Hopefully, I am wrong. Lets say they have whole teams working overtime to finish the DLC and these people will transition to finishing the game. And the reason they havent done dick for a whole year was they needed to finish the DLC. I will be very happy for people to call me out and laugh at me.
"Please just continue taking your blue pill and move along, Sir." |
Yes you we agree.
Only thing I want to point out is "the op on release/buy to win theory". In my opinion it is can be a an oversimplification in some cases.
When a new item is released people need to play with it so that enough data is created to deiced what changes are need. Now lets say the miraculously on release is item is slightly up or op. After the initial hype where people will check out the new content people will realize that using the new item will cause them to lose games since they are not familiar with its full potential. Soon they will stop using preferring to go back to what they know. And that would mean that not enough data is created to help fix to problem. Having things being op at launch actually speed up the balancing processes so it makes sense.
I know this is an argument regularly made. It seems reasonable, although the amount of 'sufficient data' is hard to quantify. I could also argue that people will always play new stuff, so they have a decent set in the beginning to work with. I'm always careful when the reasoning is just so convenient for the company and 'accidentally' increases sales. In any way, it diminishes my fun with the game. I am not any company's QA tester. They are responsible for getting their stuff right. |
Balance was screwed because Relic did a basic mistake. Instead of tuning the new faction to the old one they started tuning the old faction to new and that creates issues for a number of reasons.
Firstly neither USF nor OKW where balanced when released and that trying to fix thing by making changes to Ostheer/Soviet was a fools errand.
In addition "fixing" Soviet to fight okw and OStheer to fight USF meant destroying the balance between the two which Relic had spend so much to achieve.
The end result was to completely redesign 3 factions and waster more time in trying balance things while not fixing simple things.
Trying to release 4 faction at launch does take a lot of resources and might be a contributing reason why other things that should be easy fixes where not done upon release.
I agree, the issue is: If it really would have taken that many resources, they should have realized at some point and cut down on that part. There were also a lot of things wrong at release and still are, there surely are deeper issues.
Another problem for CoH2 was also that the newer factions were released OP. Probably by design to make people buy them. Obviously people don't like their new DLC that they paid for overly nerfed afterwards, so as you said the old factions had to change, throwing both the hypothesized overfitting off as well as the some of the factors that the game has been designed around. This will take more time overall than designing four factions from the get go. Especially since CoH2 did a repetition once UKF was released, resetting parts of the process. |
Thank you for the post. Good points all around. Maybe it was doomed from the start just from the Relic staff and leadership, maybe it was biting off more than they could chew, or maybe it was both ofc. Who knows. To be completely fair, it's probably not worth much to speculate about, seeing as there's nothing we can do to change the release (unless someone on here's invented a time machine I don't know about  ), it was more of a hopeless rant on my part haha.
Always has to be both. With a large enough budget, even an incompetent leadership can succeed reaching a mediocre goal. A mediocre goal would have been to roughly redo CoH2 after 10 years. No one would have complained, but also no one would have been flashed by the "new" CoH. Relic was more ambitious though: Four factions that all have their own style, more flexible battlegroups, the Italian single player campaign, new engine, new animations, new sound and graphic assets etc...
Which is exactly what they need to set CoH3 apart. On that point, they did everything right. The CoH3 as outlined would have been amazing, even if some features would have been only "okay". But in the end, there were few really well done things (such as some graphics/textures, the battlegroups and the four factions) and too many bad to mediocre ones.
I don't know their budget, but seeing that Relic has multiple hundred people as staff and allegedly started development 5-6 years ago, it must have been mismanagement at the very least. The management did not make efficient use of that work force. Maybe the company was bloated by administration, inefficient processes, unclear directions and goals. Most of this falls back on management in the end. Surely Relic has their fair share of simply incompetent individuals, but which larger company doesn't? Some aspects of the game are done well, and some are lacking. It might be incompetence, it might be under-budgeting, I can't judge that from outside. Whatever the reason, it would have been duty of HR to get sufficiently qualified people and of management to give the necessary budget and adjust to problems in time. If only one or two aspects failed, then I'd assume it is personal incompetence in that section of the company and not blame the management. Management cannot catch every single issue as well, but if so much stuff is just straight up bad, they should have noticed and re-adjusted. They didn't. Instead, we got a video what a great launch this has been.
CoH3 wasn't bound to fail, but with the decision making higher up, there probably was not much chance left. As a CoH2 fan, I can only hope that Relic will devote a small dev group for the next 2 years to keep improving the game, while player numbers slowly creep up again. Relic has blown its best chance at release though, from now on, everything will be twice as difficult. |
Return. This is what they have already sold at the peak online was 19,000. But need to attract new players as well. SEGA should think very hard about how to soften the regional prices for the game, a huge number of people simply cannot afford to buy the game. And also to bring back sales in Russia and bring back Russian localization, a huge RTS and CoH community was just cut off from a rather niche game.
I assume the Russian market is for CoH3 has shrunk compared to CoH2 since the game covers a completely different front, and regularly people are really picky if their nation (or at least one they find interesting) is represented. People from eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechia, Romania and many more) don't play as much CoH3 as they do CoH2 relative to other nations like Germany, the US or the UK that are represented in both games.
But I agree, they're definitely missing out on some sales. Especially pricing the game according to more wealthy Western countries cuts a lot of people off. I've read somewhere that buying CoH3 in Turkey at release cost the equivalent of half or a quarter of the average monthly net salary. I don't know why they decided to do so. It's really unfair to the people living in these countries.
Whatever will happen on that "front", Relic plans to fulfill their legal responsibility of delivering an expansion in 2023 in December. I don't think they plan on halting development, otherwise they could just push a shitty expansion out now and call it a day, but it might be an internal break point for their business decision making. |
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I guess December will be an interesting time then. We'll see if Relic will support the game further or if we get an "unfortunately we cannot continue to update the game" message around February/March.
Relic will watch closely how well the DLC sells and if it brings back players or not. Current CoH3 cannot sustain Relic for sure. People need to trickle back into the game. |
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Quality post right there.
Divided on the topic though. I think having 4 factions currently keeps the game alive, because even with only 2-3 maps, you can have at least some variety in gameplay. With only one faction per side and two main strats per faction, variety is very limited even in 3v3/4v4 games. The second factions spices up things a lot.
From what I have read, the balancing isn't an awful lot off. Yes, some broken stuff, but most of what I have read is that all factions are interesting to play and generally well designed. Regarding game design, having four faction from the start will help the overall faction design. Balancing two factions against each other will lead to "overfitting". "Faction A is strong in this phase, therefore B needs this counter earlier and peak afterwards, therefore unit X from faction A needs that buff...". The units will be tuned to fight their counterpart and the special strategy of the opposing faction. This can lead to very cool and interesting gameplay as in CoH1 and CoH2, but both games fucked up the introduction of additional factions. Balance was screwed and suddenly hard to tune because the first factions were meant to fight each other and none of the new factions. CoH3 balances each faction against two others from the start. This should hopefully reduce overfitting and allow easier introduction of new units and factions.
This surely came at the cost of other parts not being finished. I don't think that CoH3 would have been a solid game if it released with two factions and shifted resources elsewhere. There was too much wrong with the game at release, having four factions can't be the cause of these issues.
The post-release drought is a symptom of incompetent Relic leadership. They used their best PR speak to brush over concerns and glaring issues and padded themselves on the back with their store update, non-communication with the community and really embarrassing content like the videos of Steve (forgot the last name) stating how proud he is of the game and its current state. This was a leadership not wanting to accept their failure and trying to hide it.
SEGA or someone even higher at Relic realized and tried to sweep those people out during the layoffs. Which will obviously come with bigger trouble for the organisation and therefore even more breaks. That and the probably still poor planning are reasons why CoH3 hasn't had large content updates up to now. Updates seem to be much more focused though since then. I think the situation overall has improved.
Releasing two additional factions shortly after launch would have helped there to be "some" content for sure. But I don't think it would have been good content. There are to options:
1. They delay the release of two factions to generate some artificially "new" content later on. Release would have had even less content and poorer reviews than it already had.
2. They delay and shift resources elsewhere: Not that easily possible if you plan on a release shortly after launch. Relic cannot hire another audio engineer, because they still need the game designers. This only works if you release the factions a long time down the road as they did with WFA in CoH2. Then you can afford to focus on e.g. audio issues before the game's launch, fire the audio guy/move him to another project and get a gameplay designer for the new content (overly simplified process obviously). But you cannot shift your budget that quickly for 2 months to audio and then shift it back to gameplay design.
Relic bit off more than they could chew, at least with poor leadership and planning. Four factions at release is part of that, but not the main reason why the launch failed so horribly and why the post-launch phase was very underwhelming. |
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To be honest, I guess it's a mix of CoH3 not being interesting and the community here aging. I guess the majority here was in their teens to twenties when CoH2 released. Back then you just had time to fuck around half the day. Add ten years, you're working a 40h week, have responsibilities, family to take care of. Obviously activity here and gaming time will go down, especially if the 'new CoH' just doesn't live up to the expectations.
This forum has lived off of balance discussions and other platforms don't even come close. Reddit threads are short lived by design and discord is a mess if you jam a couple of hundred people into the same server. This forum was decently active up to the very last patch for CoH2 and has outlived many other traditional forums. The fact that this thread got quite some responses within half a day shows that people are still lurking.
But take CoH2 not being supported (so balance discussions being pointless), an maturing community, Relic losing trust and CoH3 being uninteresting together, it shouldn't surprise anyone that there is relatively little in depth discussion anymore. |
Thread: LMG-4219 Jul 2023, 18:35 PM
Jesus Christ Donnie... |
https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/62-wire-report-june-23-2023?page=1
Jesus Christ... First thing on the site is a charity donation event that always leave a bad aftertaste.
I'd say their value tags are pretty made up, but since it's subjective, to each their own. I don't know how it works in Canada, but in many countries donations can be deducted from your overall tax amount. If that's the case, it works like many other corporate donation schemes: You give money to the corporation, they donate it, file for a tax refund and get their 20-30% tax back, depending on what they pay.
On the other hand, Relic is sponsoring a charity bike ride, which means they put some own money in. Still, it would be better if they'd put some clarifications up or add money on top of the donated amount, otherwise I have to assume they will file the amount for a tax refund it if gets donated from their bank account.
I skipped through parts of the live stream that interested me most. There was no concrete information, and it did not feel like anything is really urgent. John in the beginning acknowledged that Relic is having a difficult time, but then went into the "we're making great progress in setting ourselves up for success", the usual PR blabbing to say nothing. It was weird to see how often they had to say "we don't have a date for that yet". It's both a sign of potential honesty, but on the other hand they should at least put one or two features to the forefront and say: THAT is our priority, we're working on this right now, and plan to release until August. Something that is in the near future, to motivate players and keep them playing, so that they can actually see improvements. Instead we get replays "sometime in fall", which can be anything from September to November. They're working on communication, but I still don't think they've really understood the issues.
Second, from your own past experience, I assume you would agree with me that losing 121 staff is a massive jolt which will be a Sword of Damocles hanging over those who survived. I don't know if that brings out the best in people and encourages them to work even longer hours, or whether it simply encourages them to move on before another chop occurs.
It'll be mentally harsh on anyone and I don't envy their positions. However, it will also depend on how much the remaining employees actually believe into their product or trust their leadership. If they don't, they will jump ship soon, or just work the bare minimum to reap the benefits before everything goes south. |
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