Funny enough, CoH released with Theater of War which was basically a coop experience.
SC2 commanders basically "saved" the franchise of been another diablo 3 with skeleton crew game.
This is why you include a campaign, good AI and Co-Op matches in an RTS game if you want it to be good and sell well, which does not mean half ass all of that and then focus on the multiplayer aspect only.
I'm sure that in the EULA or whatever you sign up when you install the game, that they reserve the right to basically shut down the game if they feel like it whenever they want. That's for all the online features the game has.
Or that you basically don't "own" the game, you are just renting it from them or whatever.
You can rant as much as you want as how unfair and fraudulent the game industry is nowadays. The key word are "industry" and business. If you want old school type of games, your only choice are indies, and indies generally can't offer the same experience as AAA, specially in the multiplayer department.
I don't remember signing anything and I'm not ranting, I'm stating facts. People have been sued over this and it takes somebody to get pissed off enough to make all of this blow up in people's faces.
Also most triple A games nowdays have been a sore disappointment and more and more people, including myself, have been looking forward to Indie devs and their games which I don't agree that lack in the multiplayer department, on the contrary due to their freedom and not having a publisher such as SEGA dictate cow milking and breathing down their necks they don't have as scummy business practices and are on the market to actually make quality games instead of basically undercover money laundering operations.
Given you can play coh2 offline without an internet connection, I doubt that applies.
Also, I think you're taking sander's part about thankfulness too literally... You don't have to be thankful to keep driving the car that you bought, and you don't have to be thankful for relic to keep running the servers.
If there is a car analogy thats at least tangentially appropriate, it would be that buying a car does not mean you are allowed to drive it (and drive it forever). You need a driver's license for that. You are not entitled to a driver's license, and that driver's license can be taken away.
Buying coh2 does not mean you are allowed to play online forever. You need relic servers for that. Relic doesnt not eternally owe you running servers.
Basically: buying a car means you can look at it and own it, just like buying coh2 means that you can play offline and own a copy of the game. Having a driver's license means you can drive that car, and having relic servers means that you can play online. You are not entitled to that stuff in the previous sentence just because you made a purchase. Those are technically privileges (and not privileges I would personally say you should be made to feel thankful for).
Maybe the car analogy isn't a good example but still, it can be driven even if it's not road legal/worthy, just not on the road with the other cars.
And I never said that Relic owes me anything, I only said that I bought their product, that being CoH2 in this case once again, so I should be free to play it even after their servers one day shut down, again, like older games.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a software even after it's official service period has concluded, take Windows XP for example, M$ stopped supporting it back in what, like 2014? My dad still has an old IBM Laptop from 2006 installed with an original OEM Win XP and still usses to this date.
So to end this pointless argument, I bought the game so that means that I should be able to play it for as long as I want to, even if the main servers are offline, through other means such as LAN and peer-to-peer with other players or offline against bots which as you said is already possible. If not that's deliberate sabotage of the product by the maker, end of story.
I don't know, the bottom line for me is that they had the game in a relatively unbalanced state, then fucked off and said "we can't spare the developmental effort to balance this game any longer, so how about you guys do the work for us?"
That's a pretty bad analogy... a REALLY bad analogy. You literally have to constantly pay to get a car serviced to keep it running. You pay up front for the car (which in your case is your 200 dollars), then you have to pay for replacement tires, oil changes, tire rotations, general servicing, etc. I don't know how you could possibly think buying and maintaining a car is LESS of a "product as a service" than anything else is. You basically just named the quintessential example...
He's arguing the silent majority is relatively satisfied with the game, and you're arguing the silent majority is not. I mean, I also know a lot of people that enjoy the game, and instead of being vocal and/or expressing their satisfaction, will just quietly continue playing. These things are completely anecdotal. The only actual measure we have is player numbers which, without any other context, indicate a constant playerbase. As you recognized, it could be artifical inflation from chinese players, but that supposition is also based on anecdotal evidence. Based on anyone's best guess, the player base seems relatively stable (and not just constant in number).
Hold up hold up here, Sander was talking about us having to be thankful to Relic for keeping the servers up which is complete and utter garbage to me when all older games do not require a main server to keep playing while I'm guessing CoH2 does.
That's not the same as saying that buying a car does not require you to maintain it, I said that I won't be thankful to the dealership from which I bought it from in order them to grace me to continue to be able to drive it.
So in short, even if Relic and their server is no more I expect to be able to play against the AI at least in offline mode and possibly against others using a peer-to-peer service like hamachi or GameRanger and LAN, if not as Ross says in the video I posted, it's FRAUD.
I pay up money up front for a product, I expect it to work as long as I maintain it which includes modern software for entertainment such as games, in the specific case meaning CoH2. If Relic or SEGA holds me to only being able to play the game while their servers are up that's deliberate sabotage of their product and can be sued on those grounds in the US and as Ross said there have been such cases.
It is true that the community has done the patches for the last 3 or so years. Brits and half of WFA was outsourced to a different dev team. Thats why the expansion armies have a different kind of style compared to soviets/ost, and different animations (that are kinda broken anyways). Relic main moved onto DOW3 pretty soon after CoH2 released.
I also do agree that the "balance" has gotten out of hand. Removing content, instead of fixing said content (squadai) is lazy and should always be avoided.
To everybody who thinks changing around stats and balancing things is hard; Its not. The attributes are actually quite easy to change and add onto, if you know what you're doing.
They care enough to keep the servers running and to let the community continue to work on and improve their game. I'd say that's pretty damn great and more than I'd ever expect from a 5 (almost 6) year old game.
Sorry what? I should be thanking somebody who I have paid to keep the servers running?
I paid 100 bucks for the Collector's Edition, then another 100 for the WFA and Brits and a few premium commanders because the game was basically unplayable without them due to broken balance which was like that for months on end, and I would dare say it was done deliberately by them to further milk it. The game should be fully playable even without their servers through methods of peer-to-peer like GameRanger and hamachi as well as LAN play like for the old games. For the amount of money I paid I'd expect what I paid for to last as long as me and I think it's only fair as it was like that before as well. Also this:
Case in point is when you buy a car, you paid the dealership or whatever so you take it and drive it, you don't have to thank them so the damn thing keeps running, get the hell out with that logic.
On top of this they STILL haven't re-enabled model editing and importing which would have made these community made patches a hell of a lot better as well, again, for a game that as you said, makes them barely anymore money out of the normal.
I feel pity the sorry sacks that are gonna be reeled in by M$ and used as slaves, I would honestly never work for them as much as Bill Gates seems like a nice guy.
M$ has proven time and time again that they're only in it for the $ and nothing else, gone are the days of RTS games published by them in which Ensemble poured their love in like Age of Empires, Age of Mythology and the first Halo Wars.
Yeah. IR halftrack is nearly useless when OKW has better ways of scouting that aren’t useful as only scouting.
OKW also has no regular halftrack either, so why not replace the IR halftrack with the new 250/1 light halftrack that WM can get? I think it fits in the OKW design and opens up lots of interesting options for medic building first play.
That's what I proposed, put the IR HT in the place of the Artillery Flares in the Special Operations doctrine and put a 250 HT in it's place.
Did no one else play the excellent modern combat mod for CoH 1?
US Army and US Marines vs the Chinese PLA. It really showed what a good modern scenario in the CoH game style can be.
Yes but it was sadly severely lacking in the balance and content department.
I'm not saying that they failed or anything, just stating the obvious. It's not easy to basically start making models and assets from the ground up for an overhaul of the entire game which really shows.
I would also rather a modern CoH be based around the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict, sort of like Arma 3/Squad instead of fighting against Russians and Chinese, basically post-communists because a lot of politics will go into it as well as online debates and so on and you will end up with the Russian being unhappy like always because they're not potrayed as the big heroes while the Chinese will try to censor as much as possible as to not look like the bad guys.
All in all said, the political climate right now does not fit a hardcore cold war/pseudo-modern fantasy setting of pitting West vs East.
Sure one could give Battlefield as an example but CoH is more known to stick closer to history while BF is just... BF, I mean you had M10s as heavy tanks in Battlefield 1942 lol, not to mention that the British were basically using 90% American equipment during the entire game and I don't think it was all about being short on the budget side either.
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