Profile of Noun

He died early in the morning earlier today. I think it's hard on my mom.

Sorry to hear that. I hope you and your mother are okay.

This said, it's obvious that relic will never ever make another game like COH. the real company behind COH was THQ, now with SEGA, they are thinking first at money and after at gameplay.

No wonder why THQ made bankrupt, they had balls to make game with new content and mechancics that were never used before in an other game.
That's how we got COH and even DOW, all claimed as the best RTS when they came out.
Sadly, too much risk can lead to failure ...

Now with SEGA, they can't afford to 'loose' (by loosing, i mean not grabing enough money) so they simply copy another concept and add new skins.

THQ didn't go out of business because they made CoH have cover mechanics or other innovations in CoH and DoW, they went out of business because they shifted out of primarily making children's licensed games for Disney and others without having a new revenue stream ready to go as a replacement. They then threw themselves into making more adult games which only the Saints Row and Relic games ever paid off for them. They also invested a lot in a WH40K MMO that never launched. Not launching an MMO isn't cheap.

The hired a lot of very high profile game creators and movie directors to make video games that were never completed (at least under THQ). Paying Guillermo del Toro to not make a game isn't cheap.

Relic made some excellent games under THQ but again when I was there they (THQ) fundamentally wanted to be in the business of big AAA console blockbusters.

Under SEGA Relic has a publisher that understands PC gaming better than THQ did at the end and understand the strategy market. Whether you like CoH2 (the only game Relic's released so far under SEGA) is a matter of personal taste. However I would argue that Relic is better off with SEGA than the THQ I worked under.

Edit:

Here's some links to read if you're wanting supporting information. Also I totally forgot the UDraw which was a successful drawing tablet for the Nintendo Wii which was then a not successful drawing tablet for every other platform.
- http://www.vg247.com/2014/03/17/what-really-happened-to-thqs-unfinished-games/
- https://gamerant.com/insane-cancelled-del-toro-thq/undefined
- http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-04-devils-third-rights-returned-to-itagaki-and-valhalla-game-studios

Relic has, in the past, done remote testing. They ran a fairly large open beta at CoH2's launch and there were other betas along the way afterwards.

There is value in having people in the office where they can be interacted with in person and immediately. There's value in seeing how someone uses the mouse when playing or how their eyes track across the screen and what they keep clicking on to implement a unit ability. Almost all developers do some form of in-person testing.

The difference between a playtest and a beta is this (in broad strokes)...

Playtest:
- helps to figure out how players interact with a game
- helps to answer specific questions / does this menu make sense, are players getting stuck somewhere / is it fun

Beta:
- helps to find bugs
- helps to test server load
- throws a lot of people at the game code all at once to stress test it
- helps to test balance at a large scale (hundreds of games to thousands of games)

A playtest is typically not for finding bugs, it's for design choices whether on a unit, menus or other parts of the game. Are people getting that they're supposed to capture this point to gain Munitions?

Here's a specific example not from a playtest but from watching non-developers play an unreleased game.

I went to and Gamescom on the game that I'm working on now. We had designers with us and we ran the booth. Seeing hundreds of people over the course of the first day in Germany made the designers realize a few things that needed to be improved and changed. Nothing big, but it was just not clear that players needed to hit 'X' to pickup weapons and open doors.

The game changed for the better because the devs got to see fans playing in person.

I'm not saying betas should never happen, just that there's value in doing in-person stuff. I don't think you can conclude from this announcement that there won't be a beta for DoW, or that this is even for DoW.

Edit: Also I think you make my leaving Relic sound more exciting than it was. I was there for 4 years, I wanted to do something different and I had confidence that Cynthia could step into my boots and be fantastic at it.

Company of Heroes 1 is still the Greatest Strategy Game.
No Steam, this Quazal Server was fine

a) the Quazal server frequently crashed. Near the end we were having hours long outages often without warning. It was pretty terrible. At the start it was great, but by the end before the transition it wasn't because their focus was shifting to supporting their own projects and away from vCoH.

b) they were bought by Ubisoft who had no desire to host SEGA (or anyone's) games on their servers. So Relic are as likely to go with them again as they are of having EA host a game on their servers.


Say what you will about the Steamworks performance, but Relic/SEGA invested a lot of time, effort and money to keep vCoH online at a time when most studios/publishers would have closed the game.

Either set in the african campaign, or maybe a game centered around the Korean war. But wont probably happen. COH2 hasn't really been a huge success for Relic, I highly doubt they will make a third installment, which is sad to think about really :/..

They'd sold well over 4 million copies while I was there and presumably more since then. Relic games also have long tails, meaning they continue to bring in revenue well after other games no longer do. The studio makes a significant amount of money from its back catalogue. Just because you don't feel like CoH2 was a success doesn't change that it had a strong launch for sales and continued well after that.