I'll break it down point by point. Bear in mind, if I'll mention steam reviews I don't mean the ones that just consist of "it's good/bad lol", but at least mention a couple of points why they gave a thumps up or down.
1. Why on earth do people constantly harp on about minor unfinished/sloppy elements of the game like icons, weapon symbols and faction flags. I saw someone on reddit declare that usage of old icons to be "UNACCEPTABLE" and the primary reason he gave a negative review. In one of the youtube reviews the guy demonstrates how he can recreate the faction symbols in 5 minutes in photoshop. He literally spends more time on this tangent than he does talking about gameplay. How dense do you have to be to completely ignore the actual GAME. You know ... the part that matters. If you dislike the gameplay we can agree to disagree. But to just brush over it and complain about the menu art instead is just infuriating.
They do, because the game is not finished to a an extend that you should expect from a release. Since it overall works as a game, but has just so many smaller rough edges, you'll have to list those rough edges. I it is not only the icons, but the sum of all the issues. And the icons are one where it is just strikingly obvious that Relic cheaped out or misplanned or whatever, especially because they are rather quick and easy to do. Yet, Relic did not fix them.
2. Why do people who are guaranteed to play the game for thousands of hours and basically have CoH as a mainstay hobby give negative reviews? Steam reviews primarily communicate to the general public. If someone unfamiliar with CoH comes across the newest iteration and sees shit reviews they will likely never get into the series. I have a hardcore CoH2 1v1 player in my friendlist that has like 4000 hours in the game and still has a negative review complaining about balance issues. Why? How does that make sense? So many people don't even know CoH or are only vaguely familiar with it. And in my experience almost everybody you show and explain the game to ends up liking it. So why scare off that crowd just because of your own agenda?
For your example regarding your friend, I fully agree with you. For CoH3, no one is guaranteed to play thousands of hours. They played maybe 10, 20, 30 hours, they're free to give a negative review.
3. Why do people completely neglect the strong aspects of CoH3? Doesn't the fact that we have 4 factions and amazing performance make up for some of the shortcomings? Isn't having 4 factions upon release preferable over having a super polished game in terms of interface and multiplayer functionality? Maybe not, but then it would be more of a case of relic being overly ambitious in their desire to provide a lot of bang for your buck. No one would have complained if it was just two factions at release, but they went the extra mile and maybe that cost us polish.
A steam review is not a journalistic piece, but from your points I get the feeling that you kind of expect everyone to list pros and cons. That would obviously be desirable, but the casual nature of steam reviews lends itself to players either giving a positive or negative review and then just writing why they chose what they chose. This goes both ways, you'll also find many positive reviews just writing positive things. Overall, I don't see your point here. It's ordinary steam reviews, nothing special.
4. A bigger playerbase would be so cool, but people actively prevent this from happening by shitting on the game. And I absolutely loathe the high and mighty do-gooder argument that this needs to be done because the gaming industry deserves a lesson about early releases. This is after relic already delayed the game and it is obvious that they ran out of options. Of course the same people would also agree that working conditions in the gaming industry are horrible and that pre release crunch should be avoided.
With the amount of stuff missing and place holders in the game, Relic heavily misplanned. That's an error of the management, nothing else. The original release date of November is a testimony to this. They should have either opted for a smaller game or delayed for longer. They might have been under financial pressure. But then again, their business decisions are none of my business, and I can't know either. I can only judge their product, which they put out to the public and labelled as "finished" for their release.
Seeing CoH3 as an unfinished product that should have gotten more polishing before release is fair critique. Blaming the critics for the small player base is unfairly shifting the blame. It's Relic's responsibility to fix their own product and ensure longevity, not the customer's responsibility to neglect problems so that more people buy the product.
5. Anyone german who gave a negative review because there is no german voice acting needs to seriously ask themselves if they would actually NOT RECOMMEND CoH to someone new for that reason. Is that really sufficient to make CoH3 a bad game? REALLY? The average German's english is light years behind the Dutch or Scandinavians so maybe it's time that we stop putting our own voice acting over everything?
I personally find these types of critique petty as well. German however has quite a large base of native speakers that are also used to audio synchronization. Many other games provide that service, CoH3 doesn't. It might tie in to all the other aspects showing that CoH3 has been rushed. It's stupid to base your whole review on it. But then again, there's also a lot of positive reviews with no substance, and I don't see you complaining about those.
Overall, your thread mostly reads like your new favourite game is being criticized partially unfairly and you want to rant about it. You can do this for sure, but if you want higher quality reviews, then maybe don't read the ones on steam. In steam's system, you're expected to read multiple reviews and distill out the essence yourself, otherwise it does not work at all. You're trying to shoot the messenger, not the one responsible for the message.
Steel Division kind of, resource income dpeends on your division choice.
Age of Empires 3 and 4 also has economies boosted in unique, inaccessible to others ways.
Neither are good examples for CoH.
Steel division still has a balanced economy over all phases and does not allow you to modify your economy as far as I am aware. Imbalances are meant to create attack and defense phases.
AoE is exactly the opposite: you're responsible for your own eco, which makes it easier to balance strong eco vs strong combat factions.
CoH has a pretty much fixed income. If you boost the eco, worse combat performance is mandatory, which is a problem in a game with fixed and rather low unit cap and focus on unit preservation.
You could make this argument in favour of abolishing the tact map though right? It also helps you in 'realizing where and when your opponent probes and pushes'. Ultimately these QOL changes in effect are productivity tools and which, while making your life easier in some regards, free your mental resources up to concentrate elsewhere. Auto reinforce is another good example.
Its not a hill I would die on though, I'd much prefer to see the control groups functionality, selector and events functionality fleshed out.
There's a lot of aspects - some already implemented - that go either way. I don't share your comparison to the tac map or auto reinforcing. The 'mechanics' and impact are just too different. The mini map does not show you new info, it is just an overview of what is going on. It reduces the micro of needing to skip to three different positions on the battlefield to get all the info and lets you focus on overall unit movement. The auto reinforcement reduces mindless clicking. In short, they both reduce things that I would not call a core feature of RTS games and free up time for the core loop itself.
Marking and tracking units however is different. I see this as a core mental part of RTS: Being able to estimate the enemy's strength in a position, weak points, how far you can push etc. Because this info directly influences your decisions, movement and positioning. Auto reinforcement and having a mini map do not change the core gameplay, they remove tedious tasks.
There is a point however that I think is much closer: Being able to see which player controls each unit, as well as stats like the aforementioned veterancy status. These also allow you some form of unit tracking. However, e.g. being able to see the enemy's vet vastly reduces frustration and imprpves readability, because the vet provides an explanation how the fight plays out. You could argue that you should not be able to see who the unit belongs to, since you'd then need to figure out yourself by sheer unit presence if you're beingteamed up on or not. Technically, it would be good for gameplay, but not fair for mixed teams, since teaming up on one single player would be obvious by the units you see.
That would be closer to ypur original point. However, just like for yout would not be a major point of discontent for me, but I weight the downsides heavier than the advantages.
Why? Well it would make it much easier to keep track of your opponents units if you could mark them in some way. For example, if I mark all my opponent's 4 rifle squads 1-4 and I notice 1,2 are on the left part of the map and 3,4 are on the right, if I note that 3 has come over to the left, I know that 4 is on its own, so I can send a vehicle over or whatever.
Another example, I mark my opponent's first Panzer IV when it comes out, but then another P4 shows up with no marker, I can deduce that they're on their second medium tank.
But that's part of the point of strategy and tactics: Properly realizing where and when your opponent probes and pushes.
I don't think this would add more than it took away from the strategy of the game.
Anyway, technically you can already do it (or at least could do it in CoH2), but you'll have to remember the veterancy progress of the squad. Not feasible for infantry, but for tanks it is. CoH3 should actually make it even easier with the added weathering on vehicles.
I am slightly disappointed to see that they did not expand the range of target sizes, but still use roughly the same scaling as in CoH2.
Together with similar accuracy values, the compressed range will make it more difficult to differentiate between some of the vehicle classes.
*The range stats for the Tiger & Panther appear to be bugged at the moment. The values for the Far/Mid/Near ranges are all set to "-1" which defaults them to the maximum range of the weapon. This results in both tanks using their maximum penetration values across their entire ranges.
Well, I didnt know they've said that. If this is the case, then I expect them to introduce proper patch this week fixing at least few of the major issues which were point out it. But I do have a feeling it was a bla bla from them, because day 1 DAK nerf didn't look like it was well thought out beforehand.
Found it again, it was on their summary after the MP test, but not before unless I missed something. Basically saying the feedback will incorporated after the launch. Obviously it's a lot of corporate gibberish and I guess some things will be swept under the carpet, but they were frank enough to say the feedback won't change the launch state. They probably did not have time for that anyway.
I guess Relic needs to figure out how to tackle balance etc. There can't be a meta or well-founded balance opinion after only one day, so all that they have at this point is people screaming on their forums about DAK and maybe some internal suggestions what could be implemented for their play tests. Changing stuff at this point is like asking your crystal ball for advice. I wouldn't blame them for a weird band aid fix at day 1. If this still happens in a month, then that's a different case.
Point here being, CoH3 is still solid game, but it had everything to be a good at launch, yet it isn't, simply because relic cut corners for some unknown reason.
I guess Relic was either (or both) under pressure from SEGA to release the game or miscalculated the time needed to fix things twice but wanted to avoid the bad PR of moving the game's launch only weeks before the respective launch date.
They rather went with the option of "the game is okay, overall best is to launch it right now and fix stuff later". They might be right on this from the company's perspective, but not from a player's perspective.
Regarding your points about the January MP test:
They said (beforehand?) that they won't be able to incorporate the feedback into the launch version, but will use it as a guide to prioritize the work in the first patches. Which is fair given that the test was about a month beforehand, but the overall point still stands: They knew that CoH3's overall state is - let's say - subpar and launched it anyway, and that misplanning is their fault.
CoH 3 is fundamentally a working game. It's not like a 2077 where the units load in 3 seconds after you move the camera over them; abilities work, animations look fine, textures load in, the balance is a little whack but it's not insanely bad.
Broken is too strong a word, but unpolished and rushed are definitely applicable.
Probably was not clear enough, with broken I did not refer to CoH3, it was a general statement.
But actually broken and unfinished games have mentally moved the norm so much, that a still rushed and incomplete game such as CoH3 suddenly shines and needs to be defended against criticism? That's the tribalism I am talking about. It's someone's new favourite game, and everything is excused because there are worse games out there and the predecessor had a worse launch.
It's not okay. Relic said the game is basically finished by launching it. Critiquing that there's still tons of rough edges that could have been fixed on Relic's side and features missing is absolutely fair. The fact that a game 10 years ago had a worse launch does not change anything about it. I know plenty of games that had better launches, so what is the argument there?
Anyway, I know that you're surely not the 'correct target' for this answer, but more a general point.
CoH3 is playable, surely fun at times, and yet this does not excuse Relic from stripping features that could be expected and that they also promised.
My point is that you need to compare CoH3 now to what is on the market right now as well, not to what was on the market 10 years ago. You're argumenting against someone who claimed that Relic will instantly drop CoH3 or that it is screwed up beyond repair, but most people don't claim that.
CoH3 was clearly rushed and could have used another couple of months for implementing basic features and polish that you could expect if a) the predecessor already has it and b) Relic markets so much as developing stuff for and with the community.
They cut those features because they did not want another delay. That's their fucked up management and nothing to excuse.
Yes, CoH3 will very likely improve with patches. But a bad launch state of CoH2 does not excuse that CoH3 launches with missing features and still some screwed up designs from what I saw on gameplay videos. If that weren't the case, their road map wouldn't include 'fixing the game and delivering basic features' for the first months. We know it could have used more time, Relic knows it could have used more time, no need to arguethat this were not the case.
I definetely not in the camp of people that say CoH3 were a failure, I've always written that I expect it to surpass CoH2 in quality within half a year or so, depending on how committed Relic really is. But I am tired of that mind boggling tribalism that players will defend unfinished games, just because launching broken shit has become the norm over the last decade.
You're right. Just because the second game was bad at launch, it doesn't excuse any issues the third has at launch as well. The game should ideally be polished as much as possible so we can all hold it to a higher standard.
But c'mon, he's being disengenious by suggesting that coh 2 is somehow vastly superior when we all know it wasn't. It was much more of a mess than 3 currently is.
I mean it's hard to make a discussion out of this thread since there is no point to discuss about. It's pretty much a shit thread, nothing more.
CoH3 (me speaking only from the January tech test) had very good improvements over CoH2, but Relic has to deliver in the next couple of months to really add some sorely missing features as well as overall atmosphere and gameplay improvements.
I'm pretty confident that Relic will commit to that despite them dodging DoW3 so early, because first they committed to AoE4 and second they probably don't have much of a choice financially than making CoH3 a success.
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