Profile of Hannibal

The other surprising fact is I have no interest watching community members stream. The game looks terrible
on most streams and is incredibly boring. There's no atmosphere at all.

I have the same feeling and I don't think there is one particular reason that stands out. I'd rather watch GCS2 instead of the newest CoH3 tournament. There's so much tension, the constant feeling of urgency, heroic-melancholic music setting the mood. Sounds, effects, all fit the graphics and art. I just looked up CoH2 gameplay from 2013 to check if CoH2 was bad at release too and improved afterwards. But it was all there right from the start. I even found a video dated to 10 June 2013, which is pre-release, and it all was there.

No thing in CoH3 is really horrible (some particular personal preferences aside), but there is also nothing great. Everything looks dull. It feels like the majority of models, sounds, effects have been finished to the point where you can somewhat label it as "job done" and then it has never been touched again. And the errors that are in the game are very obvious and even straight to your face. I cannot see a Coh3 video without noticing a weird visual glitch every 2 minutes or so. Dead soldiers are constantly teleported and rotated for their death animations, the minimap planes fly across the screen, shots constantly seem to disappear, weapons shoot without facing the target. Yes, some of these are in CoH2 as well, but just not as obvious and frequent

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As I said, it is hard to nail down what exactly sets CoH2 apart by that much, but here's a few things I noticed:
CoH2's overall effects are amazing. The craters from explosions look so much better, the earth is smoking for a couple of seconds. Some explosions create lingering smoke that stays for longer. Overall the particle effects look better and the artists back then used them masterfully to cover up graphical issues. Eg. look at collapsing buildings: They have to remove the old model and add a new, destroyed one in the same place. CoH2 spawns a ton of smoke to cover up the model being exchanged. It's not perfect, but they did it well enough. In CoH3, I have seen so many blunt changes from "intact" to "destroyed". It almost feels like the game is laggy for a split second, and I am only watching it. It is such a sharp contrast, as a viewer, you'll just be drawn into it.
Uniforms and coloring schemes blend perfectly into each other in CoH2. Infantry is clearly visible, but they all have a dirty look on them. And while also being a bit cartoonish, they look believable. The uniforms in CoH3 all look like toys. I think that's an issue with shading and lighting, but they just pop out so much that it does not feel like those men are fighting in a dirty and grim war. They're a moving toy figure on the screen.
Infantry in CoH2 seems to have more or more visible animations. There's more idle animations, and even animations between shots. Didn't really notice that in CoH3, it just looks more static. What bugs me as well is, that retreating is just a sprint. They look like they're jogging out of danger. CoH2's models somehow leaned more forwards. Retreating looks more believable, I also think they change their running animation sometimes and even duck their heads.

And after writing all of this, I think I forgot about the most relevant thing: The game overall lacks visual depth. Terrain looks washed out and muddy despite good textures. I guess the overall higher resolution does not help either. It makes the game look sharper and sets the expectation for more realistic graphics overall, but makes it only more visible if that's not the case. Stylized graphics often age better than "ultrarealistic" ones.

That was a lot of semicoherent rambling from my side, but I just find it hard to pinpoint the exact issues, because it is a big of everything in every corner.

opening of the "Store", or something like that.

Yay! Finally, the most important feature this game has been missing: The in game store to throw more moneys at Relic.

The game would benefit tremendously if someone could cross check this.
Coh2 discussions to this date are based mostly on serealia data that is often imprecise and in some cases clearly wrong. The overall curve is fine, but people will pull out this data for exact discussions. And 10% DPS more or less matter a lot.

Agreed. Maps, balance and basic features should be the big priority along with everything in that beautiful list that came from dirty finisher.

I think the camera changes are likely to do with the slightly zoomed in perspective issue. If so I hope they can change it. I'm getting used to the way it is now but its still so annoying compared to the previous game. No idea why they felt the need to change it.

I guess it is about the zoom level and the camera bobbing when going over terrain due to height differences. However, I did not feel that the camera was much more zoomed in than in CoH2. At least not in the beta and also streams looked similar. Maybe they need to fiddle with performance in order to allow zooming out. Or they make it a "feature" with adjustable camera settings, but need to tune it in order to be more balanced or the game still to be readable.
Anyway, it looks stupid on the list to make this a separate bullet point. This should be a sidenote under QoL improvements. Especially if the end result will be a slightly different camera setting that is the same for everyone, without changes for graphics and readability in the game. That's a 1-person job.

Regarding using player numbers to judge CoH3's success (with all the caveats associated with that approach), I have to correct myself. There still is a noticeable outflow of players. One month after launch, CoH3 currently has a good quarter of the players at release left. CoH2 needed two months to reach that mark and then continued to lose another 20% from that point onward, which was the low point of CoH2.

For CoH3, when comparing yesterday to the Monday a week ago, as well as the current players right now to a week ago, there's another 2k missing that might very well translate to the next days. CoH3 might very soon reach the same state that was the low point for CoH2 (in percentage of the players at launch), but much sooner after launch and it does not look like the game has reached the bottom yet.

CoH3 does a bad job at retaining players. And this is despite many here claiming that the launch state regarding stability and performance were much better, the core gameplay being much better, more factions, even a campaign that is supposed to offer higher replayability. All this should slow the efflux down considerably, but is doesn't.

I have no idea what Relic is doing. I couldn't find any info on the forums. Just some smaller patches and hotfixes, but no big steps forward. Neither the most embarrassing smaller issues like missing descriptions and wrong icons have being fixed, nor some major progress towards design issues as far as I can tell. They had a roadmap for the postponed launch in November and further reveals. So where's the roadmap now? They even had an extra beta with feedback in between to get a better idea of what needs fixing. Where is their idea and strategy for their newest game of their biggest franchise?

At the very best, Relic is just horrible and communicating but fixing stuff under the hood. At the very worst they are bargaining already with Sega how much will be invested into CoH3 and define some mile stones for further support. It would be a very bad outlook for the game and community, but it has been almost a month after launch. There should be info out there. But there is not, or did I miss something?


EDIT:
Last part is probably a bit overly pessimistic, especially looking at DoW3's player drop. Still, CoH3 has less players than a healthy game should and so far Relic has not signalled proper support since the game launched.