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Yeah, the A_E video was terrible. I normally don't go for the 40-minute "video essay" shit but I felt it necessary to at least get a handle on what one of the self-described "god-tier" community members thought. And predictably, it's awful. Just a load of complete mealy-mouthed bullshit if I'm being honest, a repeat of the same tired tropes that have been trotted out for the past month-plus coupled with some wink-and-nudge intimations that Relic is probably not all that bad but hey, NDA, wink-wink.
I personally don't think it's a personal attack to say that developers at Relic don't know what they're doing - this much has been obvious to me in the gap between the two "pre-alpha" tests. Being given quality, concrete feedback and doing absolutely nothing with it is one thing, but actively choosing the worst decision possible at almost every step of the way is something else entirely. A lot has been made of the comparison between this release and Company of Heroes 2's (and A_E helpfully parrots Relic's selling point of more maps! more factions! wheee!), but what really drove me away here that I was willing to overlook in Company of Heroes 2 (which I alpha-tested and played pretty consistently during and after launch) was that this game is a straight downgrade in a lot of ways.
Company of Heroes 2, even from the start, was evident as a game made by people who were committed to improving on Company of Heroes 1. So many important features were there right away - cap circles, fuel for vehicle call-ins, no purchased veterancy, no global upgrades, and the basis of an excellent and tactically-diverse combat system. Were there major issues? Yes, but it was clear in those days that they were going to be fixed. I was complaining along with everyone else when they added Soviet Industry, and the Tiger Ace, and everything else, but I was still playing the game, because it was fun, and it was clearly being made by some people with a modicum of passion.
Company of Heroes 3 is devoid of all of that. It was abundantly clear from the pre-alphas to release that almost no feedback was taken into account in regards to the glaring issues in moment-to-moment gameplay and greater-scheme metastructure. It's been obvious that whoever is calling the shots at Relic was concerned purely with 1. getting the game out the door, and 2. making sure any issues with what a certain breed of management would term "optics" were corrected. I even attempted a little experiment with the latter - I raised a bit of a stink about unarmed medics being targetable entities, saying that the game promotes war crimes as a result (and honestly, it's pretty sick). I laughed my ass off when I learned that medics were invincible at release - instead of actually adjusting the way the mechanic worked, or removing it entirely, they chose the worst possible way to "fix" the problem at the complete expense of gameplay. So that shows you where Relic's priorities are.
So a 40-man developer team or even a single person's basement operation will always outperform Relic's bloated corpse of a 200-man team, because of that key ingredient - actual passion. Whether or not the developers (and I suspect this is a critical minority of the people actually employed at Relic right now) are talented or not is irrelevant when the people making decisions behind the veil are cowards cashing a cheque and nothing more. The fact that they're being outdone by Eugen, a mediocre B-tier developer by any metric, is enough of an indication to me that this game is going nowhere. I can't trust the process anymore after Dawn of War III, which, incidentally, was the last game from Relic that looked like it had any amount of effort put into it. |
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Here's the thing though - you can say that was Relic's strategy, and the pre-release material will definitely support that. Question really is, was it a good strategy? Most people here are operating in a relative bubble in that most people they'll be interacting with regarding this game are, or have been, diehard Company of Heroes fans. The 90% of players who don't touch multiplayer may as well be some mythical lost tribe - they are so far from here that people treat them almost as an elemental force. But I happen to know a few casual RTS players, the kind who Relic's pre-release marketing was designed for and, indeed, drew in somewhat. I made sure not to colour their opinions so I'd get something of a litmus test as to how the game is being perceived outside of our little bubble.
In short? It's not good. Banking on single player is one thing, but the way Relic did it has almost irrepairably harmed public perception of the series. When you combine pie-in-the-sky pre-release media that hypes a dynamic, exciting and replayable campaign and then launch with a boring slog with absent or barely-functional features that took centre stage in advertising, the result is that the people who weren't lured in day one were treated to the aftermath of an abject failure of a launch. These people don't expect much from a single-player RTS - a functional scripted campaign with a bland, bargain-bin novel story is enough for most. Promising the world and then delivering less than the bare minimum expected has lead to the point where this fabled 90% just straight-up don't care about the game. The fact that some these things have been fixed isn't going to bring that section of the paying public back. Relying on single-player casuals to fund the future of this game was a gamble that Relic lost - user reviews are on the downswing again and player population will continue to shrink as well.
Most of this, I think, also comes down to Relic's approach post-release. Most of the glaringly-visible issues with the game that surface-level players care about are still there (bad UI, etc.), and moreover their tone has been smarmy. Darktide provides a good comparison here - Fatshark issued a straight-up apology for the state of the game and have been working pretty hard to fix the core complaints, to some success, as Darktide's review scores are climbing. Relic's announcement comes off more as boilerplate corporate bullshit where everything's fine and the game launched great and thank you all for your VALUABLE CRITICISMS, etc. It's a huge joke and don't think the paying public at large don't see it that way. Most people don't have the attachment to the series people here do - they're more than willing to laugh at it, and take their money elsewhere. |
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I'm going to have to second that, I was there at Company of Heroes 2's launch, I alpha- and beta-tested it and I knew full well what I was getting into. That being said, I still wanted to play it over Company of Heroes 1 - buggy and imbalanced as it was, it was already the more interesting game for a number of reasons (no vehicle pushing, no zombie squads, no purchased veterancy, no economy bullshit until Soviet Industry for a brief moment). I played it on an integrated graphics laptop on minimum settings, and I didn't mind because I was having fun. I did not have fun with Company of Heroes 3 - unlike in the above example I had no desire to spend money to play that game at launch. It's just an exercise in masochism. |
Ok, I'll admit its been quite a long time since COH 1 came out and I have some serious rose-tinted nostalgia goggles when it comes to that game, so feel free to correct me on this. But I'm pretty sure it beat the fuck out of Dawn of War 3 when it comes to a 'successful' launch.
While the various factions felt OK in terms of units and options, the input lag in DoW 3 was absolutely horrendous and the the hero units were very boring and uninspired. It's cool if you liked it of course, but to me it felt like it had very little in common with any of the previous entries at all. I might be misremembering but didn't they completely water down/remove the cover system? Not to mention all of the shallow MOBA nonsense they tried to add. I get that they really wanted to innovate but it just didn't know what it wanted to be.
That said though, you and other people have voiced a lot of completely valid criticisms of 3. That list from Dirty Finisher for example, it brought up so many obvious 'why is this STILL an issue' issues that should never have made it past the testing phase. It definitely smacks of very rushed and unfinished game that just isn't really acceptable, given all the love and hard work from the people who made the original and then (eventually) coh 2, into a really great multiplayer RTS.
I don't really consider Company of Heroes 1 to be the benchmark anymore because that game launched at a point in time where the industry standard was to rigorously QA-test a game before it came out in the absence of Steam and its patch infrastructure. That moment in history is long past us and so the more relevant launches are Company of Heroes 2 and Dawn of War 3, both of which launched in a more contemporaneous moment.
That being said, Company of Heroes 1 launched as an extremely functional game in terms of playability and smoothness, but it left much to be desired in the balance department. There are several systems that are included, even in the base factions, that time and experience would repudiate in Company of Heroes 2. Manpower discounts, purchased veterancy, unit replacement abilities, stealthed elite infantry, global upgrades... these were things that were included from the beginning, before Company of Heroes had defined itself as a subgenre within the greater scope of RTS games, and many of them were mistakenly drawn from other, completely mechanically-different strategy games. Many of them downplay or even outright negate the moment-to-moment tactical gameplay that makes Company of Heroes great - hence, they were largely excised save for a few abortive attempts in the second game. Not coincidentally, many of these things have been brought back in some form or another in Company of Heroes 3 which is one of the reasons why I expressed serious concern during the pre-alpha tests.
It's funny that you bring up the cover issue in Dawn of War 3 because this was something that was an issue in Dawn of War 2 - at that game's launch common wisdom said that the cover system was cloned from Company of Heroes (not entirely inaccurate) and that it had no place in Dawn of War. If anything, Dawn of War 3's cover system, such as it was, had a bit more in common with the first game than it did the second. Was this for better or worse? I can't say. The input lag was indeed an issue but one that was fixed quickly. I will also note that it had absolutely none of the ridiculous interface problems Company of Heroes 3 currently has - Dawn of War 3 looks professional and appealing in its menus and UI. Company of Heroes 3's current interface is barely at the level of the first game, and it's honestly shameful. It's also been that way for almost a month now. As for the elites being uninspired, sure, there were a few that were pretty basic. Most of them, though, had a unique mechanic or an interesting role or synergy with other elite units or with your base roster that made them worth using. I had a lot of fun very successfully using elites some considered to be very far from meta (Warp Spiders). That was one of the things I loved most about Dawn of War 3 - the tactical diversity. You could make just about any unit on the roster work for you if you used them right.
The point is, Relic has fallen far indeed. I wonder how much of Age of Empires 4 was actually Relic and not one of Microsoft's supervising studios, or how much Relic's internal decision-making process was involved in the game's design. The difference between even that and Company of Heroes 3 is vast, and it's depressing to see people debasing themselves to try and garner enthusiasm for a game which was clearly made with very little. I, personally, don't have time to waste on a game which doesn't have any respect for me as a consumer. Company of Heroes 2 is still out there if I ever want to play a Relic game again. |
There's definitely a lot that needs fixing and balancing, but this is a little bit hysterical. Dawn of War 3 was an absolute dumpster fire. Whatever you think of it's issues, the game at least got more than decent reviews and it isn't a watered down MOBA.
Dawn of War 3 was honestly Relic's best game at launch, other than the huge misfire that was the main multiplayer mode (for the record, I liked it, but I can see how people would have issues being forced into it). The art direction was generally terrible but the game ran great, there was next to no major bugs or technical issues, and the game launched with three of the most well-designed and distinct factions in Relic's development history. There were a few outstanding balance issues coming out of the beta test but for the most part, every unit in the game had a role and a job that it could perform, build diversity was even better than Company of Heroes 2 in its heyday and the game just felt great to play - every unit operated differently, the elites were extremely fun to use (albeit not fun to have used against you in some specific balance scenarios) and it had that ineffable quality that just made me want to keep playing.
Fast forward to Company of Heroes 3 and it's clear that the PR disaster that was Dawn of War 3 must have gutted the company of its former talent - playing the most recent multiplayer alpha (i.e., the launch build) was a thoroughly uninteresting and unentertaining experience. It feels like the Diet version of Company of Heroes - I understand why people say that it feels like a mobile game, because tons of tiny things about how the game operates, from the way tanks move to how infantry operate and react and just the blandness of it all add up to something that lacks that quality that makes me want to keep playing. I don't think I played more than three games of that test for no other reason than that desire wasn't there. It's like AI-generated text - you can train an AI to mimic a particular author or writing style and all the hallmarks of it will be there, but the thing itself, taken as a whole, will be flawed.
Hence I think the best possible outcome at this point is Relic collapses. The argument tends to be, without Relic there won't be Company of Heroes, but at this point what I'm seeing is that with Relic, there won't be another good Company of Heroes. And I'm not going to settle for a boring, broken, buggy mess and shell out $70 CAD on the promise that maybe, down the line, it might end up being a good game. I have standards. |
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Honestly is Company of Heroes actually worth saving at this point? All it is right now is pretty much a hollow brand - Ancestors Legacy was mentioned earlier and, whatever you may think of the game, it proved that other, smaller studios can pretty successfully emulate or even innovate on the formula and produce a fun, functional game. Relic right now is in the end stage of a Ship of Theseus situation, clearly a vast majority of the people making actual decisions at the company have no idea what makes Company of Heroes good or fun, and I suspect a large portion of them don't even play it.
The silence from the company and the fact that they can't even do a proper hotfix when it's desperately needed points to a critical failure at some end of the decision-making process internally. Right now everything looks like it's adding up to a Dawn of War 3-level scenario, and I think people should brace for the possibility that the studio straight-up won't finish the game. Refund it while you still can, if you can. |
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Right now giving this game a positive review is like giving a horse with a broken leg a pat on the back. You might make it feel better in some small way but it'll never be what it once was and someone, at some point, is probably going to put it down. |
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I have a five-year-old PC and while the game is technically playable, it's not an ideal experience. My point is that I can run Company of Heroes 2 at max settings with no frame rate drops and yet this game runs like complete ass for no discernible reason, and this is supposed to be my fault. It's fine though, because I want to play Relic's game as much as they want me to play it. |
You really underestimate how many people play on 10+ year old PCs and blame everything except their hardware for low performance.
Just go to reviews of any game that does not have pixel art graphics and you'll notice the exact same comments on negative reviews, irrelevant hardware, windows 7 and rant how game is "badly optimized" or has "bad graphics".
I think one of the issues here is that for a game which is an absolute GPU hog, there isn't much on-screen impressive enough to justify the frankly-ridiculous performance demands. It comes off as either sloppy optimization or just another attempt to sell graphics cards.
Developers used to have to pull tricks like only texturing the visible sides of objects and environments, and now they feel they can just melt your PC for no good reason. I really don't care if the visual fidelity of some tiny environmental object has increased 400%, I'd rather the game actually runs well. |
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I'm honestly surprised to see so many people here okay with what's been thrown out of the gate. Company of Heroes 3 is trash right now, the lustre of newness will fade quite quickly, although I do have to say I didn't expect them to be touching balance quite so soon so hats off to that.
Yes, Company of Heroes 2 was also bad at launch. That being said, we were also dealing with an entirely different situation where Relic was dealing with the fallout from a publisher changeup and was clearly given a lot of leeway. Dawn of War 3 proved that SEGA is more than willing to pull the plug if things get dicey.
Age of Empires IV is something of an outlier in that most of the post-launch support is on Microsoft's strategy divisions, and I get the impression that Relic is only tangentially involved there anymore.
We're dealing with a studio that has rapidly ballooned in size but is staffed by almost none of the people who made the games which made the studio what it is, and this launch has proved that the learning curve is apparently brutal. It's anyone's guess as to how it all turns out in the end, but the absolute fumble that is the singleplayer campaign's current state and the public beating the game is currently taking may cause irreparable harm that the studio may not get the resources to fix. In the end it looks like Relic might be going the way of BioWare - either way it's not the company that makes the games I like anymore, and if they end up burning for it I'm going to sit on the sidelines with my popcorn in hand.
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