laughable.

Bulletins, which on the surface appear stupid, I suspect were originally being pushed by THQ as a way to generate cash from purchases. Everything you see displayed right now when you load could easily have been purchase only, and this would have made the most sense.


Ultimately, though quality and community build name recognition, name recogintion once acquired can be monetized for direct income and reduced. This is a sell the farm to pay the bills so to speak, and it is exactly how it started.

After having read more of the article "journalism" is a strong word and this is not it. This is exactly what people complain about with journalists, letting the interviewee basically ask their own questions, instead of asking deep questions and forcing the person answering to demonstrate their expertise. COH2 was so unfinished when it launched I thought the beta was a partial build and was expecting to download a double or triple sized file to begin on day 1. To my surprise the game was the beta. Even simple unit command didn't work, because of lag time from input delay, a cardinal sin in any online game. Relic sold some of its name brand to make COH2, and I hope that is a learning experience. My experience is now to never buy Relic products without a long waiting period. I only bought OKW/Amer/Brits when they were discounted at >90% and OKW/Amer when I could donate all my proceeds to non-profits. The products themselves were simply not worth supporting at release.

Really interesting article, if one reads it without venom filled eyes o.0

*Sorry if I missed the joke.*

Serious answer:
The decision to make commanders was clearly a design to milk the franchise quickly. It was so poorly handled they even gave up on abilities and just tossed in crap already on hand.

The ToW material was also completely designed as a simple ploy.

All the different editions of the game, laughable.

Bulletins, which on the surface appear stupid, I suspect were originally being pushed by THQ as a way to generate cash from purchases. Everything you see displayed right now when you load could easily have been purchase only, and this would have made the most sense.


Ultimately, though quality and community build name recognition, name recogintion once acquired can be monetized for direct income and reduced. This is a sell the farm to pay the bills so to speak, and it is exactly how it started.

After having read more of the article "journalism" is a strong word and this is not it. This is exactly what people complain about with journalists, letting the interviewee basically ask their own questions, instead of asking deep questions and forcing the person answering to demonstrate their expertise. COH2 was so unfinished when it launched I thought the beta was a partial build and was expecting to download a double or triple sized file to begin on day 1. To my surprise the game was the beta. Even simple unit command didn't work, because of lag time from input delay, a cardinal sin in any online game. Relic sold some of its name brand to make COH2, and I hope that is a learning experience. My experience is now to never buy Relic products without a long waiting period. I only bought OKW/Amer/Brits when they were discounted at >90% and OKW/Amer when I could donate all my proceeds to non-profits. The products themselves were simply not worth supporting at release.

I agree about the cmders but it isn't only Relic who are guilty of this business model.

I don't see any issue with the TOW stuff, it is sp / co-op content.

You can't force developers to answer questions.

Depends how you define finished?

Contents wise COH2 was finished. It did launch with bugs but so do all games and the input lag was actually, well, not what people think it was.

People need to remember than COH2 was developed and launched in a very turbulent time which couldn't have been easy.

I think you're being to cynical about why people make video games. Yes of course money comes into it since without my money the industry wouldn't exist, but the prime motivation for developers (people) is to create great games.

I think you're being to cynical about why people make video games. Yes of course money comes into it since without my money the industry wouldn't exist, but the prime motivation for developers (people) is to create great games.

i don't think that most developers strive for great games, most of them are fine with good games. vcoh was developed with a 95 metacritic score in mind and in my opinion you can feel the difference between that and the mindset for coh2. regardless of the thq trouble coh2 was faulty at its core, mechanics like blizzards and abandoning clearly show that the thought process behind it was shallow.

i don't think that most developers strive for great games, most of them are fine with good games. vcoh was developed with a 95 metacritic score in mind and in my opinion you can feel the difference between that and the mindset for coh2. regardless of the thq trouble coh2 was faulty at its core, mechanics like blizzards and abandoning clearly show that the thought process behind it was shallow.

They want to make the best game they can.

I don't think anyone outside of the development can accurately speak of the studios mindset. Blizzards / abandoned are fine in SP, mistake to have them in MP.

well, i can only speak based on the things they say in interviews and the stuff they produce.

for coh2 i have never read about that "pushing it to the limits" or "rethink every mechanic until its perfect", but for vcoh that has been true and i think it shows

well, i can only speak based on the things they say in interviews and the stuff they produce.

for coh2 i have never read about that "pushing it to the limits" or "rethink every mechanic until its perfect", but for vcoh that has been true and i think it shows

Were you even around back then (vCoH)? Yeah they re-thought the shit out of the kangaroo for about a year without patching the game. And all those times strafing runs alternated between broken OP and useless with months on end going by. They pushed it to the limits so hard...

The frustrating thing is that despite the bad rep they get due to their lack of support for EVERY game they release, there's little or no change in the long run. Relic still treats their multiplayer component as an afterthought.

I don't know, maybe only industry giants like Blizzard and Valve can afford workable balance teams and proper after-launch support and events. In that case the only thing Relic has going for itself is that none of the big boys decided to steal their lunch money in a while. That, and government protectionism because they clearly wouldn't have survived without those subsidies.

i disagree aswell, if you don't hammer down the most important things for esport in your design it is gonna fail. Enough strategic depth has to be there!
Look at hearthstone, it is fun to play and well designed in that aspect, but many people belive that it isn't really competetive and many pro players there are frustrated

I'll also do my best to respond to Strategos's post in my reply.

I agree with you both in the sense that good infrastructure SHOULD be there in today's world. What I mean by this is a good replay system, a solid observer mode, and the ability to reasonably easily play tournament matches (workable custom lobby system that isn't difficult to use and supports observation).

From a design perspective, the game just needs to be good, competitive, and fun to watch/play. It also needs to be easy to understand what is happening and who is winning for people that don't play the game.

Let's look at a few examples.

DoTA2/LOL: Probably the largest and most successful e-sports of all time. Neither game was DESIGNED to be an e-sport. DOTA: Allstars was already largely successful being just a custom map inside of Wc3. What DOTA2/LOL did was take the existing successful game and provide a better engine and (in the case of dota2) great observer functions.

SSBM (Super Smash Brothers Melee) and other fighters were e-sports well before the era of "ZOMG EVERYTHIGN NEEDS TO BE ESPORTZ." None of them were designed with e-sports in mind. Nintendo actually actively worked AGAINST the community of SSBM as far as competitive play went. The community still succeeded.

SC:BW/Wc3: Also not designed at all with e-sports in mind. Both were wildly successful in their time. Particularly SC:BW with being the father of modern RTS and e-sports as a whole.

CS/CS:GO: Not designed for e-sports. CS:GO added a lot of engine/infrastructure things that improve the viewer experience.

The biggest and most successful game titles in the e-sports world today all have this in common:

*They were NEVER designed to be e-sports.
*The community put in TONS of work prior to developer involvement to grow the e-sports scene.
*In today's world they have good observer functionality.

Regarding Hearthstone:

The game was clearly, CLEARLY, never designed with true competitive play in mind. There is still no replay system, there is still no observer mode at all, and the game is riddled with frustrating RNG beyond all the RNG that comes inherent to any card game. I don't think Hearthstone makes for a good e-sport and I predict that it will fail within the next 2-3 years in much the same manner that Diablo 3 failed because of Path of Exile being better in almost ever aspect. Hearthstone has been successful in terms of viewership thus far because early on the community ran lots of tournaments before Blizzard stepped in and threw money at the game.

Another example, World of Warcraft:

By all accounts WoW *should* be a hugely successful e-sport at this point. WoW is by far the largest MMO of all time, it has the best competitive PvP experience of any MMO that I've played (I prefer the more hardcore/full-loot style PvP MMOs like Darkfall, Albion, Eve, etc but these make for bad competitive titles). Plus the game has had tons of community support and community driven tournaments and Blizzard's support. The downfall of WoW has always been that the game is extremely obtuse to anyone who does not play the game. It's hard to tell what is happening, it is difficult to tell who is winning, and for a long time the infrastructure was lacking to truly support an e-sports scene.

Final example, SC2:
Designed with e-sports in mind. Failed pretty miserably when compared to what it could/should have been. The viewer experience in Heart of the Swarm in particular was miserable.

Keep in mind that a huge portion of viewers for any e-sport title do not actively play the game they're watching.

TLDR is this -

In today's world, the game SHOULD have functionality in place to support the title as far as e-sports goes. Observer mode and replays are easily solved issues for modern engines to implement. So are easy-to-use custom lobbies.

The game should NOT be designed exclusively for esports. Thus far there has been no correlation between a game being designed around being an esport and being a successful esport. Most evidence points to the contrary. Produce a quality game, provide the community with a few basic tools and if it takes off - provide developer support if it makes sense from a business perspective.

Final note regarding For Honor - I loved the game, played it a ton. The network issues were over-exaggerated. The biggest issues with For Honor were lack of reasonable observer functionality and major flaws in base game design. Defensive play was rewarded WAY too much because of a lack of chip damage, the insane strength of parrying, and a flawed stamina system. Balance issues aside.

People tend to forget the biggest reason for warcraft 3/BW's success was the bundled map editor. It turned both the games from regular run of the mill RTSes to complete modding platforms, giving us games like all those DBZ maps, Raccoon City, AoS and hundreds of varieties of RPGs.

This made buying blizzard games an extremely good proposition because you could get a potentially infinite amount of varied gameplay that every other RTS lacks

SC2's biggest failure was the ToS which told modders that their ideas would belong to blizzard if they used the map editor. Combine that with the terrible WoL layout, the custom games scene died for SC2, and for a time the game was kept alive when it was the top dog in eSports because MOBAs weren't that popular. Once League got the ball rolling, SC2 faded into the background and lost it's popularity.

CoH1 had several successful mods that enhanced the gameplay further like EFMod, BK etc. Compare that to CoH2 which is loaded with microtransactions and limited support for modding. Now Kat_RE had stated that DoW3 is going to have increased mod support, and if Relic play's their cards right, they will have the baseline for a large and moddable game that they can keep supporting with content from the 40k IP.

I don't trust Relic as a company. Unfortunately I almost don't trust any company in the gaming industry anymore. Not only have the dlc milking scams gone up intensively since the first time one went up in 2006 in Elder Scrolls, but the games that come out are now buggy, unfinished and definite beta builds in most cases. Most companies know they can get away with patching a game after launch no matter how broken it is.

Relic has become a cash grabbing company that milks every franchise it still has, it is obvious. They launch obvious completely broken dlc in an online real time strategy game that has good balance as one of its central pillars and proceed to not hot fix it for months. The only company I still trust is CD Projekt Red.

Relic has become a cash grabbing company that milks every franchise it still has, it is obvious.

Yes, that is how businesses run.

+ to Ciez and Dangerous-Cloth.
I dont trust Relic after there bad work with coh2. I can undestand a lot DLC (its okey, game make for money), but not bad support, slow balance fix, broken optimizations, OP factions/docs for money. Relic make unfinished games.

From a design perspective, the game just needs to be good, competitive, and fun to watch/play. It also needs to be easy to understand what is happening and who is winning for people that don't play the game.

i agree 100% with that now that you have included competetive!

Were you even around back then (vCoH)? Yeah they re-thought the shit out of the kangaroo for about a year without patching the game. And all those times strafing runs alternated between broken OP and useless with months on end going by. They pushed it to the limits so hard...

I am not talking about balancing (at least they mad 2.602 with pros). Its rather about the fundamentals of the game, things like popcap, upkeep, side armor, amount of RNG, ressource points, ...
vcoh has a lot more thought put into that than coh2

snip

I think you're taking the word e-sport too straight. By e-sport people mean balanced and fair. All the examples your are giving are actually balanced and fair between players, even if their objective isn't the same. (CS-like)
E-sport isn't only a matter of money and tournament but raw material that is going to provide interesting matchup on a fair environment.
Saying a game is E-sport compatible means that, it is actually balanced between every assets and aspect of the gameplay.

Relic is bullshitting here again, of course they want their game to be e-sport, of course it has been part of the design since the beginning. For what other reason would they have build their multilayer around a bastard concept MOBA/STR? For what other reason would they have reduce the complexity of the game layer after layer?
For what other reasons would they have improve the Coh2 e-sport aspect? Because they are using it as a test platform for DoW3. Note that I'm not against since it has improved many Coh2 multiplayer aspects.

To have a game easy to use, easy to play, easy to follow and understand what is happening on your screen/twitch from the casual audience.

i don't think that most developers strive for great games, most of them are fine with good games. vcoh was developed with a 95 metacritic score in mind and in my opinion you can feel the difference between that and the mindset for coh2. regardless of the thq trouble coh2 was faulty at its core, mechanics like blizzards and abandoning clearly show that the thought process behind it was shallow.

Blizzard mechanism and deep snow were presented a year or two before Coh2 release. The community was amazed, looked so fun and cool. I was one of the few little voices telling this would simply be broken on multiplayer. Relic didn't care, it was all about "each game tells a story" bullshit and people loved it.

Can someone define what they mean by e-sport? This is getting rather confusing.

I thank Relic for this beautifull game. Does not exist no other, Which would make me entertained for so long.

I hope after they make all DoW3 datadisks, time for CoH3 will begin.

Can someone define what they mean by e-sport? This is getting rather confusing.

I would define an e-sport as any game that a player can play professionally without the need for a part/full time job.

DOTA2, LoL, Hearthstone, CS:GO, SSBM (probably other fighters that I don't follow) being the major examples. The professionally sponsored players for these games make enough between tournament winnings, salary, and streaming that they are professionals - they make their living through playing the game.

Not sure if SC2 is popular enough anymore to be a real e-sport (at least in the west).

Maybe SC:BW is still popular enough in Korea for it to be an e-sport there?

@Esxile - balance is mostly irrelevant to e-sport potential (Especially in coh2 where you have to play both sides during a tournament. Balance is literally meaningless as far as tournament play from a player's perspective in coh2. For a viewer experience, which is vitally important to a game's success, it can be important).

SSBM is extremely imbalanced for the majority of the characters and stages. Many heroes in DOTA2 are not viable at a top level. Hearthstone is one of the most imbalanced games of all time. I can't comment on LoL because I don't follow it. The important thing is that in each case (as is the case in coh2, and I assume Dow3) players can choose not to use the under-powered stuff. As long as the viewer experience isn't inhibited too much by a lack of balance, it doesn't matter. As long as the matches are still exciting to watch the viewer won't care about balance (because 99% of viewers aren't good enough for balance to determine their wins/losses on ladder/custom games anyways). If balance is so bad that one faction/hero/card/whatever is an insta-win without any engaging play from either player... that is when you have a problem. But those situations are generally easy for developers to fix.

Sadly, with CoH 2 Relic didn't have a great track record of quickly fixing those issues (Tiger Ace, Windustry, insta-win exploits like infinite range tanks/vickers/superman Paratroopers etc).

A point to the contrary - Chess is quite balanced (jk white OP), but it isn't an engaging viewer experience for anyone that doesn't play the game.

Were you even around back then (vCoH)? Yeah they re-thought the shit out of the kangaroo for about a year without patching the game. And all those times strafing runs alternated between broken OP and useless with months on end going by. They pushed it to the limits so hard...

The frustrating thing is that despite the bad rep they get due to their lack of support for EVERY game they release, there's little or no change in the long run. Relic still treats their multiplayer component as an afterthought.

I don't know, maybe only industry giants like Blizzard and Valve can afford workable balance teams and proper after-launch support and events. In that case the only thing Relic has going for itself is that none of the big boys decided to steal their lunch money in a while. That, and government protectionism because they clearly wouldn't have survived without those subsidies.

ahaahhaah

also the sniper RNG so 33sp0rtzzz

I don't trust Relic as a company. Unfortunately I almost don't trust any company in the gaming industry anymore. Not only have the dlc milking scams gone up intensively since the first time one went up in 2006 in Elder Scrolls, but the games that come out are now buggy, unfinished and definite beta builds in most cases. Most companies know they can get away with patching a game after launch no matter how broken it is.

Relic has become a cash grabbing company that milks every franchise it still has, it is obvious. They launch obvious completely broken dlc in an online real time strategy game that has good balance as one of its central pillars and proceed to not hot fix it for months. The only company I still trust is CD Projekt Red.

That just isn't true.

There has indeed been a handful of games which have had hard launches(Assgreed), most on the PC since there is a lack of quality control, but in general most games are fine.

All games launch with bugs and we're lucky to get patches to fix them otherwise we would be stuck with those bugs.

Indeed the cmders was a mess but there is nothing wrong with DLC.

Yes, that is how businesses run.

No no no my friend. This is ONE way to run businesses. There are also other (better for both, companies and players) ways.

If you think this is the ONLY way then you have fallen in to their trap.