I just played the DoW3 open beta, and I am sad to report that it is complete rubbish.
They stripped every last bit of the gameplay that made CoH fun. No cover, no retreating, no flanking, no strategy. You just mass units and send them in. Maybe micro the overpowered hero units. That's it.
That's the point, I guess they want a clear difference between the franchises, Which is the right move.
Personally DOW3 is not for me, I've never been a fan of traditional RTS games.
American Super soldier campaign against Na zi enemies that are beyond evil without any reflection.
Scenario: 60% Probability: Normandy
40% Probability: I assume they want a new scenario with US troops. which one is left? Italy/Sicily
+ British SAS bullshi t (infiltrate base and kill 100dreds of guys on your own)
after that: Unreal Tournament Multiplayer with Jumping and Hipfire + no Recoil. heavy Mg's can be fired mid air and running. Killstreak rewards with p47 Bombing run
First of all the stress on the PC is neglegible
Second of all it reduces the amount of RNG: Imagine a tank shooting exactly at the side of the other tank. In vcoh that was always side armor, but in coh2 it is a coin toss between front and rear which makes a huge difference. side armor basically eliminates the situation when you flank an enemy tank but only hit its front
This adds a very nice strategic component, some tanks might have more side armor, some less, which would require more micro and thought put into it.
And yes, pathfinding sucks, but that is another thing for itself
as the dow2 engine is an pdated version of the coh1 enginge i highly doubt thatit would have made the game better, which means it was a stupid decision, but many like those were made
many latest releases beg to difer
The DOW2 engine was a a modified version of the VCOH one, the infamous COH2 input lag was caused by the DOW2 animation system, so yes, it could well have been a tech issue.
Whether it is a stupid decision or not is subjective.
That still doesn't justify/answers the problems with COH2. I consider Relic (on CoH2) been doing 2 steps forwards 1 backwards with too many high-lows for this last 4 years.
You can make the excuses you want, which might be realistic and out of their hands, but at the end of the day what it matters are the results. If it's due to spaghetti code, UP employees, low numbers of them assigned to the project, lack of QA or a problem on how the work flow is done, for the consumers it won't matter.
I'll do a revision from what IRC. I'll skip the goods (the game, battle servers, constant "reworks" even if they were at a low pace, etc.)
1-You can't justify them implementing commanders when CM say months before released that there wasn't gonna be gameplay changing elements behind a paywall.
2-Giving them the middle finger to those who bought the "REAL" collector/limited edition.
3-The mess we have with EFA commanders because THAT WAS A REAL lazy/money grab decision.
A smaller core set of commanders for "ranked" multiplayer and leaving the rest for ToW and custom games would be good. Instead we have 20+, many of them never seen, and all or most of them having the same repeated abilities. This was rectified with the new factions.
Note: the supply system was god sent but unfortunately arrived a bit too late.
4-Bulletins and Blizzards were interesting features badly though/implemented. Blizzards had like 0 priority in order for it to be less frustrating/balanced/dynamic gameplay wise (just take a look at the changelogs). Disabled due to probably lack of manpower to work on it.
5-For +2 years, the whole design direction of "every plane crash tells a story" aka BAD RNG. This kinds of RNGs are expectable on something like Hearthstone, not on an RTS which can have an avg of +25mins games.
Ex:
I can get a REAL bad roll on having an AT gun miss of fail to penetrate a certain vehicle. That's part of the "good" RNG. Now, if i call a recon run, my opponent has AA, shoots the plane and then it suddenly kills my opponents whole vet 3 main line infantry and i win the game due to that. Neither of the players is gonna feel really well cause neither had influence or intention on doing that.
6-REAL SLOW times on fixing game-breaking bugs. Slow decision on fixing/balancing latest DLC commander/faction (TA/Windustry 6 months of reign). I don't expect patches every week, not even monthly patches, but 4/6 months is quite a time lapse specially with glaring issues.
NOTE: i can understand something as the gun shoot sound bug been hard to detect for example. That is justifiable.
What I don't get why they kept releasing "old builds" with new patches, which introduced several ninja changes which were already fixed/dealt with in previous patches. AND i'm not talking of complicated mechanics. Think about how on the WFA beta, we had SwS truck crush removed and then it was implemented on the live build because someone problably used an "old" build.
NOTE2: you can't be taken seriously when a single guy from the community (at that time it was only Cruzz) checks your game, gives you a list of all the changes applied which are not mentioned on the changelog and tells you what they broke.
7-Communication and community handling.
OR because of how the game plays (dynamics, handling, mechanics, engine) it might not make too much sense on having it? IMO it would be a layer of depth which doesn't really add to much due to how positioning and projectiles and handled.
Example:
On an FPS such as Battlefield, i think they handle this well and it makes sense since you have FINESSE control of both the vehicle and the projectile. Positioning and more so angling is important. It's not the same hitting the rear armor at 90° than doing so at 15°. Since on that game there's no "deflection" this is just reflected on pure different damage values.
On CoH2, IMO, this not worth it, cause you'll had to implement a new mechanic and stress the PC even more to handle the respective position between the damage dealer and the victim target. Right now, it all depends on what part of the tank, the shell lands. If the vehicle lands an accuracy role, it would most probably land right on a straight line to the vehicle. But when not and with scatter, what would be a "frontal" shot can transform into a "rear" shot with enough RNG. If side armor was implemented this would be even worst. Not to mention it would mean more work, test and headache to balance properly.
PD: and i didn't even mentioned how bad and frustrating sometimes is too handle vehicle pathing.
I absolutely agree about the commanders (and have never said otherwise), it was and is a terrible idea to have any DLC which affects MP bar cosmetics.
The blizzards and plane crashes are all subjective, the competitive community hates them but the comp stompers prob love them.
I agree that I feel Relic's patching system wasn't good, massive patches just didn't work.
Game development all boils down to resource management, time, money etc a developer normally has a set time and budget to produce a product in, this means hard decisions have to be made, things get cut, It is just the reality of the business.
The biggest misconception I read all the is the lazy developer issue. A development team is made up of so many disciplines that if you're lazy people will notice and you will be fired.
And releasing a product with the we'll fix it later attitude will only get you poor reviews, poor sales and out of a job.
And There lies the problem. Sega can push it out and fix it after. I'm not saying all games are broken. developers will almost allways try their best to create great bug free games which is hard with increased complexity but we still see lots of bad practice where games are released too early. Now we have the early access phenomenon. It may well actually result in better games overall but my point is that it's easy to assume the ability to change your product after release as being a good thing for quality but it's not quite so simple
A publisher spends millions of dollars on PR for a game pre and post release, that is when their game (product) is at its highest exposure and most chance of scoring a success, so why would they not try and release the best bug free version of the game possible within the given time.
well, i did. didnt help me in any way.
i gave side armor as example: someone at relic decided it was fine to not have it. that is stupidity or lazyness, no other option....
It does. Never had the thought "I'm not gonna do this because i can do it later"?
No other option? Maybe it was a tech issue since it was the DOW2 engine.
It could be a design decision but not laziness.
I'll do this later?! LOL There might not be a later, it isn't a good way to run a business and not how developers what to ship a title.
There are several reasons why a bug fix would be pushed to a post release or release day patch,if there is higher priority bugs that need fixing before the cut off date, the bug was discovered to late and the fix to make it into the final build.
Uhm the last few years have seen so many pc games that have been broken at launch because they either were bad ports, or simply pushed out because a publisher needed them to be released in a specific quarter.
Not all games, but still a lot...
It depends on what you mean by broken? Because if you can play through a game from start to finish then it isn't broken.
The only port I can think of which was truly broken on launch was Batman Arkham Knight and was rightly pulled from steam.
The fact is PC 'ports' will likely always have more bugs than their counter parts simply because there is a huge variation in hardware and soft in the PC market.
As a side note, many bugs are discovered post launch since no QA team in the world has the bandwidth to mimic tens of thousands of potential player actions.
design wise and i dont want perfection, but at least a little thought
i mean which thought that the game did not need side armor?
or why did they change the ressource system from coh1?
stuff like that shows lack of thought or lazyness
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Relic Entertainment
