Console ports are outsourced in most of the cases. Even huge companies like sony and so on, usually are outsourcing their porting. + Relic is known to use outsourcing, CoH port as an example.
Gabby or John confirmed that the console port is outsourced under the guidance of Relic. I think it was either Reddit or their official forums. |
While these news are kinda sad and definitely point to CoH3 not performing as expected, let's not pretend like this means that CoH3 is doomed for sure... not even close if you ask me.
We have absolutely no clue who got fired here, they could be (and probably are) people who -as shitty as it sounds- are not deemed essential anymore for the future development of the game.. such as Campaign mission designers or certain artists.... or people who are not even in the CoH3 team to begin with.
Even when putting the performance of CoH3 and this rough economic situation aside, Relic is not working on any projects right now apart from CoH3, at least not that we know of. They had over 300 employees prior to this move.... and I really doubt you need that big of a staff to support a post-launch game. So it's absolutely no surprise that they laid off employees, the total number is just a bit surprisingly high now. It's not unusual at all that the employee number of game development companies goes significantly up and down as time passes and games getting launched. No matter if it's Relic or Rockstar Games or any other studio
People really need to stop jumping to worst-case scenario conclusions all the time... the future of CoH3 might as well be very positive despite this news for all we know. Relic still has around 200 employees left
Yes, the studio was surely bloated. Yet, kicking out a third/quarter (whatever the number of Relic employees currently is) of your employees is never a good sign. Judging by the game's problems, features and Relic's communication, a lot is mismanagement of the studio, which means Relic would need to exchange at least leading positions in the company. This is speculation of course, but I think a somewhat founded one. But kicking out 121 people is not kicking out the management. I guess those people save their ass and it is smaller staff that has to go, so the core issues will likely stay unresolved.
Relic wasn't able to get CoH3 ready for launch with their previous employees, they didn't get much done between the betas and launch, nor launch and today. Relic won't suddenly have a faster pace by downsizing significantly.
The mass layoff could be expected after finishing a game. You obviously need way less people to maintain and update content than to development from scratch. But coh3 is not done and Relic knows this. Yet, they have to kick out a huge part of their staff.
The most likely conclusion is that Relic was in financial trouble before, had to rush the release of CoH3 (or management ignored the state in order to cash in for their reports), the game got its deserved mixed reviews which is worse than what Relic would have needed. They then released the shop to rake in more revenue, which made the situation worse. Players were dropping and so did the economic expectations for coh3, at which point they made the odd survey and also the decision that the current size is unsustainable given the expected revenue from the game, so a huge part of the employees got fired.
Since I doubt that these people are the ones responsible for all of the failures, I don't see why things will improve from here. Development will go even slower than right now.
At the very very least, Relic teams will go through a huge restructuring process that will likely put output to zero for the next weeks. This coincides with the console release, and will also not help to rebuild the player base (unless the next patch is great, which I doubt given the preview). |
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Looks like Relic de-diversified quickly.
Sega has apparently decided that CoH3 has too little players to support a company of Relic's size. Which obviously means they don't deem CoH3 very profitable in the short to mid term. This is a big hit to development, if not the last nail in the coffin. |
So no-one gonna mention how new promised map is a bridge map for skirmish? I mean this fucking priorities are insane.
Bot stompers already play on x10000000 shitty bridge maps from workshop, but HEY this one is official. Its probably remake of this idiotic 2v2 map, with terrain lowered making middle bridge the only available path.
Sorry but I really want to smack someone who works for relic in the face.
Operation BRuh ASS.
I don't get this either. Some actual mappers correct me, but I guess comp stomp maps are also pretty easy to make. There's at least no need to make the map balanced and even approaches to certain points don't have to follow as strict guidelines to keep the map competitive. The map mostly has to look pretty. Unfair design could even be positive. Worse players can take the easier side and put the bots on the more difficult one. Experienced players pick the difficult spawn instead. |
Wow - you're an alleged moderator and you respond to a post about statistics by attacking my personal skill level? That says a lot about you.
In long games, you'll always hit the point where you don't have a choice except to keep a squad on a VP, even when you hear the sound of the rockets. There isn't a lot of dodging within that circle.
Also, even if I go back all the way to the start of the last patch, the Soviet win rate is 45.5%. While that's looks a little better, it's still not even close to balanced. The number of games is 2757.
As for May being balanced, it shows a 42% win rate for Soviets. If that's your idea of balanced then ok.
You complained about Axis having an alleged 60 win rate, not about Soviets being bad in 4v4. I've shown that the statistics you provided are biased because you only look at a few selected months. Soviet's win rate this may doesn't matter, the whole point of the paragraph was that win rates in single months jump like crazy. The point you make with sometimes not being able to dodge is true for all Allied factions, not just Soviets. So why do we see see the assumingly worst winrate in only one faction and even the only one that has stock rocket arty on its own? No, I am not attacking you personally, but the data and conclusions you provide don't make sense. This one occasion in the game where you have to hold the circle at all cost and lose a squad because of it, therefore ticking down your last 5 VPs are not the reason why you lost the whole game. It's rather been a chain of suboptimal engagements and potentially even Soviets being too weak overall that forced you into that situation. This means that there's probably a multitude minor tweaks needed, but attributing it to only one effect that we apparently only see in 4v4 (but never in any other mode) is absurd. If not dodging rocket arty constantly costs you the game, this IS a skill issue. I am not talking about the overall loss, that might have occured regardless.
Another effect could be that the player base shifted unevenly after CoH3's release and for some reason better Axis players prefer coh2 or something. Whatever the reason, win rates in 4v4 are fairly even with probably a slight advantage to Axis. I wouldn't put this on balance team though. They've asked for giving USF and UKF nondoc rocket arty but Relic said no. The other option is to nerf Axis rocket arty, but this would affect the balance in all other modes where win rate actually looked fairly even, and they openly stated that they didn't know how long Relic allows them to patch the game. Given that situation, choosing to nerf Axis arty and being forced to rebalance three others modes (given that this change fixes 4v4 in the first place) would be honestly a dumb decision. Shit would have hit the fan if that patch game out, fucked up the game and then Relic decides this would be the last patch. I don't blame them for doing that, especially since the price is a minor imbalance overall. The balance team has done some dumb decision too, and the game overall has definitely lost its 'crazy moments' and become overall more homogenized. But criticizing them based on a single stat in one of multiple modes while neglecting the complexity of the problem is just cheap. Especially if you top it off with accusing them of doing it on purpose. |
COH2 4v4 is badly unbalanced now, with win rates in the 60/40 split range.
Nobody listened to any feedback that they didn't want to hear. The Walking Stuka's ability to one-shot 7-man vet 3 con squads, or any other Russian infantry, makes it terrible to play against. They nerfed the Land Mattress and Calliope so that it wouldn't do that, but evidently it is okay for Ost and OKW rocket arty to do that.
If you already accuse others of selective perception and biased opinions, at least fact check your own stuff. You base your pro Axis 60/40 split on coh2stats.com data for top200 games from January, March and April 2023 with a total of about 250 games. February (140 games) shows 55% winrate for Allies and May so far is balanced with 70 games.
What do we learn from that? This number of games is way too little. Most imbalances occur after coh3 release and if you look to either all data or the top200 data for all of 2022, you'll see a pretty even split. If Axis arty constantly wipes your 7 men Cons, you're just bad at dodging and counterwiping. |
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Gives some insight into Relic:
Working on CoH3, there's a project lead supervising a senior dev supervising a junior dev supervising the new that in turn supervises the new intern that does the actual work. But also that guy can only work half hours at best because he's working part time as a waiter to pay his rent.
Otherwise I don't really get how the patch can be so small after a month of nothing. |
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Relic's artists should spend less time making background images for their updates and fix the game assets instead...
Anyway, it looks like the game is ever so slowly getting there. The fact that many minor points are in these lists shows me that they apparently still have to develop a lot of their code base. I guess that's also why things seem to be taking ages. |
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PPPS: tl;dr
Just kidding though, thanks for the break down. I've had MoWII on my watchlist as well, but unfortunately did not find the time for the playtest except for one of the campaign missions - which was okay.
The interface is much cleaner and more usable than in MoWAS2. But even back then I only played bot matches. I somehow never could get along with how this game works, having to click everything down to potentially even inventory management of single soldiers while I actually have to constantly reposition units and control shots directly. I love the detail to it, and I absolutely loved how this game manages to tell small stories with gameplay alone - trying to save your tank crew after their tank got damaged and could not move, starting an operation to gain control over that hill that the tank is now lying on and repairing it under fire, or just trying to get the crew back to a safe place - really cool memories, something that even CoH can't recreate. I am still one of the people that would love a slightly dumbed down version of MoW. The micro management distracted me too much from the actual game play. The small mission I played was more fluent in the overall gameplay, but unfortunately not enough to convince me that my gripes with the general game flow will be solved. Maybe I'll get another chance if there is a next test, let's see. I'll probably pick it up at some time for a couple of Euros, but 90% sure not for release.
Currently, I've come back to the never-aging Age of Empires 2 and Beyond all Reason. The latter one is a game that is being developed by some talented people from the community with no game dev studio behind it. It's a passion project through and through, the devs even play the game at a very good level and you feel it every second in the game. The sci fi stuff is actually not my type of game, but I fell in love nevertheless.
Apart from that, I've also played a couple of matches of Wargame recently while having an eye on both Warno and Broken Arrow. These look promising too, but they are rather modern warfare games. |
Well the two things he mentioned are obviously big factors. Your points are more speculative.
When I say CoH3 is in a better state than CoH2 was early on I'm thinking of how many steps are necessary to make this a good game. And I think CoH3 is far ahead of CoH2 in this regard.
I don't think you can conclude much from the playernumbers. CoH1 multiplayer scene was larger than CoH2. The initial steam playernumbers are almost completely irrelevant here because a very large portion of that is campaign players. Also the reason people are staying away from the game is super important. If the game becomes good some of the hardcore people will come back eventually and there will be a very slow influx of new players. I don't think there was much growth potential in the first place with relic's marketing approach. Barely anyone even perceives CoH as a MP game.
All these debates we're having are soooo similar to CoH2's realease. Yes, there is a chance this time the game doesn't make it, and a lot of you guys will end up quitting and never bothering with CoH3 just like the COH1 boomers do to this day. And that's fine. But still, odds are CoH3 becomes good and establishes its own playerbase.
The exact reasons why players stopped playing CoH3 were never my main point, at least not in the part of the discussion when Aerafield quoted me. Whatever the reason is, CoH3 does not manage to retain players.
And the player numbers do matter. I guess we don't need to argue about MP, but they matter even for SP. I'd rather buy a single player game that has thousands of players months to years after launch than one that died quickly, because this game is apparently replayable and has a lot of content to offer, while I have to assume that the one that dies has not. It might still be a strong story and worth it, but if that's not written in the reviews, why should I buy it? The safer bet is to buy different game.
That's why it also doesn't matter if the drop has partially occured due to campaign players leaving. Your argument just proves my point: Relic has failed to keep the SP people and casuals engaged. This was the whole purpose of their Italy campaign.
Currently, a potential buyer of CoH3 sees bad reviews and even worse recent reviews, a hard drop in player numbers and low current player numbers. Unless he knows that this is the game for him, there's not much reason to buy it. But those people you don't have to convince anyway, Relic is losing out on the crowd. Relic and Sega see this, and it will hurt their business down the line and influence their decision making on CoH3.
Which is also why I concluded that they will probably need to rebuild it from their hardcore fan base - the others are gone anyway. The game becoming good eventually is unfortunately no guarantee that it will survive long term and rebuild a community. It might happen, yes, but there's also plenty of good games that just took too long to patch and are now dead. We don't know what will happen with CoH3. |
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